Latest / Rusty's Garage / Ed Ordynski - Part 2

Transcript

Ed Ordynski - Part 2 · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:19
  G'day, it's Rusty here.
• 0:20
  All set for part two of my podcast with Group N rally legend Ed Ordinsky, but his story...
• 0:26
  as you're already gathering, is way broader than that.
• 0:29
  He tells the stories well too, so we have split this into three parts.
• 0:34
  If you've arrived here without listening to part one, you'll call, but you are missing some fantastic stuff.
• 0:40
  How he was captivated by the Monte Carlo rally coverage in a magazine when he emigrated with his family to Australia from England as a youngster.
• 0:49
  Scraping together a few hundred bucks to buy an underpowered Corolla rally car while he was at uni.
• 0:54
  Trying to tame a wild RX2.
• 0:58
  And how he recognised early on some key traits and disciplines needed for success.
• 1:03
  And Ed hasn't shared those widely until now.
• 1:07
  It's something that we can all benefit from.
• 1:10
  Let's get back to the chat.
• 1:15
  So there had been a rear-wheel drive iteration of Lancer.
• 1:19
  Starian had been there in some circuit racing and a bit of rallying too, for that matter.
• 1:23
  But the rebirth of Gallant is something that is ideal for Mitsubishi, for rally.
• 1:28
  When did you get your hands on a VR4?
• 1:31
  When did perhaps talks start to begin around the idea of working with them?
• 1:37
  Well, we looked at... We had that dream of going to a round of the WRC.
• 1:41
  So this is largely discussing this with Kevin Petter a great deal.
• 1:46
  We thought the Subaru... We didn't know if the Subarus were going to be eligible for a round of the WRC.
• 1:51
  It turns out they were, but they had to run in the Group A outright category.
• 1:57
  So I actually went to the very first forerunner of the WRC in Perth in the Subaru.
• 2:03
  So 1988, it wasn't actually a WRC round.
• 2:06
  It's like a test event, more or less, but it was treated like a WRC event, wasn't it?
• 2:09
  Yeah.
• 2:10
  And, you know, the Subaru had been so reliable for me, it retired on the first stage with engine.
• 2:17
  So the event that was going to go on to be so important to me, I actually didn't get to do the first one.
• 2:23
  It retired stage one, engine, destruct.
• 2:26
  So we were going to see how it would have gone.
• 2:29
  And as it turned out, you know, the Subarus did pretty well.
• 2:31
  I think Possum ended up being right up the front near the end, maybe third or something.
• 2:36
  So, you know, that might have, had we gone well in that event, it might have gone back in a Subaru.
• 2:41
  I don't know.
• 2:42
  But we looked around to see Group N had only just come in at that time.
• 2:48
  And we thought there's something you could actually win.
• 2:50
  And a lot of people didn't realise back then that the WRC was really two parts like it is now.
• 2:55
  There's the Rally 1 nowadays and Rally 2.
• 2:58
  And Group N was a strong or stronger than Rally 2 is nowadays.
• 3:01
  So there was a whole world championship for Group N. How good if you could go in your home event and have a crack at winning that?
• 3:07
  Because obviously you couldn't go in the first Australian WRC and expect to win it.
• 3:11
  outright.
• 3:13
  So Group N looked good.
• 3:14
  We looked around to see what there was in Group N. There was Sierra Cosworth's Mazda 323 four-wheel drives.
• 3:20
  The Subaru was homologated in Group N, but as a Group N car, it was very slow.
• 3:26
  And I actually saw somewhere that Mitsubishi were going to homologate a two-litre four-wheel drive turbo Galant.
• 3:32
  Had no idea it was VR4.
• 3:34
  So I inquired with Mitsubishi and
• 3:38
  When I made that inquiry, I somewhere along the way heard that Greg Carr had been given a drive of one in Malaysia, a prototype or a pre-runner.
• 3:47
  So I called Greg and he said, it's like a big Toyota crown to drive.
• 3:53
  You know, Galant, he goes...
