Well, since the Canadian forum hasn't seen much love lately mabye I will liven things up a bit with a recap of last weekend's event

The Cochrane rally is based out of Cochrane, Alberta which is about 15-20 minutes west of Calgary.  It is a regional rally, and is part of the Western Canada Rally Championship (WCRC) hosted by the Calgary Sports Car Club (CSCC) with "jurisdiction" falling under the Rally West organization.  This is the last year it will be held in March, with plans finalized to have a true winter rally in Alberta in January. Cochrane is the first event in the WCRC, so everyone (who isn't also competing in the nationals out east) is just getting back into their cars since the Kananaskis Rally in November.  Turnout was fairly good with 23 cars entering.  Total stage mileage was 105km (ended up being 95km because last two stages were cancelled).  Alberta rally is flourishing, it would be an understatement to say that all of the cars competing were "nicely" prepped.

Western Canada rally has a huge contingent of G2 competitors.  1st, 2nd, and 3rd overall were all G2 competitors.  This is even though there were 5 open class cars and 4 PGT/P4 cars.  My driver Hardy Schmidtke and I came 4th overall in a 2002 WRX prepped by Rocket Rally.  It runs on 91 octane, and is basically a stock WRX with a 50mm DMS suspension setup on it.  Very durable car.  This was Hardy's 2nd event ever plus a test day.  I pushed him very hard, as I knew a podium could be possible as Hardy has some great potential. Unfortunatley, we were not able to make up the time lost from slowly getting up to speed in the morning.  If we would have had the final two stages, 3rd would have been ours (we were 11 seconds off).

Conditions were interesting.  The rally takes place 45 minutes north west of Cochrane in the foothills.  When race day came around (we also have two pass recce the day before), there was 8 inches of snow that fell over night were we would be racing, but less then 1 cm in Cochrane itself.  Fun fun eh?  Conditions were slippery, however most of the ice was very manageable.  The roads themselves are AWESOME.  Only 6 different stages were used (3 stages ran one way, turn around and run the other) but with an interesting mix.  4 of the stages were very fast (quite possible to break the maximum 120km/h average allowed) while 2 of the stages were "L3 into R3 50 R3< 75 crest into L3>2".  Very interesting.

Overall, it was a great weekend.  There were some unfortunate incidents (last years WCRC overall winner, Aaron Neumann in his G2 Civic that makes 200hp and he shifts at 9k) will have to reshell his car but both him and the co-driver were A-OK.  Also of note was the Subaru RX of John Geeland that had an unfortunate roll on a slippery "L3 /crest into downhill".  Car/driver/co-driver were fine, but the co-drivers neck became very sore from whiplash and they withdrew from the rally.

And finally, pictures! I'll link some of the photog's websites, but the ones I am posting are just of Hardy and I.







Go entertain yourselves with these ones:

http://www.lourensansregret.com/cochrane08/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/formulapho … 142703966/
http://www.rallysport.ca/photos/Cochrane_Rally_2008/
http://members.shaw.ca/checkelrally/

Last edited by HiTempguy (2008-04-13 16:42:49)