right now, the time allowance thing only seems to be an MCO thing.

One of the things they do on winter rallies to speed up the night is change up the break.  If you arrive on time to the break, you get your full time, but if you arrive late, you leave on car zero out time + your car in #......  could leave you with 5 minutes to take a break, fill up with gas, and get out of there.

Where is there a link for this driving school?

(MCO is offering 4 or 5 full-day courses ($150), 1-2 instructor-student ratio, and tons of seat time on a great clsoed course.)

Heh... I'd really love to take advantage of the MCO schools - but being 450km away, this is just not practical at this juncture I'm afraid.

One day you do the winter driving school, the next day you can compete on the same course in the "Slush n Slide" which is run "like" a rallycross, more or less.  But, it is a bit of a drive.  It's sort of how we feel in Ottawa when RSO puts on the navigational school in the GTA, on weeknights.

http://www.mco.org/app/skidschool.asp

I believe MCO is the only club that offers this type of school.  Students have included the Govenor General's drivers.

Quote:

Okay, here's a 2-minute video clip. It's not highly dramatic, but there is a lot of educational stuff happening here that newbies might find interesting or maybe even useful.

SOWR2004-1.wmv (7.4MB)

The first unusual thing is that we're following another car.  Normally, if everyone is running on time spaced one minute apart, you could go the whole night without ever seeing another car, except at checkpoints.  For some mysterious reason Martin & Ken ahead of us departed from the last checkpoint on the same minute as we did.  I know we're okay.  We checked it twenty times.  And I doubt Martin & Ken screwed up.  They don't make errors like that.  So maybe the checkpoint crew mistakenly assigned us both the same time out.

Please note:  We are *** NOT *** racing each other!  Definitely, NOT racing!

Also note, we are *** NOT *** breaking the 80 km/h speed limit.  You can see my speedometer throughout this video clip.  Straight up on the dial would be 120km/h.  The gauge is marked in increments of 20 km/h.  We never go over 80.

I'm happy to just follow behind these guys because it's an advantage to have someone competent leading the way.  I can watch their brake lights to get an idea of what's coming up.  They're not holding us up at all, and we're confident that we're running right on time, so I have no intention of trying to pass them.   If anything, I suspect it's those guys who are a minute behind their correct time slot and I don't want to get in Martin's way if they suddenly wake up and realize that.

The video starts as we turn left at km 125.7 and Commence Average Speed (CAS) 63.6 km/h.  If you just want to finish the event and don't care how well you score, then you should completely ignore the target speeds and just concentrate on not falling off the road anywhere or getting lost.  You're NOT going to be able to go a constant 63.6 km/h over every blind hill or around every corner.  Use the straights when it's safe to do so, and slow down if you're not sure what's coming up.

When closely following another car like this, visibility becomes an issue.  There's blowing snow to contend with.  Also I'm reluctant to use my high beams when running this close behind Martin because I don't want to blind him.  But if I back off too much to open a gap between us, I lose the benefit of his high beams, and I find I really need to use my own.  Because I'm too distracted trying to establish the correct gap, I promptly forget what speed I'm supposed to be doing.

Then I see Martin's car bash through a big frost heave, which gives me enough warning to slow for it.  But now I've not only forgotten what speed I'm supposed to be doing, I also didn't hear what the next route instruction was.  At this point Christoph, my excellent navigator, has already TWICE told me those two bits of info.  Hey, it's 4  in the morning and I'm concentrating on driving here, eh.

So Christoph has to tell me for a THIRD time that we're supposed to be doing CAS 63.6, and we're looking for a 'Keep LEFT' at 126.2 km.

And right there is a perfect example of another problem.  We're running with only the vehicle's stock trip odometer which, compared to the bright headlights shining on snowbanks, is only dimly illuminated in my instrument panel and barely legible.  Christoph cannot see the odo at all from the right seat.  So I have to take my eyes off the road to squint down at the odo for a couple of seconds every now and then to try and get a reading.  Often there's no time to look away from the road, so we sometimes lose track of the mileage.  After this event we bought a rally computer so Christoph is able to read the mileage for us.  It makes an enormous difference!

When it finally clicks in my tired brain that I'm supposed to be watching for km 126.2, I don't have enough time to look down because we're in the middle of a corner.  Unfortunately this corner already is the 'Keep LEFT' that I was supposed to be watching for.

Christoph is patiently waiting to for me to tell him that we've passed this mileage so he can feed me the next route instruction.  Therefore it's not at all his fault that he didn't warn me about the "CAUTION! - Acute LEFT at bottom of Hill" that closely follows this next downhill right, which suddenly tightens and gets much steeper halfway around the corner...   As a result, I have a small panic moment where I need to grab the handbrake to keep the car from understeering straight off.  [cont'd...]

Wow Ferdinand.... that is an awesome little video... good tool to show people the conditions we drive under.