This Car Is Cursed: Our Second DNF in a Row at the Great Alpine

Not every weekend is a good story. Some are just expensive. The Great Alpine Rally was both.

This was Round 2 of the Australian Tarmac Rally series, up around Falls Creek and Mount Beauty in the Victorian alps, with Anthony Carr alongside me on the notes — our first time in the car together, so there was a bit of getting-to-know-each-other going on. He calls left, right, four; I say it back so he knows I've got it. Miss the callback and he goes a bit slower — or, in his words, just hopes for the best.

Snowed out before we started

The first challenge wasn't the driving. It was the weather. Around 20 cm of snow dropped overnight, which turned the recce into a bit of a mess — trees down, debris everywhere, slush under the canopy. As I put it at the time: snow is the ultimate aquaplane.

Then there's the small matter of starting the thing. The car runs on ethanol, and ethanol does not want to atomise at zero degrees, so the engine flatly refused to fire in the cold. The fix was about as agricultural as it sounds — a bit of brake cleaner down the throttle bodies and a lot of hope. It eventually caught.

Finally, some pace

Once it warmed up and the roads dried, it was actually good. The car had changed a lot since I last drove it — more power in more places, and after the diff and alignment gremlins from earlier rounds it was finally starting to feel correct. Dry tarmac, a car coming good, some genuinely fun driving. For a while there it looked like the weekend might turn around.

And then it didn't

Then a noise, and it was over. At the time I was convinced the engine had let go — it made all the right horrible sounds for it — and we packed up genuinely thinking we'd grenaded the bottom end. Turned out, once we pulled it apart back home, it was the turbo again. Same failure as Mt Buller a month earlier, just a different way of announcing itself. Either way: done, and stranded at the bottom of the mountain waiting on a recovery, with the locals (and a dog) coming over to see what the broken silver Subaru was all about.

That's two rounds of ATR this year, and two DNFs — two blown turbos. I'll be blunt about the cost, because people don't talk about this part enough: between entry fees, transport, accommodation, food and fuel, you're looking at something like $30,000 to do less than two days of actual racing across those two events. We didn't even get the engine rebuilt and back in between rounds, and got zero testing in the month in between. So no, I wasn't stoked.

Packing up

So that was that. Load the car back on the trailer, point the truck at Sydney, and start the long drive home with a broken turbo and not much to show for it.

But here's the thing about this stupid, cursed, expensive sport: I still got some fun driving in, the car felt the best it ever had right up until it grenaded, and there's always another event on the calendar. Next up, in a couple of weeks, is the Rally of the Heartland — a three-day gravel marathon over in South Australia. Here's hoping for a cleaner run than this one.