• 3:58
  Because it's like this big wallowing Toyota Crown, but I think it would be five seconds a kilometre, which is huge.
• 4:05
  Five seconds a kilometre quicker than a BDA Escort.
• 4:10
  Game changer.
• 4:11
  Game changer, yeah.
• 4:13
  George Shepard was running the Starion Racing Program, which I think was doing really well in production cars and all sorts of things.
• 4:24
  And I heard that he had also been given a prototype here in Australia.
• 4:32
  They had done some testing with it.
• 4:34
  I didn't get to see that car, but I spoke to George and he said it was with Tony Scott driving, who ultimately was Brock's car.
• 4:42
  co-driver in that Volvo team that I, Tony Scott was the driver and although the VR4 was heavy and you know all of those things It was about two seconds a lap quicker around AIR than the Starion that they were racing So it was going to be fast, but it's heavy and all of that.
• 4:58
  So sight unseen we Ordered one.
• 5:02
  We were the first order of a VR4 so we got ours before Rally Art Australia did First in the country
• 5:09
  Yeah.
• 5:11
  So we ordered one, we had to pay, you know, full retail for it.
• 5:16
  So $46,000, which was a lot of money for a car back then.
• 5:20
  But, you know, with all the work I've been doing on sponsorship and success with the Subaru and with Kevin's help, we put together a real return on investment sponsorship strategy A to Pedder's nationally.
• 5:34
  That's so that was Ron Pedder, Mark Pedder's dad.
• 5:38
  And we also managed to get some Mitsubishi dealers on board.
• 5:43
  And Kevin was instrumental in us getting Bose shock absorbers, European brand.
• 5:51
  And that was a classic return investment Contra deal.
• 5:54
  Peders, you know, selling those shock absorbers in Australia with them contributing to our program with the VR4, which was totally doing home round of the VR4.
• 6:04
  the WRC but to get ready for that we entered the ARC Alpine then went to WA so I'd had some experience on the WA ball bearing roads and we did our home event here in South Australia home ARC round but you know we went with that car in and Group N then was carpets sun you know full interior trim you even had to run the standard wheels on the car and we beat the Group N world champions
• 6:33
  Unbelievable.
• 6:35
  Tell me a little bit about that.
• 6:36
  Because back in that whole group end period, because you contested successfully a number of events on the global scene, right?
• 6:44
  And over time you would come up against, if memory serves, Gustavo Trelles, Manfred Stoll.
• 6:51
  There were some really good operators in that class, weren't there?
• 6:55
  Look, it was wonderful.
• 6:56
  And, you know, that was it.
• 6:58
  You went there and you knew you were going up against the best in the world.
• 7:02
  And those guys were really fantastic in Group Anne, all of those you care to mention, you know, Tommy McKinnon, you know, just incredible.
• 7:10
  So you really felt welcome to it.
• 7:13
  And the esteem of Group Anne...
• 7:16
  probably outside of Australia, of course, was much greater than here.
• 7:20
  You know, you went to the press conference with the outright three winners, you know, so that's how much it was regarded by the FIA, et cetera, because it was that era of the manufacturers had to homologate their Group A World Rally Car outright vehicles, and to do that they had to have a Group N version that they were selling.
• 7:39
  So, you know, you had manufacturers were in it like crazy.
• 7:42
  So you saw a wonderful ground floor opportunity there.
• 7:46
  But the VR4 was far superior than you could ever imagine, than we ever imagined.
• 7:52
  You know, we had no idea just how fast we were going in and against the other group and cars at the time.
• 7:57
  And Rally Art by then had got their cars and built them.
• 8:00
  They ran Kinjiro and,
• 8:05
  I think they only ran Kanjiro.
• 8:06
  Ross might have been Starian still.
• 8:08
  I can't... No, Ross would have been VR4 then as well.
• 8:10
  Oops.
• 8:11
  Duncan, you took it.
• 8:11
  Yeah, yeah, sorry.
• 8:12
  Yes.
• 8:14
  Yeah, I have to check my facts carefully on that.
• 8:17
  But we were in front of the Group A cars with our Group N car by...
