Another service break, then the long loop of Qwirk South, The Peanut again, and Qwirk North.
These are the good ones! Martin loves these long rough stages.
We had our only near-off of the rally on A6-Qwirk South. At about 9:50 into the video, 17:53:24 on our clock display, I get thrown off by a questionable note.
"30 R6 short over Crest...", that's still obvious and okay.
"... into
L6, 50
L6 over Jump continues over Crest" I didn't see that first L6 at all. That made me really slow for the L6/Jmp and the bit that continues over the crest. I'm reading those way too late
as we're already going over them.
Martin knows I'm off because at 10:10, or 17:53:45 on the clock, he prompts me to speed up with a "Crest?" that he sees coming up which I haven't called yet.
So the following "R4 long" after that catches him by surprise and we nearly fall off the road there. Alan Ryall and Bruce Leonard, running a minute behind us on the road, later both commented on noticing the interesting lines we left in the gravel at that turn.
A6 - Qwirk South
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshc3W5BCH4On the second running of the Peanut, Martin dialed the pace up another notch. At 3:57 into the video, 18:23:16 on the clock, we come to a "L6+/Cr ruf down 200". The road barely turns left a tiny bit over that crest, but because the road drops steep downhill for a long way after that crest, it's completely blind when approaching the crest. We
usually, but not this time, go a bit more carefully over that crest, especially since at the bottom of the following rough downhill section is where the logging operations stack piles of logs on either side of the road.
This time Martin hardly lifted at all! I was in the middle of turning the page in my notes as the car got light over the crest and then came down HARD into the downhill rough stuff. That kinda surprised me, eh.
A7 - The Peanut 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgtgxWJCekFinally everything clicked perfectly on the the last stage A8 - Qwirk North. We absolutely scorched through that stage! We were both full-on confident in the way this one flowed.
Sadly the pounding delivered to the car managed to knock the connection loose betweent the bulletcam and the video recorder. We lost video for the last minute of the stage. But the audio recording is still good.
Listen to this one and you can tell we were feeling pretty pleased with our performance at the end of this stage!
A8 - Qwirk North
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPx8sKJ9hY