Rally Rewind - EMC Kabale Rally 2016 : Part 4 – Action CS 1-3

33 cars passed pre-event technical checks at Stabex petrol station along the Kabale-Mbarara highway and while almost 1 in 4 of the entrants had cancelled their participation, this did not dilute the competition and quality at the top end of the start list.  Following the results of round1 in Mbarara – Ronald Ssebuguzi/Ssenyange would be first car on the road followed by Christakis Fitidis/Nzamwita and Godfrey Lubega/Justin Mungoma who were the only 3 among the top 5 finishers to enter this rally.   The rest would then fall in according to seeding criteria: Arthur Blick/Unissan, Jas Mangat/J Kamya, Duncan Mubiru/Bashir Mbogo, Omar Mayanja/Ernest, Desh Kananura/Moses Matovu, 

The late risers would have missed the first loop of 3 stages totalling 42 kms as these had been completed before breakfast utensils had been cleared out at the White horse inn. And perhaps Nothing says “without much ado” in Uganda rallying like driving out of Rally HQ and arriving at the start of your first stage before the next car is flagged off behind you.

Not entirely surprising Mangat/Kamya drew first blood by winning the first pass over Bunyonyi in 7.22. Desh/Matovu did not wait to show home-ground advantage by posting second fastest and only 4s slower.  The two were followed by Duncan Mubiru who was 3^rd fastest on his very first stage in the new car – and Hassan Alwi a close 4^th, Omar Mayanja a distant 5^th and Arthur Blick in 6^th.  The competition would become more intense in the long Kitagata stage where Desh would equal Jas stage winning time of 20:05.  Duncan and Hassan were not too far off in 3^rd and 4^th while Arthur had beaten Omar by a slim margin of 5s to emerge 5^th on the stage.  

A bigger surprise would be in the super special where the form book would be overturned with Hassan Alwi going fastest followed by Geoffrey Nsamba and Musa Kabega.  Hassan’s fellow rookie and erstwhile rival in Mbarara Rauf Essa had retired in Bunyonyi  where he rested his Evo X upside down over a latrine adjacent to the FF.  The overall standings for the top 6 would remain the same with only Arthur Blick taking 5^th from Omar.  Still, there was tight competition between drivers with only 4s between Jas and Desh, 6s between Duncan and Hassan, 9s between Arthur and Omar while there was less than 20s between Sebuguzi,  Fitidis, Pole Pole and Nsamba rounding off the top 10.  
Continues in Part 5 - Action CS 4-6

Rally Rewind - EMC Kabale Rally 2016 : Part 2 - The Stages

Cs1/4 Bunyonyi – 12 kms – This stage finishes at the Lake Bunyonyi resort but does not provide scenic views of the lake, that bragging right belongs to another stage. This stage runs along the lower slopes overlooking Kabale town, on wide and fairly straight roads.  Not surprisingly the fastest stage of the rally.  It finishes with a super steep downhill and fast brows that bring you back into town along the Kisoro road.

Cs2/5/9 Kitagata – 27 kms -  A long liaison section along the Kisoro road precedes this stage and takes us deeper and higher into the hills.  It has very narrow, tight, rough and un-protected hairpin bends as you spiral up the hills, a bit rough on the way up through lumberjack territory for about 14kms. The road opens and maintains altitude for about 4 kms before a rollercoaster descent on wide, smooth, rounder medium speed bends to the FF which is itself near the start.

Cs3/6/8 Stadium – 1.5kms – This is a spectator special stage, on a grass track in the Kabale town stadium right in the centre of town.  Perhaps because the organisers figured you can catch all the action from the adjacent slopes and without setting foot inside the arena, they decided against a gate charge. How do you make a pitch of 100m length into a stage more than 1 km long. Answer – you create 15 hairpins 

Cs7/10 Katuna 29 kms – a 20 km drive south takes you to katuna border post, thru the border gates and west thru the Katuna village. It starts in low lying areas and ascends gently at first and then sharply thru narrow, stony cliff hanger hairpin bends as it makes its way towards Lake Bunyonyi. Towards the end, it joins the Bunyonyi stage.   