• 8:21
  If we were in front of Ross, it would have been by him having a problem.
• 8:24
  But we were quicker than Kanjiro in the Group A version.
• 8:28
  And I rarely get the chance to tell this story because I was sworn to secrecy at the time.
• 8:33
  But, you know, Doug Stewart, the president of Rally Out Australia and globally, along with Andrew Cowan at the time, came up and asked me politely if, you know, Group N, I had it in the bag with One Day To Go.
• 8:48
  it would be good for my career if I finished behind Kanduro because of him needing to score Asia-Pacific Championship points.
• 8:55
  And where you finished outright made no difference to me.
• 8:58
  So I said, no problem at all.
• 9:01
  But it opened a door, you know, obviously.
• 9:04
  And...
• 9:05
  Yeah, Mitsubishi Motors Australia sent their main guy in marketing at the time, a guy called Charles Isles, to the event because the Mitsubishis were running for outright positions, not Group N. But, you know, he was there and I was able to meet him and...
• 9:23
  all of that sort of thing.
• 9:24
  So, you know, you can see what a turning point.
• 9:26
  But I would say it was not just the opportunity of WRC and seeing the opportunity to do Group N properly.
• 9:31
  It was a combination of all those things I'd learned from Corolla about driving, team building, fitness, sponsorship.
• 9:38
  You know, you got there with a car capable of an outright winning Group N against the
• 9:44
  really incredible drivers like I'd never come up against before, but you had just as much in place.
• 9:49
  You know, you had equal...
• 9:50
  I felt I had equal opportunity.
• 9:52
  My co-driver, Lynn Wilson, had been with me since the Rotary Master.
• 9:56
  You know, we had learnt that pace noting together with the emphasis.
• 10:00
  I think we had probably better pace notes than the majority of the group and competitors, and certainly the VR4 suited everything I'd put into my driving style.
• 10:09
  You know, we even ran...
• 10:11
  the VR4 with its rear wheel steering connected.
• 10:13
  You know, people just automatically disconnected the rear steering because they thought that would be a terrible thing.
• 10:18
  What if it went wrong?
• 10:19
  But, you know, the main thing it did was it kept the car in the ruts.
• 10:23
  It could steer, you know, the same direction as the front wheels, just three degrees, but that car never rode out of the ruts.
• 10:30
  And in WA on those narrow tracks, rutted, dug up.
• 10:34
  You could just hurl it through corners and it tracked beautifully, you know, so...
• 10:39
  It was a big turning point, but you can see it was a combination of a lot of work and the aligning of the planets, if you like, with car and everything else that goes with it.
• 10:48
  But aligning of the planets because of the disciplined things you had earmarked that you needed to do.
• 10:55
  Yes, great car, but it was the collective sum of all these things that you hold to be very valuable or very important in the quote-unquote making of a champion, right?
• 11:09
  Yeah, and coming back to your first mention of that, Cara, it was part of the goal setting.
• 11:13
  So the whole study, the books on goal setting and the key takeaway that you should apply to everything you do is work from the end point backwards.
• 11:22
  What is the goal?
• 11:22
  Get to a round of the WRC and Win Group N became the written down goal.
• 11:27
  How are we going to do that?
• 11:28
  And you've got to work backwards, imagining you're there.
• 11:30
  What did you need to have in place?
• 11:33
  Yeah, reverse engineer, and then you've got to tick the boxes to get there.
• 11:38
  And, yeah, I had the right people in place.
• 11:40
  I had, you know, a good budget from sponsorship.
• 11:43
  So I can't say I did it.
• 11:45
  You know, I certainly didn't.
• 11:47
  Some of the group and teams, like the Lancia Integrales there, which, you know, were unaffordable...
• 11:51
  they had their own trucks and aircraft and everything in Group N, you know.
• 11:55
  So we were there with only a couple of service vehicles and a six-by-four trailer with all our stuff on, but we had enough things, you know.
• 12:04
  Yeah.
• 12:05
  I want to...
• 12:06
  Correct me if I don't get this statistic right.
