My First Rally

My First Rally There I was on a July morning (courtesy of Uriah Heep), pushing my first car sideways through the first corner of my very first rally, some few hundred yards from the start, when the smoke filled the cockpit. A quick glance at the gauges discovered an overheating engine. My co-pilot, an old buddy of mine Alex and I looked at each other in disbelief, pissed and on the verge of laughing. Thank God this was a semi pro rally, a huge gathering of Yugoslav pros and amateurs in Mostar, Bosnia, some six hours away, and we had the entire day to get there without a time penalty. Fast forwarding, I woke up my pal and fellow racer Bob Milovanovic, a future Yugoslav and Balkan rally champion. One of the very few things that Bob hated was to get up at 8 am. We changed the head gasket within two hours, committing a few cardinal sins of auto mechanics in the process, like departing a hot engine head from the block. Somewhere in the outskirts of Belgrade, with no traffic around, I approached a long, curving tunnel full speed, comfortably wearing sunglasses. That was the first and the last time I’ve ever raced with sunglasses on. Once inside, I couldn’t see a damn thing, if the road curves to the right or to the left, and since the switches were in the middle of the dashboard, like in Minis, Alex went for the lights and turned turn on the vipers. That not helping much, with the corner of my eyes I caught something approaching my side window: the left side of the speeding tunnel was into my face. I snapped the steering wheel and the Fiat went sideways through the darkness. At that point my pride dissipated, as I hit the brakes hard, sending us into a spin. As soon as the monster stopped we ran out to determine the damage, not a single scratch, when a sharp noise rose from the pitch dark, growing louder and louder. Back inside in a jiffy, I hit the throttle to point the car into right lane, and a local bus whistled by doing some 60 mph. On the road again and back to business, leaving the city and its challenges, Alex and I enjoyed a quiet hour of maniacal zigzagging down the two-laner, passing cars, trucks, and horse carriages, and God knows what else, when the left rear rubber joint went into pieces. The good news was that I had the spare part, I came prepared! Twenty minutes later, and the all overtaken traffic (including one crawling carriage) passing us to return the favor, we were off and running. The bad news came later when the very new joint gave up. This time Alex had to hitchhike to the nearest town and back, and another two hours were lost to eternity. Now the fun was over, the schedule tightened, but we were still within the reach of 8pm deadline. Noticing the distant lights of Mostar I was about to make a comment about being lucky, when the throttle cable broke. By the time we sneaked into the time control, ashamed and battered, everybody else, i.e. some two thousand or so crews, were digesting a hot meal and cracking jokes. We pulled into the darkest corner and went to sleep. The next morning brought the only competitive event of the rally, the slalom. I slid around cones but managed to stall the engine backing up into a slot, finishing with total time of 24 seconds. The reigning Yugoslav champion, Filipovic, came in second, with the time of 27 seconds.