Day 3: Significant improvement on an incredibly intense day
On the last day of the event, we were going to be travelling from Montreal to St-Hyacinthe, looping around our destination and heading back to the start/finish line. And we’d completely changed our method of calculation.
Instead of maintaining an average speed based on the Porsche Cayenne’s onboard computer, we found a way to match the required arrival time to within a second no matter where we were.
In the cockpit, Marc-Andre (copilot) told Olivier (driver) when we needed to arrive at the next station and how many kilometres we needed to cover to get there, and provided a countdown while staying on the alert to avoid a costly and counterproductive detour. Olivier had to keep an eye on fuel consumption, remember where to turn and get us to where we were going on time.
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| Photo: Auto123.com |
If we thought Saturday was tough, Sunday was 20 times worse. Physically, we had to deal with a constant downpour and bitter cold – can you say depressing fall weather?
Our new approach bore some pretty decent fruit, though. Instead of showing up 7 minutes early or late like the day before, we were much more on time. We hit the waypoints with a lot more regularity, sometimes only 11 seconds late.
Back in Montreal, we refuelled again (and again pissed off the hapless attendant), and went for the final weighing.
Our 4,632 penalty points placed us 18th out of a field of 19, while the 8.2 L/100 km sipped on average by the Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid during the weekend ensured us a sweet 11th place finish.
So, we came in 15th overall for our first rally experience and managed to surprise quite a few people who honestly thought our ungainly 380 hp SUV wouldn’t stand a chance.