Empire State Performance Rally -- Race Recap
I ran the Empire State Performance Rally this weekend. The event is a 2-day long tarmac rally held in the roads around Rock Hill, New York. The roads are mostly marked 25-35mph and are rough, have significant elevation change, and are heavily crowned and sandy/gravelly from the winter. Some say it's perfect conditions for Subaru's, but I beg to differ.
As you know from the build thread, after more than 2 years away from stage rally, I decided to build up my street E46 M3 so I could do the handful of tarmac events in North America; ESPR, some hillclimbs, and Targa Newfoundland. My budget was short, so as you see in the build thread I focused solely on adding safety equipment and completing key maintenance. The car is exactly as I drove it to work every day for the last 8 years, with mild suspension tweaks, engine bolt-ons, and a lightweight hood and trunk. It's a total pig at 3300lbs without driver/co-driver, but I love the car anyway. Seeing a service park full of gutted and turbo'ed monsters running proper 5-figure rally suspension made me seriously re-think the decision to leave in the heater core, power windows, sound deadening, etc.
I decided to run a smart race rather than a flat-out race. I was starting the rally with limited experience with pace notes, a new car, a new co-driver, with a suspension that I wasn't sure could handle the bumps, and on roads I have never seen before. It felt right to focus on running as quickly as I was comfortable, avoid pushing on the jumps and gravel sections, and really focus on trying to finish the event at a competitive pace and see how we made out along the way.
Day 1 started well. I was right within striking distance of the other 2WD cars. It was really hard to get comfortable trusting the pace notes over the high speed crests, and I was braking heavily for the jumps so as to save the suspension. There were issues with a couple of local residents trying to disrupt the rally so we had a couple of stage cancellations, so unfortunately the times were equalized and I missed out on time I was really hoping for to learn the car and get comfortable with the notes before the long, high speed stages that closed the day.
After our lunch service we started the first run of the longest stage of the rally. I was off-pace, and uncomfortable. I didn't know how much to push the car and stay within a reasonable pace, and the rough roads were pounding the suspension into the bump stops. Towards the end of the stage, I was caught by the leader in 2WD, Erik Potts in his turbocharged focus. Thankfully it was just the kick in the ass I needed. With Erik 100 or so yards off my rear bumper I picked up the pace and managed to maintain the gap through the finish. I limited the damage to only 1 minute, but it was poor driving and would set us back for the rest of the event. I didn't make the same mistake on the second run through the stage. I was flat over all of the crests, braked as late as possible before jumps, and carried as much speed as was reasonable through the short gravel section on the stage. I cut a full minute off of my time in the first run and got right back on pace with the leaders. I ended Day 1 back in 5th, but now I was even more determined to keep my pace up while not risking the car.
Day 2 started at Monticello Motor Club. The rally would use the track for 2 "stages" that started from the pit lane, included two chicanes to slow down the high speed cars, and ended back in the pit lane. This was our chance to make back time. I had never seen the track before, but attacked the course and managed to dominate both my competitors in 2WD as well as all of the AWD cars. It was just the boost I needed, and allowed me to claw back over half the time I lost on my slow stage time.
With that motivation, and with increased confidence in my co-driver, I proceeded to attack the rest of the day's stages in order to climb back up the order. I was still losing a ton of time having to crawl through the gravel sections, and to avoid any of the cuts so as to not damage the unprotected belly of the M3. Instead, I was focusing on making the time back by using the high-speed handling advantage of the M3 to push harder through the fast sections than I knew my competitors would be able to.
When all the results were tallied, we managed to claw back all of the time we lost and finished the day in 2nd place in 2WD (behind the incredibly well prepared and expertly driven Ford Focus of Erik Potts) and 6th place overall. Not a bad result.
Thanks to James Clay @
Bimmerworld for his invaluable advice and for supplying some critical maintenance and reliability parts, to
TC Design for suspension set-up advice, to Marco at
Motive for the tools and supplies, and to
Falken for the tires.
I plan to make some key changes to the car to make it more competitive; switch to a suspension set-up that will give me more travel and durability, and to a semi-slick tire like our competitors ran, we'll cut as much weight out of the car as possible, and protect the underbody so that we don't have to fear the gravel and the cuts. With those changes, I believe we have a set-up that could do really well at Targa, and could win next year's Empire State Rally (and maybe even podium in the overall).
Some more pics below, courtesy of
NCRally: