Chapter 8

Strangers in the Night: 8.

Wendy was pleased to see me. It seems that the World Rally Championship was at our house this weekend.

That's not exactly right. The race wasn't for the championship ... the race was Finland's race for points for the Cup.

The racers would use some of our roads and the rest of the neighborhood roads were part of it. The co-drivers had been driving the routes for several days, taking notes about speed, gears, braking and distances between corners. It all boiled down to a chart with a shorthand description of everything they had been practicing.

The roads in the Lakes Region were mostly access to the Lakes ... with a little timbering on the side. There was enough variation that one never knew which roads were being featured ... except for two corners and "the hill."

Both corners were off camber ... and right after a high speed straight.

Real car collectors.

If the driver was too fast the remedy was make most of the corner and then straight off ... swampy ground. Only slightly too fast and the turn could be made but sideways ... the Trees were the car destroyer. Just a little farther down the road was a series of boulders guaranteed to knock off a rear wheel.

The hill was a granite cliff that helped rally drivers learn to fly. It was in the middle of another high speed straight. A little twist and the car might land off kilter and roll ... and roll ... and roll ... and roll some more. A little farther twist and the car might land in the crowd of rally fans. It's happened.

Too far a flight and the car has a good chance of striking nose first and going end over end over end over end ... with maybe a full twist in there somewhere. Sometimes the twist was half way and the car struck sideways ... and rolled.

The road in front of our house made a sharp right ... the 10 foot tall three foot thick hedge ate cars and spit them out ... usually upside down. Very springy hedge.

Competition was tough: Skoda, VW, Citroen, Peugeot, Ford, BMW Jaguar, Kia, Honda, Nissan, Porsche, Laaka, Volvo, Saab, Fiat, Lancia, Vauxhall, Liger, Simca, Daewoo, Bentley, Geely and Holden all had three or four factory sponsored teams with four hundred thousand dollar cars, support teams with lorries and there were independents with new cars.

Then came the regular F-Cup racers, dealer sponsored teams and backyard mechanic built cars, daddy hobbies, and old restored racers.

After those ... which numbered in the hundreds, there were the rally trucks ... lorries with empty van bodies ... every truck manufacturer in Asia and Europe ran at least two teams.

The Rally runs over a week. With cars leaving the start in Helsinki and racing to The Lakes it still takes 48 hours to start them all. The route is run in the dark and the daylight. After they finish in Kuopio they rally between there and Vehmersalmi.

They race the logging, farming and vacation home roads in 8 and 12 kilometer spurts. All the little villages and hamlets have a shot at the racers running through their streets.

The idea used to be that the drivers tried to come closest to the calculated time it would take to drive the route at 88 kilometers per hour.

Lately, it's all about the speed and drivers try to be the fastest or quickest over a given distance. Sometimes it's impossible to average 88kph ... there are corners that can't be taken at five kph ... making up the time at speeds exceeding 140 kph is almost guaranteed to create some nasty wrecks.

A driver doesn't have to misjudge the edge of the road by very much to roll all the way down to and into the lake. Drivers have drowned.

Now ... the WRC run with a driver and a reader ... but much of the time the F-Cup cars just have a driver ... he's supposed to be a local and knows his way around. That's how I learned ... run the roads ... all hours of the day and night ... daddy had money ... I had money. I had money so I had girls ... there's nothing like fast cars and handsome boys to make a girl need dry panties.

When I was the other David Valmaat...