Cs8 Heisesero – 27 kms – stage starts at Heisesero on the Kisoro road and on the northern most tip of the Lake Bunyonyi, the only point where the highway touches the lake.  You can actually touch the water here and because of the sharp bends in the terrain the lake looks like a pond at this point.  The start is very similar to Kitagata – very narrow, rough, tight hairpin bends, and no barriers, the difference being drops into the water as opposed to fertile gardens – within 700m you wake up to the reality that if you step off the road and there isn’t much to stop you, you are ending up in the deepest lake in the world.  It is a scary ascent when the road is say 50m off the level of the lake.  It is suicidal when the road climbs to maybe 200m above lake level, a point where you can mistake the little islands on the lake for fishing boats. The entire stage traces about half of the eastern bank of the lake. Towards the end it leaves the lake and descends gently then sharply on very slippery red earth fertile soils towards Bubare on the Kisoro road.

Rugarama – This stage is very similar to Heisesero and Kitagata, only steeper.  It also adds cracks in the narrow pavement and because it was raining, there was no telling if the pavement would get washed away during the rally.  It was cancelled.  

It was obvious after the recce that this was going to be the championships toughest. But even before it began, we would get premonitions of things to come

Look out for Part 3: Premonitions/Weird moments and Part 4 for the Entry List

Rally Rewind - EMC Kabale Rally 2016 : Part 1 - The Anticipation

While the prospect of a rally in Kabale was widely welcomed, there was some controversy surrounding it’s organisation.  For starters it didn’t make sense that the Jinja based Eastern Motor Club was organising a rally all the way West in Kabale.  Secondly the original date of the rally on Easter weekend was sharing a date with another motor cross event in Kampala - something that the sporting calendar planners had hitherto said was not allowed, however the long weekend would see the rally run on Good Friday and Saturday and leave Sunday for traveling.  At the last minute the rally was moved to a later date which did not go down well with many competitors who had prepared and would be unduly inconvenienced by the change.   The organisers cited a health scare in the area. 

Kabale was nouveau:

The itinerary was different. In sharp contrast to normal Uganda rallies where we spend the Saturday morning and afternoon pulling grass out of the super special grounds because we only cover less than 5 kms the entire day, for kabale, Saturday was big business.  By 9 am we were already in the stages proper and by 10 30 am we had completed the first service stop after the first loop of 3 stages totaling 42 kms and 25%  of the rally distance . By the time we went to bed on Saturday, we would have covered a whopping 110 kms of competitive stages with more stages to come on Sunday.

Other than the Lubiri palace super special, we had never had a super special bang in the middle of and along the high street of a major town.  The super special was super accessible not just because it was free entry but also because of the elevated landscapes surrounding it, you could catch the action without entering the stadium.

The stages were very different from anything we were used to.  We had expected winding roads and power sapping altitude but nothing like what we actually encountered.  We had narrow, rough and unimaginably tucked into the terrain, extremely tight and therefore slow sections. I don’t remember anyone complaining after the power sapped out by the altitude as the last thing you needed was a barking bronco on those unbridled cliff hangers.  We also had stages running along the highest and deepest lake in the world – scenic views if you forget the insanity that it required to drive it.  

Continues in Part 2: The Stages

2017 MMC Lato Milk rally, Mbarara

This time last week it was impossible to imagine we would be here this week as not just finishers but  the celebrated winners of the first round of the Uganda national rally championship, the Lato milk sponsored and Mbarara-based event.  I was down with the worst case of Man flu which I had battled for 2 weeks.  I was also dealing with a bereavement in the family (RIP Hajat Anisha).  Much was uncertain and what little was, did not go according to plan.

We had planned to map and install a new ECU that would give us Bang-Bang, raise the power produced by the engine and the noise that gets the fans hearts racing.  This did not happen as the tuner we had booked changed plans.  We had also imported new tyres and suspension parts but again these had arrived in the country when we had not done any pre-customs clearance work and so were not with us by the time we loaded up to go to Mbarara.  I had only done 50% of the recce and my health was improving ever so slowly i was not sure I would be able to do more than 50% of the actual rally.

