The end of hiatus

After leaving the old country we ended up in Canada with no money, no friends and no racing car :-). So I went to hiatus for 25 years. I even lived 10 years without any car whatsoever. Finally, in 2007, I started to look around for a cheap form of racing again. And I found it - ice racing. What can be more appropriate if one lives in Canada and freezes his but every winter anyway?

I bought a car for $500 that was "fully prepared" for the 2008 season of ice racing.

I guess, the German cars were meant for me. After the East German Trabant I upgraded to 1984 VW Rabbit. The car might have been "fully prepared", but what I did not realize, was that it was prepared for the 2006 season, when the owner stopped racing. As the car was stored for about two years, it did what any older car must do - invisibly deteriorated.

I remember the first year of my ice racing quite vividly. Yes, there is nothing more exhilarating than to try to change a brake line in -20C (-4F). It would help so much if the car still had the brake bleeder... Exhilarating? Yes, probably for the onlookers.

Most of the time I lost my will to live when I came to my car on Saturday morning before the races and saw this:

Oh, have I mentioned that the car was impossible to start as soon as the weather made you to put on a light sweater?

Yet, this twisted approach to ice racing had one big advantage. I got to know everyone very quickly, begging for advice and borrowing spare parts. I have to say that the ice racers are a great bunch of guys and they have always helped me.

I felt like the car gave me a sign in the fourth race of the season. All the remnants of oil, gas (and I do not know what else) stored in the exhaust pipe for the last two years, got heated, blew, and the car bellowed a huge cloud of smoke. The spectators were rolling in the snow laughing. See it for yourself from the car behind me:

The car was slowly shedding the rotten parts, and I was hoping I might spend some time racing instead of fixing it. Unfortunately, it was not so simple. I was fixing the car every week for the rest of the six-week-long season. Surprisingly enough, I was able to race in between the repairs

and stuff it into a snow bank here and there (see the car at the back):

At the end of the season I ended up 7th in the class (out of 22) and 28th overall (out of 82). I have to admit, that (a bit altered) Ernest Hemingway's quote describes my driving perfectly: "I have tried to drive the best I could. Sometimes, I had good luck and drove better than I could."

One day I looked into our garden and saw:

And the season was over.

It all started in the early eightees...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the great rally drivers were moving from two-wheel drive cars to the all-wheel drive cars and the "monster class" - group B appeared in the World Rally Championship. I was lucky enough to see Walter Rohl, Sandro Munari and some other great rally drivers of that time.

No wonder then, that I started to rally as well. Living in a communist country at that time, my answer to Group B car was racing Trabant :-). Obviously it was a proper answer; so let us just to compare these beasts:

Audi Quatro - 2,150 ccm, 300 HP

Trabant - 595 ccm (two stroke) 30-35 HP (fully "prepped" for rally)

But you might enjoy the sound as well:

Audi Quatro and similar B group cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozntieZs8Bg

Trabant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCeQ3tDznUI&feature=related

Yet Trabant was a lot of fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snEuERpUjhw

and the group of people racing them was amazing. These were the guys who usually did not have money to buy anything more expensive, but quite a few of them knew how to race. There were about 40 Trabants in the class and the battles were fierce at the top.

I rallied the Trabant for about 4 years. Here are some of my pictures:


One of the drivers I admired the most was Ari Vatanen. He was / is well known for his aggressive driving style--winning, but also crashing out, in a spectacular way. So, in no time, I was a master of a series of spectacular car rollovers. The wins, though, missed me...

In 1984 I and my wife left the country without advising the comrades about our intentions. Some of my friends still claim that it must have been because I drove the Trabant, and the four years just drove me to insanity, but to them I would say: "It was noisy, it smelled of the burn oil, it was cold, it was slow, it might even be called ugly...but it was my 'first love'. And you never forget her :-)."

Video clips

A couple of videos:

2009 Tall Pines on-board:



the same one (later part) from the outside:



another Tall Pines:




2009 BDC



2009 I do not know where...