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Rally Mentality
September 03, 2019
What is a Rally Mentality?
This weekend, our friend Victor Kuhns brought his GC Rally/Pikes Peak race car to High Plains Raceway from New Mexico to shake it down at the track and test out some changes that he had made to the car. In his first session, he did 2 hot laps, and being happy with what he was seeing, the next session, he went out with plans to run a full session.
But on the first hot lap, he heard a very loud noise coming from the rear floor of the car, and he had to immediately come into the pits. With a chance to look the car over, the problem was quickly found. It turned out that one of the rear differential outrigger/”T” bushings had completely failed, so what he was hearing was the rear subframe hitting the body of the car.
So with a total of 3 hot laps, his car was no longer safe to run on track.
As frustrating as that might be, you may remember that about a year ago Victor brought his car out to Colorado for the first time, and he ended up snapping an axle halfway around the track on his first hot lap. So now in 2 trips to High Plains, Victor had run a total of 3 hot laps without issue.
Now in ether one of these cases, most of us would just put the car back on the trailer and chalk it up to bad luck. But Victor started out running Rallies, and to say that Victor has a Rally Mentality is an understatement to say the least.
So what is a Rally Mentality? Well when you compete in Rally your team of the driver, co-driver, and crew have one primary goal, and that is to finish the race. No matter what happens, and no matter what kind of damage that you might incur, you have to do anything possible to keep the car running and driving so that you can cross the finish-line. It isn’t always possible, but once you accept that rally mentality, it can be amazing the solutions that you can come up with to get you to the finish.
A year ago with the snapped axle, Victor actually ended up borrowing the axle off of another GC car that was at the track, and trying to see if he could turn a couple more laps, but on that day, it turned out that there was a bit more damage to the car than could be fixed by another axle.
So back to this weekend. With nothing but a failed bushing in his way, Victor and his friend Aaron immediately set to work going through his truck, parts, and tools that he had brought to see if he could find a solution. The readily available parts of a bearing race, and an axle nut didn’t get the job done, but after a bit of a more thorough dig through Victor’s tool box, Aaron found an old bearing puller, that had a part on it that seemed like it might do the trick.
The bolt fit right through it, and it also just happened to be close enough to the right size that it held the “T” brace in place just fine. After a quick trip around the paddock and a lap to test the car, the fix passed the test, and Victor was able to get in a couple more good sessions before the end of the day.
On this day, having that Rally Mentality turned a second less than ideal track day into a double victory of a good track day, and the job-well-done of tackling a tough problem.
There is definitely something to this Rally Mentality, I think.