Two wheels is enough

Having made a complete balls up of it last year, we decided to have another go.  The lessons we learn from last year were, make sure that we have the right road book  holder, and an adjustable trip on the speedo, the right tyres and to be a lot fitter. The alto is possibly the hardest rally in Europe.  With daily mileage being in the region of 300 km over a mountainous region with a 95% being off-road you can imagine the difficulties.  Although they have a hard or soft route even the soft route is hard.

Fitness is very very important.  On the Wednesday, which was the hottest day, the dropout rate was horrendous. The speedo problem was sorted with the unit from a company called Trail Tech .  Called the ” vector” it has an adjustable trip facility which can be operated from pushbuttons on the handlebar.  This is extremely important as when following the road book the distances are quite exact.  You might be travelling down a dirt track, whilst looking for a track to the left at 103.03 km.  If at the same time you are travelling, you are trying to work out the difference between what your speedo actually says and what it should say, it can be very distracting.  To give you a good example, imagine that at 85.4 km you take the right-hand fork, you then have to turn left 160 m later.  Perhaps you might be travelling too fast and you’ve overshot the left-hand turn.  By the time you get back to where you should be your total trip might be reading 86.2 km.  You now have to reach the next point on the road book remembering that you are over reading by .46 km.  If five or 10 km later you make a similar mistake the amount you have to remember will change.  I can guarantee, having experienced this last year, that by lunchtime, your brain will be leaking out of your ears.  This problem can be sorted with an adjustable trip.  The experts use instruments that are called,ICO’s or IMO’s. the major difference between my adjustable trip and them is that they can operate off the differentials not the total trip.  That is to say instead of working off the total, you can work of the difference between the last waypoint and the next.  You then zero the trip as you pass over the waypoint, this means any errors are very small and can safely be ignored.  It is a much quicker system. The other major difference between my adjustable Speedo and the professional systems is cost, about £200.As I only use the adjustable facility once a year, the extra cost would be a waste. The road book  problem was sorted with a unit from Acerbis.  It is a manual unit which has a mounting for the cross brace on the handlebars.  I decided to fabricate some aluminium brackets to hold them and the speed in plain sight.  The experts use an electrically operated road book.  This operates off the bikes battery and can be an advanced and rewound from switchgear mounted on the handlebar.  This is a very useful feature and I may invest in one for next year. here are some pictures from the DVD I received from the organisers.

this is me on Friday on one of the hard sections Here is a link to a Dutch competitor’s  picture site http://picasaweb.google.nl/niek.ronde/2009AltoTuria?authkey=Gv1sRgCOuqv8XooeGKNw#