• 12:08
  So I... Was it the first of eight wins in Group N at Rally Aus out of 11 starts there, I want to say?
• 12:17
  I mean, the percentage is...
• 12:20
  freaking phenomenal where did that first one because you're you're you're privateer it's it's part of the you know this kid who'd seen the monaco rally on a magazine on a boat on the way out from england and and dreamt of doing something like this right how much did you savour that to win something of that stature on the on the international scene
• 12:43
  You know, the more time goes on, I suppose, it's even better to look back on.
• 12:48
  You know, it's fair to say at the time, while you're doing it, you don't realise, you know, what a turning point that can be in your career or what was happening to you in the sport and where it was going to lead to you.
• 13:00
  You know, you were just, I mean, we were exhausted at the end of the rally.
• 13:05
  It's a whirlwind thing, you know, it's like all of that.
• 13:07
  You know, you've gone there to be in a round,
• 13:10
  you've given yourself every opportunity to win, but you've got to have a lot of luck as well.
• 13:15
  A lot of things go your way, don't you?
• 13:16
  So by the time we were on that last day, just stroking it home to the finish, suddenly you are on the podium at a World Championship rally, standing on the bonnet, spraying champagne, and you're sitting next to the three World Championship previous winners, you are Kankanon and those guys, and they're asking you questions about a VR4, you know, that must be a good thing in Group N.
• 13:40
  And then you're off, you know, we've never been to so many press conference media commitments and so on.
• 13:45
  Afterwards, you've got, you know, Rally Art saying you better come and talk to us and, you know, all that kind of stuff because...
• 13:52
  Yeah, that's it.
• 13:53
  It's going – it's no different – you know, if somebody now went to a round of the WRC in a Rally 2 vehicle and it was their first ever drive of a Rally 2 car at the home event and they beat not only all the Rally 2 cars but were asked to slow down and finish behind a Rally 1, what a turning point in your career would that be?
• 14:11
  And that's how it was for us.
• 14:13
  Mm-hmm.
• 14:13
  So what transpires here, firstly tell the audience how long the partnership with Mitsubishi went for because this is basically the formative stages of that isn't it?
• 14:24
  Well, you know, the very first thing that happened was that Charles Isles from Mitsubishi phoned me up because they were bringing the Galant VR4 to Australia, because this is before they'd even been launched in Australia.
• 14:35
  They were going to launch it here.
• 14:37
  So pre-launch, he asked me if I'd like to come in and be in.
• 14:40
  So this is a good sponsorship lesson, isn't it?
• 14:43
  It wasn't to ask me to go and drive in more rallies.
• 14:45
  It was asked me to come and assist with the launch of the VR4.
• 14:48
  And I ended up being given the job to run the launch and...
• 14:53
  which was a big responsibility, you know, from them to let me choose the drive route and where we went and the presentation on VR4 and all of that stuff.
• 15:01
  But I could see, you know, Mitsubishi was focused straight away on what could I do between rallies, not on the rallies themselves.
• 15:09
  Mitsubishi Australia actually had a no motorsport policy thrust upon them from being purchased by Mitsubishi from Chrysler, which Mitsubishi believed had squandered money on the Charger motor racing program.
• 15:22
  Not that they didn't think they should have gone racing, but...
• 15:24
  There weren't enough controls over where the money went.
• 15:27
  So they weren't allowed to participate directly in motorsport.
• 15:31
  But there was nothing to stop Mitsubishi signing you up for a promotional endorsement services contract, which is what I signed up with Mitsubishi to be able to do launch.
• 15:41
  And I did a TV advertisement for VR4 and then various other things.
• 15:45
  So they gave me a contract worth far more than I could earn as a school teacher, but
• 15:52
  didn't formally put money into the rallying itself.
• 15:57
  And, you know, there's one of those things, I guess it's make your own luck, but I've forever stayed contracted to Mitsubishi Motors Australia.
• 16:03
  I never signed a contract with Rally Art.
• 16:06
  I was always with Mitsubishi Motors.
