July 21st, 2000
Pemberton, B.C.
Round 3 of the B.C. TSD rally championship
Congratulations to all the competitors who came
out to the rally to compete. A special thanks to those who
came from our neighbors across the 49th parallel,
I know it was a long trip for most, and we would like to say
thanks for coming out and we hope you enjoyed yourselves. For
the 2nd year in a row, Gold Digger has defied expectations.
What was expected to be a very smooth rally, with the possibility
of rain to make it slippery, was not the case! With the weather
being poor over the week between pre-run and the event, the
rocky terrain had radically changed from a clean swept course
to a rally cross event using rocks as pylons for our 21 car
rally! The expected rain turned into an intense fogbank at
the higher elevations, and only had rained enough to keep the
dust down.
Congratulations to the team of John Fouse
and Dennis Wende for finishing first overall
with the team of Jamie Thomas and Max Vaysburd
taking 2nd by only a small margin. Congratulations
also go to the team of John McLearen and Mark
Fleming for coming in first in novice class
and fourth overall! Unfortunately Gold Digger
also had its victims. The Honda accord of Jordan
Manley and Brendan Maher had suffered clutch
failure early in the first regularity. Shortly
there afterwards, Andrew Dobric's Trusty Golf
had decided to let him know that it was in
no mood for rallying this eve and lost the
left rear wheel! On to the third regularity,
which seems to have been a real tire killer,
the Mazda 323 GTX of Alan Perry and John Allen
had suffered 2 punctures, 1 of which was the
space saver! The Subaru Legacy of Bill Westhead
and Paul Westwick also suffered a puncture
in this stage and the Suzuki Sidekick of Fred
Wiedemann and Shelley Donaldson had to deal
with a blowout on route to a checkpoint! The
Pathfinder of Harry Wong also had tire
problems when a rear tire turned to spaghetti
and nearly disintegrated on the last regularity.
We would like to thanks Nokian Tyres for providing
us with the Nokian Tyre contingency program,
Specialty Subaru for their contributions and
Polaris Water for donating water to the competitors
and the crews. We would also like to thank
all the people who helped and check pointed
(or at least tried!) this event would not be
possible without their help! We would also
like to recognize Ken Kwong and Ben Bradley
for doing the triple service of checkpoint,
sweep and Steward for this event! They transported
Alan and John back to Whistler to repair their
tire and then back up150 km on the rally route
to their stricken 323 to get them home. By
the time they had gotten off the mountain and
into Pemberton from getting the car moving
again, it was 5:30 pm, with an arrival at home
in Vancouver at 9:00pm! (The rally finished
at 9:30 am!) That's what I call rally endurance!!!
Please join us for the next TSD rally, The
Totem Rally coming up in November on the 24/25.
Our next pro rally will be the Pacific Forest
Rally on September 15th. If you
can't compete, you can come out to volunteer
and get the best views of the rally cars going
by, or at least watch and make a weekend of
it!
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