Team Giant Update | Wild West Rally Car Race

It’s nice to immediately bookend the Mountain Bike Season with something, well, else.  What better activity than racing cars around in the prairies of Eastern Washington?  Carl and I hastily departed Las Vegas at 6am (not soon enough) on Thursday morning in order to have time to take care of some last minute prep on the Rally Car and maybe, possibly, get a bit of rest before piling into the Dodge with Carl’s Dad for the seven hour drive from Bend to Pomeroy, Washington.  We just barely got the car buttoned up at about 1am but were still on the road, Longboard Louie’s breakfast burritos in hand, by 11am on Friday.  The plan was coming together…

After we left Tech Inspection and Registration with a (for our roving gong-show) minimal amount of being made to feel like complete novices it appeared that the weekend of racing was starting off without a hitch. Our decision to check out the sticking right rear brake was made quite effectively on the short drive to the Pioneer Motel (a whole ‘nother set of issues) during which the car refused to coast and the brake got quite hot, to say the least…  We had the right tools for the job though.  Anything you could ever need was right in the back of the Dodge.  We had a Leatherman, some scissors, vice grips, a hammer and the impact wrench.  And the bucket o’ bolts.  An hour later we’d used the hammer and concrete wall out front in all manner of ways and eventually removed the offending seized part.  It was honed and buffed with the most rudimentary techniques, greased liberally and reinstalled.  Success.  Fortunately on our midnight test drive we realized that the Odometer was already calibrated and promptly went to bed, wondering how triple digit speeds through the praries with only a Route Book would work out in the morning…

Our first instruction in the morning with said Route Book (not to be confused with detailed Pace Notes, a Route Book basically tells you where to go and where not to crash into people’s barns) was clearly at the end of what we determined, by listening to the cars in front of us shift through five gears before braking, was a “Pavement Ends/90 Left”.  Carl used the slightly uphill braking zone concerningly late (code for perfect) to haul us down from around 90mph and flick the Subaru into a beautiful third gear slide past the first of many homesteads.  It was ON!  The stage climbed through Geiger Gulch on flowing smooth gravel and eventually crested onto the winter wheat covered plateaus that characterize the majority of eastern Washington. Good sightlines made up for the lack of accurate notes and we posted a solid first stage time as told by the volunteer timekeepers who were getting dusted out by every car.  Thanks, timekeepers…

The first few stages rolled along smoothly, getting our bearings and having surprisingly good time hauling ass through gulches and open fields.  Initial fears of the speeds and unfamiliar terrain gave way to wide smiles at the end of each stage that Carl clearly drove very, very well.  It wasn’t until stage four that we realized just how well Carl was driving though, the timekeepers handed us our card and said kind of excitedly, “nice work”.  We inquired casually (not sure of protocol on this) as to just how “nice” our work was.  They casually responded that our work was the “nicest” they’d seen as of yet.  This meant quite a lot to us as the first car on the road was none other than Carl Jarvedall, a seasoned rally veteran who cut his teeth racing the Swedish Rally Series back in his home country.  For those who aren’t familiar with the distribution rallying around the world, Scandinavia is the epicenter.  Mr. Jardevall holds a variety of stage records around the northwest and pilots an absolutely immaculately prepared Mitsubishi Evo. When we saw him in Parc Expose in the morning we immediately were excited to see how close we could get to his times but never once considered besting them.  Suddenly we had a race on our hands.  Carl once again posted a faster time on the next running of Ball Grade Up, which happened to have a solid dose of down as well, allowing the all-out-attack skills of the formerly underpowered Wheels of Teal on downhills to shine through.  The last two miles of that stage are the most impressive driving I’ve seen Carl put together to date, linking fifth-gear sweepers together over crests like it was a walk in the park.  Stoked, and with smoking brakes, every time… 

The day ended with back-to-back runnings of the Maxwell Hill stage around dusk.  With Jardevall fifty seconds up we knew outright victory was unlikely but hoped to post another fast stage time or two.  The cagey veteran had our number though, despite being within one m.p.h. of his speed approaching the spectator area there were some other places on the seven-mile stage that we were clearly slower, finishing ten seconds down on run #1.  The second running demonstrated the value of early road position clearly as the Evo sped off into the sunset with no dust ahead and dying winds.  We took off ten minutes later with fading light and hanging dust from the cars in front, losing a further twenty seconds to Jardevall in just one stage.  Oh well, at least we had a little battle going for a few stages there.  It was and exciting day and we were even more excited to eat a provided chilidog dinner and not work on the car with the wrong tools into the night. 

