My Vintage Rallies Texas 1000 Thread

[Zedyone_kenobi]

Well it is 6 am and my bother, navigator is taking a shower. We are packed up and ready to hit the 3 stages they have planned for us today. Looks like they have us running 3 stages about 80 miles or so miles, not too bad. Car is running well, but with the last few tweaks I made I am a touch on the rich side. I may make a few tweaks. My inexperience is showing through as we forgot several things we will need. But again, as this is my first TSD style rally, I fully plan to soak up the sights and sounds of ever corner and just have fun. There are some hardcore rally folks here that have a long history of Zero'ing every single stage. I figure I will let them bang it out for first, and we will just try to carry as many smiles through every corner we can.

After the tow in yesterday we got settled in to the hotel. This place was nice. I started to meet some of the Rally participants,and they varied from CEO's to entrepreneurs, to doctors, etc. But EVERYBODY was friendly and loved to talk cars. It was great. I got to sit in a 330 Ferrari GTB, that a guy drove from New Jersy! (He was the CEO of SportClips) . That night as a welcome we got to go see a private WWII plane collection and eat some snacks and drink some wine in his hanger. It was pretty special. WE got a tour around the Glacier Gal, a P38 lightning that was rescued from 235 feet below the ice in a glacier in Greenland. Amazing stuff.

Here are some pics from the day we came in. I left my camera in the car last night, so the airplane pics are out of reach this morning, but they are coming...

[Ben's Z]

You got some expensive company there...

[esmit208]

That looks SOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOOOL!

[Zedyone_kenobi]

We are starting day three of the rally today. Since I do not have access to any form of Internet other than my smartphone I will have to give you the day 1 and day 2 reviews tonight when we get in to the hotel back near San Antonio. But here we are in the middle of day 2 with our good Z friends Mike and Alex Wodopain whose presence haas made this rally more enjoyable than any car or road could ever hope to! Big updates to come tonight!

[Zedyone_kenobi]

Okay we are at the Eilan hotel now and finally have internet again. So lets talk about Day one....

A vintage rally, in essence it seems to be the thing that our cars are made for. Driving at an elevated pace through some of the best roads in the country. We prepare for these things by building our cars into seemingly unbreakable machines with no detail overlooked. We check and recheck all manner of things and then one day we make the call and give a stranger our credit car number for rights to be part of something special. So how did it go?

Well day one. I arrived at the La Cantera Hotel with the Datsun in tow behind me. I wish I could say I towed it with out any issues. But let me be clear, it was totally not a fun experience. I was nervous every mile I was towing it. And for many a mile I wished I had driven it. (insert the 'I told you so' comments right now) But it was a learning experience. So I have that.

I unloaded my car and parked it next to the rest of the rally cars. I was among some very nice company. Vintage and new Ferrais and Porsches. An Aston Martin Vantage V8, a classic mustang, a very cool Triumph TR6, and other exotica of notable heritage. Before I go on let me be perfectly clear about the TEXAS 1000. It is every bit as much about driving cars as it is about people and food. The way the rally is organized is as follows. Every day, the cars are slated to leave between 8 and 9 am. This gives you time to wake your tired aging bodies out of bed and get a shower and then head to breakfast. Now the way Rich and Jean have this rally organized is that all meals, drinks, and alcohol are included. The only thing that needs to come out of your pocket is gratuities and gasoline (which I will speak about in great detail later). So you almost feel obligated to eat every mean whether you would normally eat that much food or not, because, well, its 'free'.

So having said that, now back to the rally. We leave between 8 and 9 am every morning and get our times. You take out on the roads with a VERY detailed route book describing how far to go and where to turn. The goal of these rallies is to arrive at EXACTLY the right time. Penalty points will be awarded if you are early or late.