• 16:09
  And I would say to anybody who's at that level in their motor sport,
• 16:13
  If you can sign up with the manufacturer, do that above signing up with the team that is tasked with preparing the cars.
• 16:20
  So sign up with, let's say when Holden was big in most, be contracted to Holden, not to the Holden Racing Team.
• 16:28
  be signed up to Toyota, not to Neil Bates Motorsport, if, you know, is the way to go.
• 16:33
  Because it's the manufacturer that is not only funding the whole show, but they're the ones who are going to actually make use of your services better than the workshop is ever going to.
• 16:42
  And so that became, you know, I suppose another hallmark of my career.
• 16:47
  And typical of you and the very disciplined, methodical way that you've gone about things, right?
• 16:54
  Even the opportunity to do some of those drive days either with staff or I would imagine customers, car launchers or whatever, you applied this kind of next level precision to that, didn't you?
• 17:09
  And you understood very early, if I do that right, it'll help the other side of things.
• 17:15
  That's the whole thing.
• 17:17
  You know, I'll jump further ahead from that to put your question in perspective.
• 17:22
  In, I think, 1997 or 1998, when Rally Corp took over the running of the ARC and there was a manufacturer's registration fee, you might recall, I don't know if you were directly involved then or not, that Mitsubishi refused to pay the manufacturer's increased levy from, I think it was $50,000 to $350,000.
• 17:43
  And so we weren't allowed to score points.
• 17:45
  And I had a number of personal sponsors, Hella, Yokohama, numerous others on the car, all of which I was doing promotional endorsement services for.
• 17:56
  Plus, of course, Mitsubishi Motors, I was contracted to a heap of days with them.
• 18:00
  And all of those contracts were in place.
• 18:03
  And I had to ring each of them and say, we're not going to be able to score points.
• 18:06
  points in the championship and every one of them was silent and then they said but you'll still do the work you're going to do for us and i said yeah i guess yeah they said well the rallies are for you you know we're still in we're in even if we don't do any rallies doesn't that send you an amazing message that's massive massive i mean and for young
• 18:25
  races, rally drivers, whatever.
• 18:27
  I mean, that's, you know, the goal is to get behind the wheel and to win races, but you have to understand the off-track, the away-from-service park work that is required to ensure that you can go around and enjoy that stuff.
• 18:40
  Yes.
• 18:41
  And, you know, all that not paying the manufacturer's fee, it was solely because Rally Corp hadn't gone to the manufacturers and said, here's what you'll get for your $350,000 and spell out the benefits.
• 18:51
  You know, not that we'll get better TV for the ARC.
• 18:53
  It's what's in it for them.
• 18:56
  You know, I was given an Evo every time I won Group N on Rally Australia as a thank you gift from Mitsubishi Motors in Japan.
• 19:07
  That happened from the first VR4 win, you know, we were gifted a new VR4.
• 19:12
  And so I had received a new Evo 3.
• 19:17
  So I drove that plain white no for two or three rounds.
• 19:20
  But in that time...
• 19:22
  I did some work with Gary Connolly and paid for Gary to come to South Australia and do a proper presentation to Mitsubishi, which he's incredibly good at, on the benefits of paying the fee.
• 19:33
  And ultimately they paid for it and we were back going again.
• 19:37
  Excellent.
• 19:38
  Okay, we've bounced forward a little bit.
• 19:39
  Let's come back to this chapter that goes for, crikey, nearly 20 years or whatever it was.
• 19:46
  It's VR4 to begin with.
• 19:49
  We've, you know, we've charted how many wins you had there at Rally Oz in Group B and in the production spec car.
• 19:57
  Was it the first one, or is there another hard-fought one in those eight that you look upon as the most hard-fought, the most rewarding?
• 20:07
  Probably the last one, 2001, I think.
• 20:11
  And bear in mind, in those, you know, the three we didn't win, there might have been one DNF in there, but I think the others we might have been second.
• 20:20
  And so you remember those because you missed it because you got a puncture or something, you know.
• 20:25
  But the last one, 2001, Evo 6, you know, that's probably...
• 20:30
  I probably was at the peak of my career then, I think.
