The Gold Digger Rally 2001

July 21^st, 2000
Pemberton, B.C.
Round 3 of the B.C. TSD rally championship

Congratulations to all the competitors who came out to the rally to compete. A special thanks to those who came from our neighbors across the 49^th parallel, I know it was a long trip for most, and we would like to say thanks for coming out and we hope you enjoyed yourselves. For the 2^nd year in a row, Gold Digger has defied expectations. What was expected to be a very smooth rally, with the possibility of rain to make it slippery, was not the case! With the weather being poor over the week between pre-run and the event, the rocky terrain had radically changed from a clean swept course to a rally cross event using rocks as pylons for our 21 car rally! The expected rain turned into an intense fogbank at the higher elevations, and only had rained enough to keep the dust down.

Congratulations to the team of John Fouse and Dennis Wende for finishing first overall with the team of Jamie Thomas and Max Vaysburd taking 2^nd by only a small margin.  Congratulations also go to the team of John McLearen and Mark Fleming for coming in first in novice class and fourth overall! Unfortunately Gold Digger also had its victims. The Honda accord of Jordan Manley and Brendan Maher had suffered clutch failure early in the first regularity. Shortly there afterwards, Andrew Dobric's Trusty Golf had decided to let him know that it was in no mood for rallying this eve and lost the left rear wheel! On to the third regularity, which seems to have been a real tire killer, the Mazda 323 GTX of Alan Perry and John Allen had suffered 2 punctures, 1 of which was the space saver! The Subaru Legacy of Bill Westhead and Paul Westwick also suffered a puncture in this stage and the Suzuki Sidekick of Fred Wiedemann and Shelley Donaldson had to deal with a blowout on route to a checkpoint! The Pathfinder of  Harry Wong also had tire problems when a rear tire turned to spaghetti and nearly disintegrated on the last regularity. We would like to thanks Nokian Tyres for providing us with the Nokian Tyre contingency program, Specialty Subaru for their contributions and Polaris Water for donating water to the competitors and the crews. We would also like to thank all the people who helped and check pointed (or at least tried!) this event would not be possible without their help! We would also like to recognize Ken Kwong and Ben Bradley for doing the triple service of checkpoint, sweep and Steward for this event! They transported Alan and John back to Whistler to repair their tire and then back up150 km on the rally route to their stricken 323 to get them home. By the time they had gotten off the mountain and into Pemberton from getting the car moving again, it was 5:30 pm, with an arrival at home in Vancouver at 9:00pm! (The rally finished at 9:30 am!) That's what I call rally endurance!!!

Please join us for the next TSD rally, The Totem Rally coming up in November on the 24/25. Our next pro rally will be the Pacific Forest Rally on September 15^th. If you can't compete, you can come out to volunteer and get the best views of the rally cars going by, or at least watch and make a weekend of it!