When the ceremonies for the start of the event were underway there was no sign of rain but by the time the convoy of rally cars entered the Kakyeka stadium, venue for the super special stage, clouds had gathered and a light drizzle had commenced.  By the time the first car took to the stage, a full blown storm was in session.  The start list had 40 cars and although we were seeded 9th, the super special stage would run in reverse order meaning we had the benefit of seeing other drivers navigating the grass and mud bath that the track had become.

When our turn came, we followed the approach we had decided before the rally, which was conservative.  All too often in the season before we had taken an aggressive start and ended up losing too much time or even a broken car and some times both. On this occasion we would end the day in 7th overall and only 16 seconds adrift of rally favourite, three-time and defending national rally champion Jas Mangat.  However, Jas was only in 3rd overall behind Duncan Mubiru in second and Kuku Ranjit overnight rally leader.  Sebuguzi Ronald had picked a 5 minute penalty for missing a run due to a broken fan belt.  Our car (Edna) was in tip-top condition and my spirits were up despite nursing a headache I had carried over from 2 days before.  I popped a pill and retired early determined to see off the headache.

By morning the headache was gone.  I could hear a light buzz outside my room at the Lake View Resort and when I pulled the curtain I could see it was raining  and apparently had done so half the night.  If the rain we had seen in the town the day before and this morning had also pounded the stages, we were in for a shocker - seeing as the recce had been completed in bone dry conditions.  I then prayed that the rain would stop by rally start so that even if we the road was wet, we would have clear visibility at the very least.  That prayer was not answered.  The rain would fall and even increase pace from the moment we entered the last stage up until the start of the very last stage. The upside of this was that for me who had done only 50% of the recce, the rain was in fact an equalising factor, these stages would look jus as strange to those who had gone thru them twice or even four times.

The start order had Jas Mangat, Hassan Alwi, Arthur Blick Jr, Christakis Fitidis, Ronald Ssebuguzi, Godfrey Lubega, Yasin Nasser, Duncan Mubiru, Omar Mayanja and Kuku Ranjit as the top ten and for the main leg we would be attacking the stages in that order.  I lowered my tire pressure and wished I had a suspension setup for the wet but I didn't.  Luckily my heater blower works like new - the benefit of buying a car from a winter nation.  I had clear vision, in the circumstances, considering the sky was completely black and visibility was down to a couple hundred meters.

A few kms into cs2 (first of day2) the Kakoba - Sanga 40km stage, we encountered Yasin Nasser fresh from a roll on a slippy and narrow downhill, we slowed not just to check both drivers were ok but also because there was not much space to negotiate thru.  A message had been delivered to us to watch  our step.  After about 15km the stage touches Biharwe town and a hairpin right connects us to the road to Sanga thru cow country.  For another 10 or so km the road is wide and smooth and interspersed with high speed jumps and holes before it suddenly switches back to cow country road, red and black earth and single lanes lined with trees, tree stumps and anthills.  The change or lets say loss or complete degeneration of grip for this last section is impossible to imagine.  Every driver reported suspected differential failure at the end which only shows it was simply the road treating everyone the same.  We soldiered thru it and it was only the last 2 km that caught us when we spun and lost about 30 seconds trying to get the car to face in the correct direction again.  From there we tiptoed to the end of the stage where we were surprised to clock the 3rd fastest time behind Jas and Hassan and ahead of Duncan, Sebuguzi and Arthur Blick Jr.  Jas had taken the lead, followed by Hassan with Duncan in third but only 5 seconds ahead of us in 4th.

In service at Sanga we found a broken rear stabiliser bar which we eliminated entirely and a rear left damper which we replaced.  Next up were two stages to be done together before the next service stop.  The first and toughest (at least during the recce) was the 30km Sanga-Ahakyapa stage which starts with a blast of 12km of dead straight ascents and descents, followed by 2km of grave deep trenches, 8 kms of medium trenches and holes and finishes with about 8kms of near dead straight ascents and descents.  We were now running 8th on the road with all cars apart from Yasin Nasser ahead of us still running and in the original start order.  On the stage, the grip was not bad and the only surprise was finding that practically all the anthills had been removed (but due to poor visibility you would only confirm this after slowing down for them).

