Day 46 15. June 2000, Dawson City to Whitehorse The test
today went along two lakes. The route was gravel, the required average
speed around 80 km/h. There was no traffic (other then the rally drivers
in front and behind us) but the streets were narrow. On even bits, we
managed to get up to 110/120 km/h, but most of the route was curvy and/or
climbing, wherein lies the challenge. With gravel and without modern electronic
wheel control, curves cannot be taken too fast: We let the Facel Vega
(car 85), which started one minute behind us, overtake only to see him
make a 180° spin on a 90° curve (he ended up almost blocking the
whole road). After that he decided to take it easier and just followed
us to see us both getting a zero penalty with ninety seconds to spare
(more than enough time). He apologized later. The Facel was lucky, another
car hit a tree from the side: although damaged, it was still running and
nobody got hurt - I have no information about the state of the tree. Two days
ago, we were asked to drive an 80 km/h average speed on the section from
Chicken to Dawson City. This would have been possible with a 90 kph speed
limit, but what it did not account for was that within the section there
was a border crossing and a ferry crossing included (!!!). Most people
lost about 10-20 minutes on the border, the ferry takes 15 minutes to
cross, but if you just missed it, that's 44 minutes and 49 seconds, if
there is a queue of cars (very likely if there is a rally of 40 cars)
it would take longer than that. Subtract those numbers from two hours
fifteen minutes and add a hailstorm to that and you get an impossible
test section on something which was announced as an easy drive. It was
obvious that the rally organization had made a mistake and on the day
they changed the end of the section to not include the ferry. The only
problem was that they did not tell anyone so that many cars were racing
down the hill from the border crossing to Dawson thinking that they are
running about thirty minutes late. This, understandably, caused a lot
of stress to the caravans or RVs going down the same route (I would be
stressed if fourty historic cars overtook me at high speed) and some of
them decided to call up the police. On that day one Mercedes SL got a
speeding ticket and today a different Mercedes SL also got a speeding
ticket. The SL-driver said that the policeman knew that the "rally"
was coming this way and that he had been warned by his fellow policemen
in Dawson that some of us are driving unnecessarily fast (which is true)
and some of us are driving very bad (unfortunately, possibly also true).
So the Canadian police is keeping an eye on us but at the same time they
are always very friendly and polite. Our team does not mind as they are
only doing their job and thereby forcing the rally organization not to
go overboard with average speeds, which does not make sense on public
roads anyway, especially with old cars.
Overall 1 hour 10 minutes penalty The official results can be looked up on this website
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