We hitch to Cache Creek and wait at the junction for another ride to Kamloops.  An International Travel-all, full of "first peoples" offered us space in the back and we accepted, reluctantly.  This group was already internally warmed by what they referred to as "one-eyed-hooch", evidently because one could only see out of one eye after imbibing the stuff.  I curled up in the back, hugging the spare tire, declined the hooch and was scared to death all the way to Kamloops, seeing the guardrail up close on either side of the truck from time to time.  Finally at Kamloops, we check in at the headquarters hotel, can't get the driveline fixed so we ride the bus to Seattle, rent a truck and car-trailer and drive back to recover the car.  The Thunderbird trip didn't seem to phase Dusty so we went on more rallies.  We ran other rallies as a team and then split into two teams.  My soon-to-be wife became my navigator.

We were teamed with Mark Nolte of Seattle, to help out on the Service Crew for Puget Sound Sports Car Club.  Someone's Chevy Suburban was packed with spare parts, fuel cans, jack stands, tools and us.  The roof was covered with several sizes of wheel/tire combinations. 

Minus 40° was the high temperature for the trip to the BC Interior and Williams Lake.  The skies were bright blue and your breath froze only inches from your face.  Seattle entries were fairly high and attrition so far was low.  We had to take the battery out of the Suburban and keep it warm in the motel at Williams Lake, so the truck would start the next day!

Day Two dawned bright and colder yet!  Teams were towing cars up and down the streets to try to start cold motors.  Several Saab drivers found towing more of a sleigh ride as with the front wheels digging studs into the street but not turning easily, the steering was questionable at best.

Records and recollections for '72 are sketchy
Anyone have any anecdotes to add to the detail here?
Nolte?  Chandler?  Johnson?  Rodgers?  Brooks?  Richards?  Ried?
Hines?  Burgess?  BC "veterans"?
Send info to ronsorem@hotmail.com
Or to the webmaster at  www.rallybc.com
Re: Thunderbird Archives

 Ron and Paul Lychako took the 1973 Opel Ascona 1900 sedan to Canada representing MORE Opel Rallye Team (one of three cars). .  MORE was a parts importer and service tuner for OPEL in the USA, with parts generally supplied by Buick/GM in Europe and Steinmetz Gmbh, a German race and rally tuner.   This little sedan had a 1900cc motor with twin Weber 40-DCOE carbs, rally suspension, and was pretty darned quick. It looked a lot like Opel's FIA rally cars driven by Walter Smolej for Irmscher Germany, Ari Vatanen of Finland, Tony Pond in England, and Walter Rohrl of Germany, winning the 1973 Czech, the '73 Danube, and the '73 Munich-Vienna-Budapest Rally.

 We left campus, flagged off by the Deputy Mayor, and ran from Vancouver to Hope on a transit, then over the Hope-Princeton mountain passes.  We turned north into the Tulameen valley on dry roads and over the ridge into Merritt.

We were doing all right as part of a large contingent from Puget Sound Sports Car Club and another from Rainier Auto Sports Club, both Seattle based.  The dry roads turned to snow covered and then to deeper snow claiming a couple of cars.  Somewhere late in the first night the snow began falling in record volume, putting six inches or more of new powder on top of an existing base.  We were pushing through bumper deep snow along a creek bed and over several bridges.  We made all the bridges, others did not.  We came out of this valley to a main highway, probably Merritt to Kamloops.  A short transit and we are all stacked up alongside the road waiting our time into the hills again.

 A couple of cars start out but are gone only a short time when they come back to the highway.  They said they were having car trouble.  The rest of the rally tried to traverse the deep snow; most failed.  I had been watching the voltmeter steadily drop so I had killed the rear-window defroster to try to keep the battery charging and use the driving lights.  We lost traction and momentum on one very deep snow hill climb and as I couldn't see out the back, I managed to plant us in a ditch as I backed up for another run at the hill.  Paul and I managed to put on chains while in the ditch, shovel and push our way back onto the road, and ready everything for another assault when headlights came our way. Back down the mountain.  The report was the road was "impassable".  We turned around, deciding to follow the crowd rather than be snowbound in BC, in a blizzard.  On the way out traffic stopped because of an extraction by "come-along".  A rally car was in the creek bed-the tree on the other side of the road used for an anchor.  The car was coming back to the road nicely but we had to wait.

 Back out on the main road, the locals led us around the mountain, to where there should have been a control.  We were so late the control left!  We found later that we had all been time-barred, out of the rally, no discussion, no recourse, "force majeure".  To be fair, there were a couple of Canadian cars in our bunch, but at the time we were certain of a conspiracy against the cars from the States.

 The two cars that started and quickly came back?  They had skirted the mountain, driven backwards past our missing control, turned around, entered the control from the right direction and been timed in-with pretty low scores!  These two and some later followers of the same ploy were the only finishers.  Local knowledge helps.

 For years I thought these two were Randy Black in the Datsun 510SSS and Sven Halle in the Datsun 240Z.  On T-Bird 2001 I found someone else who knew this story and confirmed Randy Black and Tom Burgess of BC.  Sven having stuffed before this.  It seems Burgess had overheard checkpoint crews discussing the route at a restaurant a few days before the rally-He surmised the location and recognized a detour opportunity when they hit the deep snow.  Rally Improv at its best.

 First and second place were both Scandinavians in Renault 8 Gordinis.  Black and Burgess finished tenth.  Other Seattle-area drivers in our same plight were Rod Johnson, Jerry Hines, and Bob Chandler.  46 started, 33 checked into the finish, only 22 were credited as finishers.

More Opel later hired second place driver, Taisto Heinonen, to drive an Opel Manta 1.9 in the Olympus and in the FIA Press-On-Regardless 1973