We cleared the stage with a bulged and about to blow tyre in 21 minutes exactly, and 4th fastest behind  Sebuguzi, Duncan and Jas with the first 2 being a whopping 120 and 85 seconds respectively faster.  Jas was only 14 s faster on this stage and had lost the overall lead of the rally to Duncan Mubiru, Hassan was in 3rd and we were holding steady in 4th.  Sebuguzi was smarting from a 5 minute penalty the night before when he did not complete the super special stage but was now firmly back in the top 10 and hunting. Duncan had also overtaken Lubega in the stage and Sebuguzi had overtaken Fitidis.  For the next stage, Lubega would request that Duncan runs ahead of him and we would now run behind Lubega.

The second of the two stages was the 12km Akageti-Ahakyapa  stage which runs thru Lake Mburo National park.  It starts out on smooth wide and winding roads before branching off into cow country where it finishes on black soil and in grip conditions worse than we had seen on cs2.  We would complete this stage 3rd fastest behind Jas and Duncan and reduce our gap to Hassan in 3rd to just 9 seconds.  Jas would also retake the lead from Duncan and take a slender 5 second advantage into the next stage whil

e Duncan' advantage over Hassan was now 34 seconds.  We checked in to service with no problems to report and I was on the whole much happier with the car.  After service we had another two stages to be run together.  Each of these stages was more than 20 kms and for fear of catching up with Lubega we asked to run on a 4 minute interval behind him.

Cs5 (the fourth of the day) was 20 kms long, starts at Sanga and finishes at Sanga on the side of the kampala-mbarara highway.  Very similar to Akageti-Ahakyapa in character it starts on wide smooth roads before transitioning and finishing in black and clay soils in cow country.  We found Lubega at the FF control of the stage vindicating our decision to run on 4 rather than 3 minutes interval.  We had cleared the stage 4th fastest behind Jas, Hassan and Sebuguzi.  Jas had extended his lead from Duncan to 88 seconds while Hassan was now pressing Duncan from behind by just 6 seconds.  We were holding fort in 4th overall but now 43 seconds behind Hassan but ahead of Arthur Blick Jr while Sebuguzi had now climbed up to 7th overall.

Cs6 starts at Sanga at the same point as Cs3 but goes separate ways at the 12km mark and this time onto winding roads that are a mix between fast wide and narrow-pot-holed roads which were now filled with water.  It is 26 kms long and generally the easiest stage for the day.  Sebuguzi posted another blistering time in this one ahead of us in 2nd fastest, Jas and Hassan in 3rd and 4th.  Duncan lost more than 5 minutes due to overheating and lost his second overall in the provisional classification.  Even without a scratch time, with the falling back of Duncan, Jas had extended his lead to 130 seconds ahead of Hassan in second and Omar in 3rd a further 30s adrift.  Arthur Blick Jr was 4th but now dangerously in the bull's eye of a hard charging Sebuguzi.  We checked into service with broken front right damper and a bent right side rack end which caused our active center diff to mal-function during the previous stage and effectively leaving us with two-wheel drive.  We changed both broken parts but were unable to realign and re-calibrate the steering to eliminate the ACD mal-function.  However this is a problem we have driven around so many times before and here we only had one stage to go.

