Roll Over Beethoven - Sea Lake Mallee Rally 2010

(By: Andy Fox)

The Queen’s Birthday Long Weekend rolled around and it was time for Round 4 of the Victorian State Championship. This is one of the favourites on the racing calendar, The Sea Lake Mallee Rally.

4 million years ago when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, a whole bunch of crazy old schoolers use to tack weld together buggies made for anything you can get your hands on, for this evolved the Beam cars, no not like the Jim Beam, but a car with a beam front axle.

These crazy off roaders used to come in numbers like never seen since. There were 200 entrants going crazy all night on the Stones Green Ginger and adrenalin all day. These days everybody passes the fibre rather than a beer and the numbers have dwindled, there are not so many people burning cars and the quality of the field has massively improved from the old days.

Move forward 4 million years…..

Sea Lake was one of the first races we did when getting into the sport. So it holds a place near and dear to our hearts. A bit like your first boy/girlfriend…well maybe?

The track is a mix of boggy sand, a salt lake, hard gravel and clay based roads including bull dust (which is usually confined to the Pits and the ‘Could Have Been Champions’ Hall of Fame). The track has a mix of tight, twisty and fast flowing sections and the favourite is the last 15 kms of the 85 km track. We usually completed between 160-190kmh. Really cool stuff……

We lined up for Prologue (Qualifying) and got a good start. Some days you are on the money and today my head was somewhere else.

We struggled in the soft stuff and mucked up a couple of corners costing us momentum and buzzed the engine. The second half of the 12 km Qualifying Track worked better for us so we worked hard to make up some time.

We ranked 56 out of 70 cars, which is about 15 places lower than we did the year before.

Sunday is a long day of 360 km and usually there is a huge amount of carnage, so really we were not that worried.

Sunday/Race Day

We were lined up early and ready to go, headspace sorted and keen to get rolling and put the poor Qualifying behind us.

The flag dropped and we had a great drag with a guy in a Super 1650 Buggy. We won the whole shot and started to work out the rhythm in the car.

Working hard we pulled about 700 metres on the other guy….we struggled with horsepower in the sandy section. We were in between 2nd and 3rd gear, 2nd was too short and 3rd too tall…..the other issue we faced was the ruts for the other cars were thinner than the wheel base of the Patrol. So all the truck wanted to do was jump out of the ruts…crazy stuff at 130kmh….

15 minutes into the race disaster struck. The soft sand and the ruts had cost us the space we had made up on the Buggy guys and as they were not in our Class, we decided to move over…..

A silly judgement/mistake ended up with the Patrol on its side. The rear wheels stayed in the rut and the fronts got bogged in the soft stuff on the side of the road. As we rolled over all I could see was the rest of the race and the Series falling away.

It’s here where the seriousness of the sport is reinforced…a small judgement error can cost a lot. The same day there were 5 other rollovers. 2 guys were air lifted to hospital after end for ending their Patrol. All other incidents were relatively minor. By the way, if you’re interested, the guys that went to hospital are okay.

After it took 2 x Toyotas to right the Nissan we inspected the damage, a few pushed in panels, the D pillar and the back door were smashed in from the guy behind hitting me. The engine mount was ripped apart and the inlet was torn from the throttle body. So that effectively finished the rest of the race.

We would sincerely like to say thankyou to the support of the Recovery Team, who did an awesome job getting us on our wheels again and the others that gave us support after the crash. The recovery guys are the unsung heroes, working for free so that we can go racing…and they do a brilliant job…More power to you guys!!!!

Our next event is Naracoorte in South Australia for the Glenroy Plains Produce Enduro.