II ITALIAN CHALLENGE 2002 report

This picture of the Porsche was taken during the Coast to Coast Rally last January, to enlarge it please push the image.

Since the rallies in the Championship requires to have a more powerful engine than the standard Ventoux, we thought  it was not good idea to attend the event in my Dauphine 1090, we won the past two competitions and wanted to stay as leaders, so we started thinking in alternative cars.

First option was a nice blue Mini Cooper belonging to an Arturo's friend, Alejandro de la Parra, but that car was as powerful as my 1090, so would not solve our need of fast acceleration.

My friend Jorge Mendoza bought from me a beautiful Alpine A110 one year ago, I thought would be a nice option so I called Jorge to ask if he would lend it and he agreed, so I picked up the car.   Now we were in the safe side.

Two days before the Rally another friend, Francisco Miranda, came to my home and when I told him that we would drive the Alpine he offered his dark blue Gordini, which in my opinion is the nicest Dauphine in Mexico, it has been modified and now is powered by a 1300 Sierra engine, so the acceleration would not be a problem.   

click the image to go to Francisco's Gordini page.

I picked up the Gordini in Francisco's house, drove it to his studio to change the tires for the 13" set he has specially for the rallies and now the two Renault options were in my garage ready for a decision.

On Friday, after a test drive of both cars we found that any of them would be good, but the speedometer in the Alpine was not very accurate since the needle was "dancing" between 30 and 80 km/h at the same speed, it would be a problem in a time & distance rally...

On the other side the Gordini had the speedometer cable disconnected because the end squared bit was now round due to wear, but Francisco had a new cable and gave it to me.

Decision was finally taken when Arturo asked me "which car would you prefer?" he was comfortable with both of them but obviously I decided for my preferred car: the Dauphine.

First step was to change the speedometer cable, I did it in two hours and now the speedometer was nicely working.

Meanwhile Arturo was in charge of the graphic decoration, he has the equipment to produce the printings and stickers so was easy and fast to make them.

In order to know the exact  speedometer deviation I drove the car to the Cuernavaca highway, I tested with my chronometer how many seconds took to run 1 km at different speeds and took note, then returned home, made a sticker graded with the information compiled and installed it in the speedometer glass.

In the afternoon we installed the graphics, it took one hour and the Dauphine got a nice competition look.

It was 6:30 a.m. on Saturday when I arrived to Arturo's house, we should drive 30 km into the city to arrive to the parking area of a shopping center where the first car should start at 9:01 a.m., the route book would be delivered to the competitors at 8:00 a.m.

Once having the route book we went to a restaurant and calculated the regularity stages while having breakfast, our time to start was 9:08:00 a.m.

How are our rallies?

In a Time & Distance rally in Mexico you can find four different kind of stages, first is "transit" in which you must go from one point to another in the exact time set by the route book, it is not important how fast or slow are you driving while you cross the start and end controls in the exact moment.   You must follow the route specified in the book and there are not control points in the middle of the stage.

"Regularity" stage means that you must drive each kilometer in the exact quantity of seconds and at the average speed specified in the route book, speed can change every km and there are control officers that check the exact moment when you pass in front of them, each second in advance or delay respect to the ideal passing time is punished with one point.   Nobody but the organizer knows where are located the control officers.

A "Limited" stage is like a transit but having short time for the distance, which means that the average speed will be high.

The "special" stage is set by the organizer to have a different activity into the rally, like a slalom, an "acceleration kilometer test" or simply to stop for lunch, in this stages only the start and finish points are counting for winning the rally, the special tests are giving different points and  trophies.

The ending point of one stage is always the starting point of the next and the winner of the rally is the team having less points at the end of the event.

Competitors are divided in different categories according to the age of the car, how many cylinders it has, if it is a sport car or not and if you are considered expert or novice; so we have Vintage 4 cylinders, 6 cylinders and 8 cylinders, "Group VI" for modern sport cars and "Copa RAC" for any other car not being vintage or sport, and a special "Ladies" category for teams formed by two women; all of them divided in "experts" and "novices".

Arturo and me are competing in "Vintage 4 cylinders experts" and we run with the number 8.

The organizers in this event were the Italian Cars Club and the Rally Automovile Club (RAC), the Director was our good friend Nacho Lulka, former President of the RAC and one of the most experienced rally competitors and organizers in Mexico.

ten, nine, eight, seven... 

That is how the navigator (also called co-pilot) tells to the pilot the exact moment to start, zero means "now" and it happened for us at 9:08:00 a.m., when our chronometers started to count the time for a full day of fun.

First stage was a transit which took us 21 Km  from Mexico City to the highway to Pachuca in forty minutes, we verified that our speedometer and odometer were working perfectly and arrived to the end point 15 minutes in advance, so we parked the car and wait for our ideal passing moment.

Real fun started in the second stage, a 23 Km regularity having different speed set for every kilometer; it took 15 minutes with 50 seconds to finish and we felt we did it very good.

The next stage was a "controlled limited" in which the organized set a special rule: the competitors could go up to 10% faster than the 97 Km/h which was the needed average speed, but would be punished with 60 points for every second if they were faster than 106.7 Km/h.   We drove it as a regularity at 100 Km/h and wait in the end only two minutes to cross the stage finish point on time.

We drove another transit and arrived to the parking area of the Soriana Shopping Center in Pachuca, Police closed a part of the parking lot where we had a slalom.

It was really motivating to realize that our Dauphine did it in only 21 seconds while the first competitor in a new and very powerful Corvette did it in 23 seconds.

After another transit we arrived to the "Mineral del Chico" road, which is a small road plenty of curves going down in the middle of a forest, there we had the second regularity going  to the town, then a small transit and another regularity going up the same road.   We were lucky having only two trucks in our way, which we passed over easily.

Last part of the report will be published soon...