Just to make sure we were still respecting our day job, Carl and I started Sunday out with a jog through town to check out our tracks from the day before.  They were rad.  And someone crashed.  A quick brake bleed (they get hot with triple digit speeds) and we rolled the car into our new Parc Expo position, second on the road behind Jardevall.  We were stoked to get to see his tracks and feel like we were really in the hunt for the win. Turns out Carl drives a bit, well, looser than the other Carl, we were consistently entering and exiting further outside, taking more liberties with the wide roads and adjusting the line on the fly.  Decker was in his groove right off the bat, driving what we thought was a solid opening stage.  Jardevall laid down some track that we’ll just call generous into a downhill junction, showing us just where not to go off the road, but somehow still beat us by ten seconds.  Keeping us honest we supposed…  The next stage was more of the same but we kept it much closer, only seven seconds over twice the distance.  It wasn’t until stage two that we got the now-familiar look of approval from the timekeepers.  The Breakdown stage is a great place for just that, the smooth flowing county roads were traded for a decommissioned, overgrown route through a narrow wash, which was crossed numerous times via car-breaking rocky ditches.  No matter though, Carl just kept ‘er loose and took some even greater liberties with the line (and weeds) to post a time a solid ten seconds faster than the “too shiny” Evo of our competitors.  Solid. 

A nice mid-day service break, lunch, some weed removal and we were on our way out of town for the final three-stage loop of the weekend.  First stage was a dead heat at 4:40, then Jardevall punched it again on New York Road to eke out another few seconds, leaving the gap at 23 seconds coming into the last running of Breakdown.  We’d taken down some notes as to the roughness of the ditches and corners to be cut and reckoned a faster time was definitely possible, kind of like a busted in half car was possible.  The spot-on Wild West Rally crew not only kept things on time all weekend, but actually let us start a couple minutes early on the final stage.  We were more than ready.  Carl continued earning his black-belt rally driver status, following my commands perfectly and taking a further 10 seconds off our first run of the stage.  We allowed ourselves to consider the unlikely prospect of Jardevall having gotten slower somehow on the second running on the 18 mile transit back to service and the virtual finish line. Not surprisingly, the Swede got faster as well, but only matched our first time, we took the gap down to 16 seconds on the day.  Not too shabby for a couple of bike racers learning the ropes in a conservatively (cheaply) prepped car.  Jardevall, usually a quiet guy, was more and more stoked throughout the day to have someone challenging him and opened up to provide some valuable advice.  His Co-Driver, Jason Grahn, did the same, in between talking shit about how we couldn’t hope to beat them…  it’s this kind of camaraderie that makes racing cars in the dirt equally enjoyable to racing bikes in the same medium.  Must be something about pavement that makes people take things too seriously.  Or maybe it’s money… 

In any case, it was a weekend of racing that exceeded even our loftiest expectations and got us fired up to learn more and get better at this intriguing new sport.  Carl’s dad was even more stoked than usual, having gotten to go out to a few spectator areas to see just how well his son was driving that little white car with AC/CD on the hood. 

We’ll be rocking around in the Mt Hood National Forest next weekend trying to get the same kind of cheers that people love to give a car that, upon first glance, appears to be a rolling tribute to who many consider the greatest rock band of all time…

Here’s a little video we found on the internet, after this quote from our friend Byron Garth we decided not to turn on the in-car camera…  “If I had the camera running I would’ve stuffed it miles before I did…”  (He rolled his freshly prepped new WRX on the same corner that claimed rally vet Paul Ecklund and fellow Impreza pilot Mike Goodwin)

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