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Post by Vivski on Mar 10, 2006 11:28:40 GMT
This weekend sees the start of the ARC for 2006. Rally of Canberra is a round of the APRC and also counts towards the ARC title. It's a new era with Subaru stepping back from its uber commitment of the last few years. Most of the regulars are back for another crack including Crocker, Evans, Pedder, Herridge (for 2 events minimum), Bates and Michael Guest in the Ford! Cody Crocker set the fastest time in shakedown and he's joined by a new co-driver for the season. Guiding Cody through the stages is Ben Atkinson who sat beside brother Chris for many years up until 2005. The pair will be competetive in the Les Walkden team driving a brand spanking new WRX STi. Eli Evans, up and coming young driver will also have a Les Walkden prepared car. Dean Herridge has scrambled together a car for Rally of Canberra and his home event in Western Australia. Given two good results he might do the rest of the championship, otherwise he'll save up and prepare for Rally Australia later in the year. The Toyotas are back minus 1 car. Evans/Evans and Bates/Taylor will again head the team but poor Ben Barker had to go. Expect the Toyotas to be competetive again this year. Scott Pedder and our very own Glen Weston will again be flying the flag for RalliArt Mitsubishi. They'll be steering a brand new EVO IX (I'll assume rally.com.au was wrong in saying it was an EVO XI) through the dangerous Canberra stages. This is a split APRC/ARC round so PWRC driver Taguchi with Mark Stacey (ex-Possum Bourne co-driver) alongside will be trying to top the ARC guys. Here is a list of entries... APRC entriesARC only entriesSubaru- Crocker/Atkinson - Yanagisawa/Misaizu* - E.Evans/McAdam - Herridge/Hayes - Windus/Mortimer - Orders/Feaver Mitsubishi- Pedder/ Weston (woohoo!!!!) - Taguchi/Stacey* - Miettinen/Markkula* - Sungkar/Herkusuma* - Aksa/Mboi* - Monkhouse/TBA - Shaw/Allen Toyota- Evans/Evans - Bates/Taylor Ford- Guest/Green Good luck to Glen, Scotty and the RalliArt team. I'm sure we'll all be cheering for you.
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Post by FordTeamRS on Mar 10, 2006 12:03:23 GMT
Ahhh, great to see the ARC season finally kicking into gear and what a great place to start the season also. I'll definately keep a very close eye on the Ford team especially seeing how unorthodox the Focus is (RWD, no power steering, NA and what not) Of course, we'll all be keeping a close eye on how Scott Pedder and Glen Weston go
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Post by Vivski on Mar 11, 2006 10:46:04 GMT
Leg 1 of the RoC is now complete. It was a pretty dramatic day. Crocker cruised away and won leads the APRC which is probably no surprise. Evans set a cracking pace but had an electrical problem half-way through the day so the car was firing on 3-cylendars and he also dropped 80s for being late out of service. But the story of the day was Scott Pedder and Glen Weston. They rocketted through, winning 5 of the 8 dangerous ACT stages. Unfortunately a puncture on SS2 cost them a minute and the Leg win. SS2 was Mineshaft so I wonder if they took the jump with the flat?!
It looked like Pedder and Evans were running a similar pace but both had problems allowing Neal Bradbury Bates to take the ARC leg win from Herridge, Pedder & Evans. I think that's right.
The Ford Focus had a nightmare. They lunched a gearbox and in the end the diff fell off and they had to retire. The Focus was quick down the straights, but a slug everywhere else. It was hard on Martin Lintott who had to follow in the Ford's dust on every stage.
In the quotes on rally.com.au Pedder said: "I'm still not 100% happy with the car in the fast fourth & fifth gear stuff but otherwise it's been a successful debut for the new Lancer Evo 9." I was wondering what that means... was it loose or tight? 4th & 5th is pretty serious speed when you're not happy with the feeling.
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Post by Curt on Mar 11, 2006 11:11:31 GMT
Its a shame to hear Scott Pedder and Glen Weston got a puncture . As I haven't previously been that interested in the ARC I didn't realise 'Mineshaft' actually exsisted!. I had saw it in a PS2 game before, but I thought it was made up ;D. Good Luck to Scott Pedder and Glen Weston in the following stages.
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Post by Vivski on Mar 11, 2006 12:40:18 GMT
Oh yeah, it exists alright!! I think they're lucky they dont run the stage backwards, 'cos they'd have to somwhow get up that thing!!
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Post by Mitch on Mar 11, 2006 22:34:29 GMT
Yeah. Very Spectacular the Mineshaft. Thats been round since the 70's! BDA Escorts, Datsun 1600's just flying over and one Finn called Ari Vatanen has had a go! Unfortunatley our Focus retired. Diff probs and it lost 5th gear earlier in the day. Just like to point out, another forum member, except on rallyforum.com RayBaker is competing in a Mitsubishi Evo 6 Scott Pedder & Glen Weston
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Post by Mitch on Mar 11, 2006 22:36:43 GMT
I want to see a full onboards stage with the Mineshaft. I remember seeing a short onboard a year ago "9 left DANGER mineshaft back off"
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Post by mattwrc on Mar 12, 2006 8:40:30 GMT
nice photo of Glen in action
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Post by Mitch on Mar 12, 2006 9:36:28 GMT
rally.com.au has a few photos
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glen
Marshall
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Post by glen on Mar 13, 2006 2:30:31 GMT
Hi everyone, I just arrived home from another hot and rough Rally of Canberra.