Lets star the first day. I was ready to drive and my brother, Greg, who came over from Louisiana to help me was navigating on the first stage. The very first direction was to take a right out of the hotel. Well our first move after being released from the gate was to go, you guessed it, RIGHT! I had to get a few things out of the truck that I towed it with the day before. So we were off to a great start. Now these routes are designed to be completed going legal speed limits for legal and safety reasons of course. Well we were already 12 minutes in the hole. How did it end up. Well lets say we drove quickly. As did most of the other folks. We arrived about 21 minutes ahead of schedule accruing the maximum amount of penalty points you can amass for a single stage. We seemed to favor this approach to leave on time but finish ludicrously early everyday and a game was made for how many early penalty points we could amass. THe roads in the hill country are nothing short of spectacular. They offer a wide range of driving excitement. From 20 mile stretches of abandoned roads with 70-80 mile per hour sweepers one after the other, to 10 mile per hour switchback mountain roads inches from guardrails and/or rocks. These things are exciting by themselves. But add to that chasing a vintage Ferrari 330 GTO or being followed by a 993 Porsche Turbo and things get, well, competitive, quickly. What do you expect to happen with 20 guys in sports cars on deserted roads. HAHA.

We had a few days where my brother and I stayed close to Team Wodopain and their STUNNING 260Z on the road, and these two Z's were streaking across texas very quickly. What a sight it must have been. Team Wodopain's father and son were locked in a Herculean dual for the fasted recorded stop speed of the day. Those speeds will of course go unmentioned in the public domain! But those guys had a ball, and like us were enjoying every waking second of the TEXAS 1000. It was truly epic on scope.

I am going to save myself a lot of time and just post my link to the flickr site for all the pics that are loaded and all those that will be coming. I have hundreds of photos and literally 32 gigs of video I need to wade through, and we still have one more day.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdamico/sets/72157631968396523/

We finished up day one with an amount of penalty points that my brother and I were quite proud of. It should be noted that Mikes 260Z with team Wodopain at the helm has zero'ed every single stage and is doing VERY well. It just goes to show you that this rally is enjoyed by the serious rally enthusiast, the guy out to just drive or any combination of the two. The rally organizers just want you to be safe and have fun, and are there to promote the joy of driving great cars, with great people, on great roads! More pics and video to Come!

[esmit208]

That looks Soooooooo CooooooooooooooL!

[conedodger]

I have done a number of TSD Rally events over the years and never done well... But I always enjoyed the drive. Looks like you're doing the same.

[Ben's Z]

With regards to the towing, I am by no means an expert, but I think you might find better results by favoring the Z to the back of the trailer a little more. You got all that engine weight way out over the tongue. Combine that with U Haul trailer tongue weight to begin with and that is a lot of weight on the rear of that Tundra. I'd almost have the rear wheels of the Z at the end of the trailer. Looks like one hell of a time.

[Zedyone_kenobi]

Well the rally is over and it seems that all participants took something away with them.

When I came into this rally I had so many expectations. Mostly I wanted to enjoy good roads, good cars, driving fast, and decent food. Over the course of a thousand plus miles many things seemed clear to me. These events are about so much more than just driving fast on country roads. As the days went by and we reunited several times a day the cars started to take a back seat to the people who were driving them. The friendships and bonds that are made are priceless and the people seem like long lost relatives more than strangers. I think cars bring people together like this.

How did our little Z cars do? That to me is the real interesting story of the Texas 1000. We had about 20 automobiles with many many veteran teams with some very valuable hardware. Some cars were probably worth in the mid 6 digits, others were just run of the mill Porsches if there is such a thing. The vast majority of the participants we met have been doing these rallies for over 5, 10, 15 years, and they use them as get togethers to see old friends that they only see on rallies. Mike W's 260Z and my 240Z were first time participants, and we may have been the only first timers. There may have been perhaps 1 or 2 more at most. Immediately, like starting at a new school, we got all the attention of the New kid. Not only were the Z's drivers first timers in an organized rally, we had brought into the fold two cars that were neither German, British, Italian, or American. Perhaps we were viewed as oddities more than outsiders. Some were curious, but I have to be honest, the majority of people had fond memories of these little Z cars. And when they came and talked to us about them, always seems to treat us as friends. We blended and among the majority of the teams I would say were were treated as equals, and we deserved there. We had Datsun sitting next to cars costing exponentially more. And just like that, we went from Japanese outsiders, to fellow rally cars, that had the heritage and the look to stand toe to toe with any other car there. The DATSUNS had officially arrived.

