I’m not quite sure how I forgot to post on this, I guess there has just been too many things in my feeble little brain.
The Rally of the Tall Pines is running today in Ontario cottage country. This final event in the North American Rally Championship and Canadian Rally Championship is also known as one of the toughest events in North America. In fact, one description over the years has been “winter roads with summer ditches”. While long time readers may recall that last year I woke up to minus 19 degrees last year at Pines, this year we’ve had a very warm Fall. Here in Whitby, 2 hours south of the event, it is about 10 degrees C out there right now. That is shorts and tee shirt weather!
The warm, wet weather means lots of muddy roads and rally crews are finding that the tires are plugging up badly with mud, making for very slippery driving conditions. You can bet that most teams were up all night grooving tires to evacuate the goo. One team that suffered was the Subaru of Pat Richard and Alan Ockwell, who had an off that fortunately only resulted in cosmetic damage.
If the Ockwell name sounds familiar, its because Alan is the brother of occasional rally guy in The Garage, Erik Ockwell. Erik is up at Pines today and hopefully will be able to get some stories together for us tomorrow. Either way, we’ll have more stories and photos from Andrew Harvey and Warwick Patterson from FlatOverCrest.
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