• 20:33
  I mean, I was getting...
• 20:34
  I would have been 46 years of age or something, but I felt my driving was still, you know, where it needed to be.
• 20:40
  And the six was kind of like a car that was tailor-made for me, you know.
• 20:46
  A lot of the testing for Evo 6 as a road and homologation car was done here in Australia with Bob Riley and the Rally Out guys getting temperature packages and diff settings and all of that stuff.
• 20:56
  So I did a lot of the driving pre-launch for 6.
• 21:00
  And there was a really – I don't want to digress from your question, but there was a way to set up an Evo 6 that was quite specific to make it work.
• 21:09
  And that's part of one of those things you need to be on top of in the top –
• 21:13
  six or eight things is technically across the vehicle.
• 21:16
  So by then I was given every opportunity to be across that car technically by rally art, both here and internationally.
• 21:24
  So the car was fitted like a glove.
• 21:27
  It was terrific.
• 21:28
  Yeah.
• 21:29
  But you came up against, for Rally Australia that year, Manfred Stoll and Gabrielle Pozzo.
• 21:36
  And Manfred Stoll is probably better known than Gabrielle, but Manfred Stoll was the current group and world champion.
• 21:42
  And Gabrielle had just taken the championship from him before Rally Australia, and that
• 21:50
  That was from a really strong team as well.
• 21:51
  So you're talking Rally Art Germany and all those South American guys from Argentina, etc.
• 21:56
  So the Gustavo Trellis team, all those guys there.
• 21:59
  So it was neck and neck.
• 22:01
  I think we were rarely separated, the three of us, by...
• 22:05
  you know, more than a handful of seconds.
• 22:07
  It was like, I think towards the end of the rally, it might have been 19 seconds with just a few stages to go.
• 22:13
  It was, you know, I just drove every stage like it was the last stage of a sprint.
• 22:20
  And so to take that win against two relatively young guys, so much younger guys than Ian Stewart and I, you know, it was just terrific.
• 22:30
  It was great.
• 22:31
  I remember it was a very hot rally.
• 22:33
  And we were coming into the start of the Helena stage, 30k stage, and you've got a front to rear your tyres.
• 22:39
  And it was blistering hot.
• 22:40
  And Ian said, do you think we can get by?
• 22:42
  You know, should we try and get by without the tyre change?
• 22:44
  It's going to kill us before starting the stage.
• 22:47
  And as we drove around, we could see the other competitors in the line up to the stage lying on the grass and all of that and not working on their cars, not changing their tyres.
• 22:55
  So we drove down past them all, parked, and did our front to rear tyre change with them.
• 23:00
  Ian and I going, if we're going to do it, let's look like we're just doing it easy, as fit as, you know, look like, there's no trouble.
• 23:07
  It was killing us, but we changed them as fast as we could.
• 23:12
  What a message, what a message that said.
• 23:14
  Yeah, it changed our tyres.
• 23:16
  So I think we were the only ones in front to re-head our tyres.
• 23:18
  It was blistering hot.
• 23:22
  Yeah, it was just, everything worked pretty well.
• 23:24
  I did damage the car in that event.
• 23:26
  I think I, you know, caught the back on some trees somewhere, but, you know, it didn't stop us.
• 23:31
  You have those lucky brakes where that could have been the end of the rally, but it wasn't.
• 23:45
  Rusty has spoken to a few of the Australian Motorsport and Rally Hall of Famers.
• 23:50
  Another in the garage you might enjoy is Neil Bates.
• 23:54
  I said before that the favourite car to drive was the World Rally car, but probably my favourite car is actually the 205.
• 24:01
  Why?
• 24:02
  Just, I love the look of it.
• 24:04
  I had an amazing success in that car.
• 24:07
  You know, I think in 1995 we won every round of the Australian Championship except for Rally Australia.
• 24:15
  That is one cool car.
• 24:17
  I wish I had kept some of my old cars.
• 24:20
  You've got room in the garage for them don't you Rusty?
• 24:23
  Love my old laden Eva.
