Chapter 10

Strangers in the Night: 10.

Before the reader gets up in arms, a discussion between the military and David had determined that his Earth was about 70 years behind in weapons development and there was nothing David could tell them in the way of improvements.

I will admit it was a simplified junior class Rally. The juniors ran a set of stages before the pros ran them. There was a method to the madness, though. The juniors cleaned the loose gravel off the roads.

The first stage wasn't really fair because it was in our home fields and woodlots.

Rikiina won.

Of course she did; she had been driving my old rear wheel drive Volvo 122 Amazon all over the home trails and roads. Where the pros ran the stages in sets of one, two or three stages a day, the juniors ran 8 stages on Saturday including one night loop.

The pros ran times of 10 or 12 minutes. The juniors ran the same stages in 20 ... or 30.

The pros had times within seconds of each other. The juniors were within minutes. Except Rikiina; Riki's times driving the Subaru on all the stages were within 30 seconds of the pros ... except for the first stage. The pros ran times 30 seconds slower. She was instantly offered a car by Team Audi ... fifteen years old and a German team offered her one hundred thousand dollars a year to drive one of their Audi Quattros.

She turned them down.

"I like the Subaru ... its all time four wheel drive, and 300 horsepower is something I can drive while I think about what's ahead. That monster B car of yours is too fast for safety. I'm fifteen years old ... I'd like to make that 20."

Subaru offered assistance in the way of parts and a limited tech support and she took that. We still had to buy the car if she destroyed my old one.

One of the things my old brain had done before the switch was to have glas body parts built that featured ducting to the brakes, dams for the radiator and extra lights in a hood mount for the night races.

I guess my former occupant was an artist of sorts because the molds for the new body parts made the car much wider ... that allowed the use of longer axleshafts for the independent rear end and longer constant velocity shafts for the steering. The lengthened shafts produced a nearly 12 inch wider wheel track. This also meant that the original interior sheet metal didn't need deeper wheel wells to accommodate the 50r x 16 Pirelli rally only tires.

The 300 hp twin overhead cam turbocharged inter cooled 2.1 liter flat four was factory supplied as long as Riki sent the 150 hp single overhead cam stock engine to a local Subaru dealership.

Pretty nice digs for a privateer.

The basic car with the rally improvements cost in the vicinity of two million Krona or two hundred fifty thousand US dollars. That's a lot ... but the old David had inherited the Volvos and learned on them. A PV544, a 122 Amazon and a 240 were all cars that Dal either built or had built at Valmaat. A couple of rather nasty crashes and the board of directors decided that he was too valuable an asset to be risking life and limb playing in the pebbles with motorcars.