The final stage is 27 km long and starts at Kamatarisi near Biharwe, winds very slowly thru the kamatarisi village for about 4 kms before joining the wide road from BIiharwe near the Rushozi hairpin (at the coca cola sign) and takes us back to Kyamugorani on familiar wide and fast roads.  My team did not reveal that we were only 30s behind Hassan and I was under strict instructions to maintain pace (as opposed to raising it to attack 2nd place), we were in 3rd place and we would remain there if we got to the finish safely.  Perhaps Hassan did not know this or perhaps the conditions were just too treacherous on the first 3kms of the stage where we hit a tree stump that luckily for us only bent the sump guard and took out pieces of the body work.  This same tree stump or anthill (no one really knows) had minutes before taken out Arthur Blick Jr and Hassan with similar suspension damage.  We would now take 2nd place if we could navigate safely to the end.  We did not see the leading car of Jas Mangat at the Rushozi junction.  We slowed considerably and just drove till the end of the stage and to the finish point at Lake View Resort.  It was here that we discovered that Jas had not emerged from the stage and we had won the rally OVERALL!!!  It's really true what they say, 50% of success is showing up.

Duncan had also lost more time in the stage and now Sebuguzi was in 2nd overall, Duncan third, FItidis 4th and Byona 5th.  Arthur Blick Jr emerged from the stage after doing repairs for more than an hour to finish 17th overall.  The top ten was completed by Musa Kabega, Godfrey Lubega, Kuku Ranjit, Fred Busulwa and Dr Ashraf.   

This is yet another event that reinforces our peculiar strength in the wet and muddy conditions.  But even as we won, the real gladiators of these conditions are the thousands of fans who took to the stages and weathered the storm to see us thru.  Our newly installed V-powered engine also ran faultlessly in the cold and wet conditions.  We owe this win to our sponsoring partners Vivo Energy, Guvnor Entertainment and Nippon Plant and Equipment hire as well as to each member of the CleanLines Racing Team - Hussein Mukuye, Paul Ekudu, Vincent Matovu, Kasozi, Ipsum, and Ivan.  We now lead the 2017 championship with 100 points, we shall be running higher in the start order meaning more visibility for our fans and partners.  Look out for the surprises that we shall unveil in Kabale on the weekend of March 3-5th.

How to drive a 6 speed FWD Normally aspirated car - coming from a 5 speed 4WD Turbo charged one

1. Take off /Launch - not important, will only result in wheel spin and will cost drive shafts. Rev lightly and do not exceed the mid range, dump the clutch, once the wheel spin subsides, the revs drop but then quickly pick up.  Shift to second once you get past the mid-range
2. Gear shifts - You have to use the entire rev range ie up to the red line if you are really pushing.  Best if you install a shift light because it becomes a problem keeping your eyes on both the road and the rev counter
3. Pace noting system and attendant driving - best to use a gear based system.  coming from a descriptive system of notes to gear numbers is not so hard.  Coming from a 5 speed to a 6 speed transmission is a bigger problem. Best to ignore no.6 as it is too weak anyway and only works on very long stretches.  So I stick to the descriptive system and drive the 5 gears as I would a 5 speed.  In any case given that every hesitation on power results in a significant drop in revs and power, it is better to fetch a lower gear that then keeps the revs up
4. Find a way of disabling ABS without disrupting the speed metering system.  I had to do the first rally with ABS on because I wanted to keep an eye on the speed.
5. Use the handbrake only on very slow and sharp corners.  You can still get away with deceleration drifts, left foot braking, scandinavian flicks.  it just feels as if every time you touch handbrake, while the car turns in easier, it just feels like it takes a while to overcome the inertia and inevitably results in more than desirable wheel spin at the front before the car starts accelerating again.
6. After long straights, brake late and use the gears to avoid locking up the wheels and slipping.

2010 KCB POAUR - winners and losers

The 2010 Edition of the KCB Pearl of Africa Rally – Winners and losers

Though it looks like the final result of last weekend’s KCB Pearl of Africa rally was taken out of my script (top 10 to watch), there were still a lot of revelations even for the seer in me. As it turned out, this rally could have been won by any of 3 people considering that a single puncture could have snatched the lead from event winner Jamie White. You also have to go back more than a few years to when podium finishers were separated by a couple of minutes. You probably have to go back many more years to a time when stages were won by 6 different drivers!!!