We have come away with a lot of confidence but it was a little disappointing to get held back by some minor problems and not get as many points as we could have.
The Evo IX is a great bit of kit. The new MIVEC engine in a gem. The torque comes in earlier and the power stays on for longer, which makes the car much easier to drive. You can afford to sacrifice a little bit of entry speed to get a better apex and then the torque really gets you out of the corner well.
TMR built us a beautiful car and it was pretty close to being on the money straight out of the box. We didn't have the big brake package that was recently homologated, so we are really looking forward to having them on the car for the next round in Western Australia in 8 weeks time. Apparently there were only 10 sets in the world and they all ended up in Mexico for the PWRC guys.
The roads were incredibly rough with large patches of bull-dust, ruts, wash-outs and rocks getting pulled out everywhere. All of the stages were run more than once so the conditions were even harder on the car on the second pass. The temperature was 33 degrees celcius on Sunday so it was doubly hard on the crews as well as the engines.
We got off to a good start by winning SS1 Oakey Creek by 7 seconds. Our time was 20 seconds faster than Cody Crocker, but a lot of that was due to him having to sweep the road. We picked up a flat front right tyre 3 km into SS2 Mineshaft, and the drove the final 7 km on it. This meant that we had to go over the Mineshaft with a flat which isn't much fun as there is a 3L 30 metres after the bottom of the jump and the car really didn't want to turn left. We dropped just over a minute in the stage.
The rally then moved to Kowen forest for the next 6 stages. The roads really cut up badly in this forest, and the poor cars take an absolute beating. SS4 Millpost has some seriously fast pieces of road in it which saw the Evo IX get up to 205km/hr (6000 rpm in 5th). This is about as fast as you can go in these cars as the 32mm restrictor really starts to strangle the engine at these revs.
The comment that Scott made about him not being completely happy with the feeling in 4th and 5th gear stuff was to do with the suspension settings. When you get the set-up right the ride feels like an armchair as it just floats over everything. If you don't get it right then bumps can tend to pitch the car off line and make it a handful to drive. We were pretty close to the mark but not quite where Scott wanted it. Mind you it didn't slow him down at all.
We had a really good run for the rest of the day and ended up winning 5 of the 8 stages.
Leg 2 started well again with two stage wins and we managed to get some serious air over the Mineshaft. Unfortunately a rock was dragged out onto the road in SS12 and we punctured again and had to drive the final 5km on a flat. We dropped about 30 seconds and that really prevented us from mounting a proper challenge.
In the end we finished 2nd in the Capital Rally, but fourth in the ARC points. The most pleasing thing was that we won the bonus point for the most number of stage wins. The speed is there, and it looks great for the next round.
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glen
Marshall
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Post by glen on Mar 13, 2006 2:48:53 GMT
I just found a link that has a Google Earth file containing all of the stages for this year's Rally of Canberra. page.site.net.au/ROC2006.kmzThe Start/Finish locations of all the stages are visible (green circles) plus white lines showing the stage route. On the left hand side in the "Places" section, you should see a folder called "Stage Routes". Open this folder, select a stage (ie Depot) and click on the little play button at the base of the "Places" section. This will play a fly through of the stage from the perspective of a helicopter. All credit for this goes to Trevor from BMSC.
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Post by FordTeamRS on Mar 13, 2006 7:07:31 GMT
Well done on a very decent result there Glen, and Scott! Hope the rest of the rest season pans out great for the entire team
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Post by Vivski on Mar 13, 2006 9:23:30 GMT
Wow, that Google Earth stuff is very cool.
Some of those stages look pretty lengthy but as you said, you blasted Oakey Creek! Do you prefer the longer stages where you can get a bit of rhythm going or doesn't it bother you?
Sounds like you had a good rally. Despite the problems, certainly looks promising for WA and the season. There often seems to be problems to either of your cars denying us a good straight fight, but hopefully we can see some good battles between you and the Evans' this season.
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glen
Marshall
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Post by glen on Mar 13, 2006 10:30:08 GMT
Some of those stages look pretty lengthy but as you said, you blasted Oakey Creek! Do you prefer the longer stages where you can get a bit of rhythm going or doesn't it bother you? It doesn't seem to matter to Scott. I think that it's not so much getting into a rhythm but more importantly keeping your concentration up on the longer stages. It's where your fitness (physical and mental) really comes into it.
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Post by Curt on Mar 13, 2006 12:23:31 GMT
Thanks for sharing the experiences you had at the rally with us. Well done on a great result . I have been looking on Google Earth on the Mineshaft stage to try and find the big drop which Ive posted a picture of earlier on in the thread. Is this it because you also mentioned it turns left at the bottom:
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