One such example of this welcoming attitude was on the morning of the first day. I was prepping the car i the parking lot and a gentlemen walked up and asked about the car and said how he just adored these little cars and that I am going to have a ball driving this car on the roads ahead. He had done the rally a dozen times or so. He was the driver of the 330 Ferrari pictured above. This V12 concours quality car is one of his rally cars he uses for these such events. He drove it down from New Jersey for this rally! No trailers for him. (I felt immediately a bit silly for trailering mine for 223 miles from one city away!) He was generally excited to see and hear what the little Datsuns could do! Such enthusiasm for the Datsun cars started to grow day by day, as our roaring straight 6's never left us without enough power to leave pricer hardware wondering how the hell we could be this fast.

Mike W and I were doing our best to represent the Japanese invasion. We brought our Datsuns that we have both poured love and time and money into in non inconsequential amounts. At first we wondered how they would be viewed by the veteran rallyist who were use to seeing vintage Italian, German, British, and American iron on these events. Immediately the results were positive. They all remembered these cars and knew how wonderful they were to drive. All we had left to do was show them what we could do.

The turning point really happened at a motorcycle museum up in the hills of texas. Somebody inquired about our engines and when the hoods of Mike and I's Datsuns opened up, the crowd just swarmed. In my head, i thought, BEHOLD THE POWER of TRIPLES. There is something about having multiple carburetors that seems to get you instant credibility. When the their shock faded the questions poured in. The shock was reaffirmed when they learned that Mike and I do our own work and tuning. I think the term used is 'street cred'. Yea, we now had it. The Datsuns racing victories and ghosts of cars dominating in the SCCA were now starting to be understood. This of course was cemented when they saw the out right pace these cars could carry through the extremely twisty bits. I truely believe in my heart some of these guys with very expensive collections will find there way to an early Z soon. Out of all the cars, Mike and his sone Alex and my brother and I were having the most fun in our DEAD SOLID reliable Japanese cars. Thats right, as some other cars failed, others did not finish, both the Datsuns were beat on and driving hard for well over a 1000 miles, and each morning woke up and say, 'thank you sir, may I have another'! If you thought you loved your Z before, take her on a 1000 mile rally and the bond will soon be far more than sheet metal deep. It was the greatest automotive event I have ever participated in. I met so many wonderful people with great stories about great cars. The cars are wonderful, the roads were epic, the food was continuous and delicious, but its the people that ended up making this a very special event!

Sadly this 3.0 CSi did not finish the race, but it was one of my all time favorite cars there. So beautiful and yet so aggressive, classy, comfortable, and fast. It was just a near perfect car for the enthusiast. He ended up bowing out after day 2 with a failed slave cylinder.

Mike and Alex, father and son, who in their first rally, ZERO'ed every stage! Kudos guys for a great result!

My brother and I (I have the hat) who could not stop smiling and laughing for 4 darn days. We figured we would screw up at least half of the stages navigation, so we never really attempted to zero anything and just concentrated primarily on having a good time. It apparently worked as at the end of the Awards ceremony, My silver team piloted by my brother and I were awarded the Spirit of the Rally commendation.

I was extremely proud and left feeling like between Mike and I, we may have really legitimized the Datsun Z in these guys minds. This was a car to be taken seriously and when driven hard, man can they fly!

Edited November 17, 2012 by Zedyone_kenobi

[conedodger]

Perfect...

[esmit208]

That looks Soooooooooooooooooooo CooooooooooooooooooL!

[Ben's Z]

So the million dollar question? With the Ferrari driving from New Jersey... Did you DRIVE the the Z home?