Satch on No Alibi 2000

Rainier Auto Sports Club
Comments about No Alibi 2000
Satch Carlson
Monday June 26, 2000
It was a weekend worth waiting for; after being postponed last year, No
Alibi proved a splendid romp through the rolling wheat-covered hills of
eastern Washington, from high-plains desert to river-carved canyons, from
twisty new-laid asphalt with no traffic in sight to new-laid gravel as
slippery as ball bearings to a stretch of I-90 that gave us a genuine
tough-to-make-it hillclimb section---when was the last time you had a cast
of 69 miles an hour?!

Like all memorable events, No Alibi has its stories that will now be carved
into Rally Lore. But the best part of the entire event was the logistical
planning that had us arrive in Spokane by 5:30 Saturday afternoon. Mike
Daily, running SOP with Steve Pfau (aka Pfau the Unflappable after he fell
asleep in Bob Chandler's Z car during a downhill Pro rally stage---on
ice---two dozen years ago), knew of a GREAT Cajun restaurant, and soon most
of us were sitting around a long patio table at the Bayou Brewery, drinking
black beer and telling rally tales.

Rallymaster Kirk Simons had things nailed down dead-solid perfect, and Rally
Roy Ward had done his amazing trick of finding wonderful roads that the rest
of the world has forgotten. The competition was keen, especially with Glen
Wallace and Richard Squire, both Microsoft engineers, running their laptop
umbilicals wired up to provide amazing real-time feedback---including
count-down to each instruction! The computer classes have gone WAAAYYY too
geeky! And the aforementioned Bob Chandler, running with Mark Clemmens in
Bob's ancient 240-Z, ran Computer Class instead of historic---though they
lost a wee bit of time when Chandler, discovering a road-goes-RIGHT
situation over a blind crest, elected to use a sturdy fencepost as a brake
rather than slide off the road trying to make the turn.

After Saturday's scores were tallied, the top tree or four cars were covered
by a dozen points---easy enough to lose in the gravel, even during Sunday's
shorter sessions! With Steve Willey and Eric Horst looking for the win in
their Range Rover, Russ Kraushaar had to wring the utmost out of his
TimeWise 798. The Range Rover was Alpha-equipped, so it was to be a showdown
of the three top computing methods: Mike Friedman, Jack Christensen, or
Microsoft Skunk Works.

What's worse, we had failed to ask the All Important Question at Saturday's
drivers' meeting. . . and Sunday we had to make a strategic decision. (Rally
geeks will understand the quandary when I say that all those luscious zeroes
we THOUGHT we'd earned on Saturday turned into 1's on the scoresheet. . .
usually one EARLY.)

I'll tell you, it's nerve-wracking to know you have only a five-point
cushion and you're DELIBERATELY running slightly off time to account for the
All Important Question. . . .

But as it turned out, the competition had troubles of their own, including
the Irate Housewife With the Hard-Hat Husband, so Kraushaar and I squeaked
by; the whole adventure reminds me that we really don't care about winning;
we just want to play the game well enough so that the winners have to be
REALLY good to beat us! And there were at least three other teams on that
plateau.

Daily and Pfau were dominant in SOP, and all agreed that we WILL be back if
the organizers promise NOT TO CHANGE A THING. (Where else can you find an
instruction that tells you---correctly---to go straight at T?!) Maybe a
little judicious control-point relocation, and send some Prozac to that
hard-hat wife, and do something to guarantee a repeat of the splendid
weather, the smooth gravel roads, the great food, the camaraderie.

Dang. It really DOESN'T get any better than this!