Subaru just released this excellent footage from the 2012 Global RallyCross Championship’s first stop at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Several of this year’s events are coinciding with NASCAR events and will be run in a format very similar to this. There was a lot of questions about how the course would look and I think they figured out a way to keep it interesting. There’s the requisite barriers, a jump and it looks like half of the loop is sprayed down with water. I’m sure it’s racing the NASCAR fans can enjoy.
DC Shoes just released this re-edit of Ken Block’s Gymkhana 4 video. This time they took out all the commercial stuff and theatrics and just showed the driving. I find this version a lot more enjoyable.
This is a vintage video of Colin McRae teaching basic rally driving techniques to what appears to be a reporter. As with all master of their art, McRae makes everything look effortless. He’s able to instruct and hold a conversation while flying through a fairly narrow and technical dirt road in the middle of a forest. They cover a lot of basic concepts that will allow you to appreciate what rally racing drivers do if you are not already familiar with the sport.
Let me add one thing to the section on left foot braking. McRae says he likes to use his left foot to hit the brakes because it’s faster than transitioning his right foot from the gas to the brake. Most rally cars are set up with a strong rear brake bias. The reason they do this is because it allows easy drift initiation while braking for a corner. In front and all wheel drive cars, you can be on the throttle with your right foot and drag the brakes with your left foot to slow the rear wheels down more than the fronts. Left foot braking in this case gives the driver a lot of control of the sliding and weight balance of the car. There’s a good shot of Tomi Makinen doing this in the Best Motoring video I posted a while ago.
Adam Carolla’s Car Cast got a behind the scenes look at Mike Ryan’s Freightliner rally/drifting truck. Mike Ryan has been the powerhouse in big rig racing up Pikes Peak and the Mt. Washington hill climb for the past several years. He also does most of big rig stunt driving you see in movies including the chase scene in Terminator 2. Some of Carolla’s commentary is kind of stupid and he goes off with a completely irrelevant and inappropriate story at the end, but they do get some good shots of the truck. It’s got a Detroit Diesel 60 series engine with a custom Borg-Warner compound turbo setup making 1950hp and 3400+ ft-lbs of torque. It weighs almost 10,000 pounds despite of the aluminum frame rails. The rear axle is a 3-link with a Watts link and the brakes have liquid cooling.
This is the big rig Gymkhana video that Mike released a while back if you want to see the truck in action:
He also competed in the Mt. Washington hill climb rally last year in the Freightliner. It’s a similar event to Pikes Peak in that part of the course is tarmac and part of it is dirt. The footage is pretty jaw-dropping.
Climb Dance is an award winning short film that was produced in 1989. It follows Finnish World Rally Champion, Ari Vatanen, as he climbs Pikes Peak in a Peugot 405 T16. Vatanen won the World Rally Championship in 1981 with Ford before signing with Peugeot in 1984. He piloted the Peugeot 205 T16 during the crazy Group B era. Ari was well known for never playing it safe. He would always push hard and go for the win even when he had a lot to lose. My favorite quote of his came during an interview about the Group B rally years. He said “I always listened to my heart more than my brain. Yes, you will miss out on many victories but you will never have a boring life. Not a dull life.” In Climb Dance, Ari is piloting Peugeot’s last Group B car, the 405 T16. The car is four wheel drive and four wheel steer with over 600 horsepower. He says on his website that instead of shifting down to lower gears, he keep the car in higher gear and slipped the clutch. The reason for this technique was that the power delivery was so vicious in the 405 that it would cause a lot of wheel spin on the gravel surface which caused him to lose time.
**EDIT** May 16th, 2013: This video was remastered in HD
Knowing that the driver and the car are veterans of the almost mythical unlimited performance era of Group B rally adds a special feel to the vintage video. It’s a tribute to an age in rally that we will never see again. The cars were so fast that they were dangerous, yet the legendary drivers of the day rose to the challenge of piloting them to victory. To me, being able to see a piece of that time is just as, if not more, exciting than watching Monster Tajima’s current record run up Pikes Peak.
