Anatomy of a disaster

As a lot of you know, I'm a racing/rally fan. This weekend was the 12th of 16 rallies in 2005, this one being held in Cardiff, Wales - the Network Q Rally of Great Britain.

The best coverage of the event, as much as all of us who watch it like to gripe about it, is the meager 90 minute recap of the event on Speed Channel. (Rallies last three days, and if you visit in person, there are at least one or two days of practice and testing you can enjoy as well.)

The GB rally was set to be a big deal from the start. The reigning champion, and current championship leader, Citroen driver Sebastian Loeb, could clinch the championship this weekend if his nearest competitor, Peugeot driver Marcus Gronholm, finished seventh or worse. Throughout the first two days of the rally, Gronholm and Loeb and the 2003 world champion, Subaru's Petter Solberg, exchanged places in the top 3. At one point, Gronholm dropped way down the leaderboard, when all brakes but the emergency brake failed, but eventually he charged his way back to the front.

For those unfamiliar with rally racing, there are a number of fixed race courses called "special stages". They consist of public roads that have been closed and secured against traffic. Spectators line the stages, standing just feet from the edge of the road, though now watched over by course marshals and other officials to ensure they are staying in relatively safe places. (In years past, spectators have been injured and killed when struck by cars.) For example, one can't stand on the outside of a turn - because a car's centrifugal force would send it that way if anything were to go awry. Standing inside the turn, at the apex, is okay.

Anyway, each of these stages is, in world championship compeition, between 10 and 40 miles long. A lot of races these days are on gravel (with one on snow and ice, scheduled during Sweden's hard winters), and a few are on tarmac (pavement). It's not a straight line race, though, nor an oval or closed-circuit style of racing. Imagine racing across the back roads from your place to the next town over - taking jog turns where the road kinks left and right, or meets up wth another side road in a T intersection. That's the kind of thing rally crews do.

Obviously, if you are doing this kind of racing, going 130mph at some points as WRC cars do, you need some kind of direction when you get to these kinks and T intersections. The strips of plastic tape or even traffic cones are hard to see when you're going with such fervor through a stage. This is why there's a need for a "co-driver".

The co-driver has a set of directions called 'pace notes', which either he (or she) made, or had provided by the rally staff. At speed, the co-driver is sitting in the passenger seat of the race car (often a race-prepared version of a car you might see on your street - the most visible ones to North Americans would be the Ford Focus and the Subaru WRX). Anyway, the co-driver is reading these notes off as fast as he can say them, and the driver is trusting his co-driver's instructions to get him down the course properly at flat-out speeds. A typical instruction might be:

Eighty, six right long, over crest, caution, into dip, fifty, four left tightens into three left, fifty, hairpin right and two left, caution, through gate.

This means, "80 meters ahead of you, you have a barely-noticeable right turn that's longer than average, and comes to a crest. Watch out, there's a depression in the road right after the crest. Fifty meters after that, a moderate left turn keeps getting tighter and tighter until it meets an even tighter left turn. Fifty meters past that, there's a right turn that turns back upon itself and immediately has a sharp left turn after it. Watch out, you go through a gate at this point."

As you can see, the co-driver's instructions are significant and vital.

Back to the way the race is scored. The car (the two-person racing team) is sent into the stage at a specific time, and by themselves - they're racing against the clock, not other competitors (directly). Other racers are sent into the stage at predetermined intervals (1 minute apart, but on some rallies they use 2 minutes due to the amount of dust that cars kick up, to allow it to settle before the next car comes through). So while any number of cars may be in-stage at any given time, unless someone has a major problem, they're not going to encounter one another on-course. There are no pit stops - the car carries one or two spare tires and a modest toolkit, and the driver and co-driver are responsible for bringing it out to the end of the stage however they can. Sometimes cars come out on three wheels because they got a flat on the fourth, and the rubber disintegrated and the titanium wheel was ground into dust by the racing action, so all that's left on the 4th hub is an axle stub. Sometimes cars come out with considerably less glass or bodywork than they went in with. And some cars just don't come out, which results in a 'retirement', which means the race is over for that team.

So let's say Team A takes 10 minutes 47 seconds and 32/100ths to get through SS1 (Special Stage 1). Team B, which started into the stage 1 minute AFTER Team A, finished in 10 minutes 39 seconds and 11/100ths. This means that Team B is actually in the lead, 8 seconds and 22/100ths ahead of Team A. Follow?

Multiply that over 7 or 8 stages per day and 3 days, and you get the gist of how rally racing is done.

There are other things that affect your outcome in the race. Every few stages - generally 4 or 5 - you get the chance to return to the "service park", which is a place where mechanics and others are waiting to work on both the car and its drivers. Teams get a strict 20 minutes to effect as many repairs to the car as they can - which often includes not only new tires and gas, which American race fans will expect, but windows, body panels, replacing brakes (see Marcus Gronholm's situation above), transmissions, radiators, etc. Often you'll see a veritable swarm of people around a vehicle working on it. And as I said, you have 20 minutes. Report to the start line late, you get penalized 10 seconds per minute you're behind. Report to the start line early, same fate.

Anyway, I told you all this to tell you what happened in Rally GB. As I said above, the lead was swapping back and forth between the top three, despite mechanical failures and nasty weather conditions. (The night before day 1 of the rally, it had rained heavily, turning the first few stages into mud.) Marcus Gronholm managed to finish day 2 back in the hunt for a podium spot (1st thru 3rd), with Solberg second and Loeb leading.

One of the up-and-coming rising stars of the series, Markko Martin, a phenomenal driver from the country of Estonia, was in the top 10 starting out day 3. On the second stage of the day, just a mile or two into the stage, his car went out of control, left the stage, and broadsided a tree on the co-driver's side.

Markko's co-driver, a well-loved and respected British man by the name of Michael Park, was killed instantly.

Michael, who had been given the nickname 'Beef' years ago, co-drove for Markko since 2000. He was one of the top co-drivers in the sport, and there's no doubt that his teamwork alongside Markko is what made the pair one of the most promising teams in recent WRC history.

This race was supposed to be all about the past world champion Colin McRae finally getting back in the driver's seat and racing after 18 months, along with his former co-driver-turned-broadcaster Nicky Grist. It was supposed to be about seeing if Marcus Gronholm could keep Seb Loeb out of the champion's position for one more race.

Instead, the entire rally community is dumbfounded, and all motorsports is in mourning.

However, the story doesn't end there. Marcus Gronholm, who you will remember I said races for Peugeot, was withdrawn from the rally by his team after learning his teammate had died. As the FIA (the governing body of the World Rally Championship) ended the rally after SS15, the stage on which Beef died, that meant that Marcus would score no points, and Sebastian Loeb, who was leading at the time, would clinch the driver's championship.

Upon learning this, and knowing fellow competitor Petter Solberg's distance behind him, Loeb deliberately reported to the final time check-in late, being assessed a 2 minute 10 second time penalty, which sent Solberg into first place and Loeb down to third, meaning he would not score enough points to win the championship this time around. He said, "I have no interest in winning the championship on these grounds."

Others I've spoken to online, who were at the rally, have reported that Markko Martin said he will never set foot in a rally car again.

Rest in peace, Beef. Thanks for spending time with us.