Compared to last year, the Rally course had been radically redesigned; 8 out of  12 SS waved through the mountains West of  Cluj in the „Fântânele" area, 2 other SS North of  Cluj through a former orchard - a great run with very fast stretches, jumps and lots of  tight corners. Two other sandy SS were South of  Cluj, with wide roads and lots of  room to drift through corners.

Our preparations

We had out training car shipped to Cluj already two weeks prior to the rally so on Thursday we could start directly with the training. As the courses lied both to the North and South of  Cluj, the first training day was scheduled for the tracks West of Cluj and Friday for the remaining ones. Because of  the last few rainy days, the tracks were extremely slippery in some areas and tough to master; on top of  that, some corners were already marked as dangerous in the road-book due to very steep drops. Thus, caution was the word of  the day.

We tested our Evo on Thursday evening as the totally ruined turbocharger from Braşov had been replaced and we wanted to make sure that the engine would rev up properly with the new turbocharger installed. This was indeed the case, even though we were not truly happy with the mapping, as the turbocharger kicked in too late and then with a severe turbo-boost, which is not the ideal thing on slippery surfaces.

Prologue

The oficial rally start was on Friday evening with a „Superspecial" in the Iulius Mall parking. A 400m long slalom course was fenced in, to be driven twice, however the result would not count in the overall economy of the race.

As we already had the new gravel tires installed on the car and did not want to trash them on the asphalt, we didn't cover the course at full speed but still managed to score the second place in our group.

Second rally day: Saturday, 20.09.2008

Conditions: 

Weather: cold and rainy

Roads: wet and softened

It rained all though the night, which turned the already wet and slippery tracks to muddy tracks and the driving to a drifting adventure.

The first SS starts from Tarniţa lake up the mountain towards Fântânele; we chose the "weakest" engine management setting, in which the abrupt kick-in of  the turbocharger wasn't felt that strong and still managed to pull the second best time in our class - 10,54 min. The second SS starts from Bedeciu along a mountain ridge and over a plateau towards Căpuşu Mic. The mountain ridge track is hazardous as some corners taken at too high speed would lead you straight down a ravine and the rocky road surface offered little grip when wet. We covered this section with great caution.

The fast stretch on the plateau was just as slippery but still a nice drive and we finished the SS with no problems at all. Shortly before the stage end failure struck again: no more turbo pressure!

We rolled slowly across the finish line and tried to figure out if a hose or some connection had been loosened. We couldn't notice anything so we drove into the service park, which was luckily only a few km away.

All connections were ok and it seemed obvious at this point we had a turbocharger failure again. We left the service park hoping we could still drive through the rally; however, it became immediately clear we had no chance since our Evo had no more power and could hardly reach a top speed of 60mph.

This was then the second drop-out in a row while on 2nd place!

Should we have finished this rally - a third place would have been enough - our 2nd place overall in the Group H championship would have been assured. Even the theoretical chance to win the championship would still have been in the cards.

Now the pressure is on in Iaşi to finish in the points to keep our 2nd place overall. We have firmly decided to finish the championship on the second place.

BRK-Rally Team