But such was the competitiveness of the Pearl that while Lwakataka was attacking from the front, Godfrey Lubega was attacking from the back to crown himself the King of Kiwoko – a stage he won both times it was run. Mark you, this Lubega (no relation to Charles) is only in his second season of competition. It is only mean people who say “you have all done well but there can only be one winner!” – for me, these are the winners:

Jamie White – For taking another basketful of ARC points and winning the rally outright even when he did not have to – following the retirement and poor luck of Jas Mangat and Giancarlo Davite. But by so doing, he has opened up the possibility of winning the ARC as early as May in Kigali.

Ronald Sebuguzi
Sebuguzi was constantly aware of the steep learning curve he was facing when he took delivery of his new car days to the start of the rally. Being able to exchange stage times and stage wins with arch rival Ponsiano Lwakataka was enough for him. But he got more just for trying and coming very close. At the end of the last competitive section, Lwakataka had beaten him by 7 seconds – before the roof caved in on Lwakataka and handed Sebuguzi a fat go at the 2010 NRC even after skipping the first round and forsaking 100 points when he did not go to Mbarara.

Nasser Mutebi
The dark (and poor cousin) horse of the rally, Nasser drove from the heart and won himself many hearts even before the rally was over. His combination of showmanship and preservation of the car had him up as high as 2nd overall at the mid-point of the rally. Nasser is also in only his second season of competition and was driving one of the older cars in the race. And when all was said and done, his effort handed him the overall lead of the 2010 NRC and a margin of 40 pts ahead of his closest challenger.

But you cannot have winners without losers, who are also many but I will stick to just 2:

Ponsiano Lwakataka
The mafu-mafu driver did all of us proud by sharing stage wins with the continent’s best and who knows what would have happened if he had not had that fatal encounter with cyclists. At the end of the last competitive section, Lwakataka had in fact finished in 2nd overall but failed to get his car to the ceremonial finish. And just like that he forfeited his claim on the podium but most importantly – dived from first on the 2010 NRC standings to an iffy 4th place – 80 pts shy of the lead. Lwakataka is also a loser for failing to challenge the people that had handed him a capital punishment (disqualification) when he completed all competitive stages even as drivers like Charles Muhangi and Susan Muwonge were given unprecedented chances at finishing with honors after missing stages.

Organiser
At the end of the day, a dark cloud hang over the rally with safety concerns being echoed across all news channels when they should have been hailing the winners, sponsors and fans. While I understand the technicalities of the sport’s regulation and recognise the near certainty that the organizer is indemnified in the event of accidents such as was witnessed last weekend, I believe that when lives are lost people should have some answers. The list of casualties could have been much higher if Godfrey Lubega had lost control of his car just 5 metres behind where he actually did at the Kiwoko TC – ultimately smashing 4 spectator cars and using them as a cushion to save his own life and keep him in the rally.

We also witnessed a skirmish when locals were bullied by safety marshals, marshals were “worked on”, reinforcements were dispatched from the service park to “avenge” the treatment, only for them to receive the same treatment! This is not only an embarrassment to the organizer, it is also an insult to the communities that host our events.

Organiser again
With only 17 starters and 9 real finishers (not counting the 5-minute rule cars) – this year’s edition of the POAUR probably has the record for the smallest number of starters – including the years when there was no sponsorship. For a rally that counts for the NRC, it beats my understanding that cars which normally compete in the NRC were not given a chance to compete and score in that category. This not only disenfranchised those competitors but also short-changed the sponsor. The Kenyan round which was held a month ago and sponsored by the same company, and to which the Ugandan organizers were famously hosted as observers, had more than 40 cars with almost half only competing in the national and 2WD championships.

Star of the Rally - Steven Byaruhanga
Clerk of Course Stephen Byaruhanga rose to the challenge for the second time in difficult times to design a course that had every driver wringing their hands at the thrill it promised. He delivered on that promise and also produced (in my humble opinion) the most hotly contested event in our rallying history. Stages were won by Mangat, White, Lwakataka, Lubega, Sebuguzi and Davite. There were position changes in the top 5 at the end of each stage. Retirements were mostly blamed on high speed off-road excursions rather than holes and trenches in the middle of the road. I pray that Byaruhanga is asked and he accepts (reluctantly of course) to pull this off again next year.