• 24:25
  Let's get back to the chat with Ed.
• 24:28
  So did you always, even from back to understanding that the RX2 had deficiencies around braking for all of its power and handling and whatever else, did you kind of immerse yourself in learning as much about that and the vehicle and its limitations, capabilities?
• 24:46
  Did you enjoy that side of it, the testing side of it and so on?
• 24:49
  Oh, absolutely, yes.
• 24:50
  So, and you've picked the right car, the RX2, because that was a car that, you know, by Greg saying to me, it was, you know, to try and make that car straight is near impossible.
• 24:58
  And it's a car that just goes sideways just ridiculously.
• 25:03
  I had to learn how could you make an RX2 not handle like that.
• 25:08
  I mean, the fastest way in any rally car, it doesn't matter if it's front drive, rear drive.
• 25:13
  four-wheel drive you really want the outside front tyre to be working hard and and sharing the work as much as possible so to get that rx2 to be able to be leaned on the outside front tyre hard into loose corners was really difficult and that's without it then going into horrible pig understeer or something um you know that that
• 25:35
  It changes the whole way you go about your suspension tuning, the way your limited slip diff is set up, everything.
• 25:41
  So, yes, it was a study of every car I get, how do I make it drive straight?
• 25:46
  The surprising thing is that to do it...
• 25:51
  And this is where it's difficult when you occasionally do some training or work with beginner drivers.
• 25:55
  You actually have to make a car be razor sharp turn in response, almost too much for a beginner to handle.
• 26:03
  So the car has to turn the moment you move the steering dramatically and then respond to a big committed stand on the throttle for it to be stable and straight through the corners.
• 26:14
  So it's fast turn in response and then really stable.
• 26:17
  That actually is very like a V8 supercar.
• 26:20
  you know you want it to turn in it's got to ride the bumps nicely and it's got to be straight take all the power down you can give it and in a rally car and particularly in a four-wheel drive car the trick to that is actually running very stiff springs on the back of the car and you would think that would make it very tail happy but you've got four-wheel drive you don't want it to squat at the back because that takes weight off the front wheels and you want all the weight over the
• 26:45
  front wheels getting good drive out of the front limited slip diff but a car with stiff rear springs is going to oversteer when you're off the throttle so you can't be off the throttle very long so it'll rotate fast but you've got to be on it or you spin out and go off the road backwards so it takes a very committed driving style and all my big crashes are when that's gotten away from me you know
• 27:07
  All of that is when I haven't been able to, for whatever reason, get on it fast enough, stay on it.
• 27:13
  And if you're truly committed going in at the maximum speed for that corner and that happens, you are going off the road.
• 27:20
  You know, you're a passenger.
• 27:21
  You have shared some of this stuff along the way from, you know, competitors and teams in Asia.
• 27:28
  I think you and I talked before I started recording today about sharing a bit of time with Chris Atkinson and so on, haven't you?
• 27:34
  Yeah, in the Asia-Pacific Championship, Katsu Taguchi is still competing nowadays.
• 27:39
  He's been driving the...
• 27:40
  a cello team Skoda last year, they're running a Toyota Yaris Rally 2 now, but he, yeah, he's still competing, he's getting on a bit now, but he was an exceptional student, so he went on to several Asia-Pacific championships, Japanese dirt trial champion and so on.
• 28:01
  So, yes, I spent a lot of time with him.
• 28:04
  I did do driving tuition for Katsu, but I also spent a lot of time with he and Fred Gassentis, who was his co-driver early on.
• 28:12
  And Fred, although he had done pace noting, he was not an adept pace noter, not in the sort of terms that I'm talking about.
• 28:20
  So there you go.
• 28:22
  You know, there's a guy who was an amazing person.
• 28:24
  navigator with Greg Carr and a great co-driver with Ross Duncan and many other drivers in between.
• 28:29
  Southern Cross Rally wins, you know, all that.
• 28:32
  But he took to learning how to pace note properly like he was 19 years old, you know, which says a lot about a champion, doesn't it?
• 28:39
  You know, he was...
• 28:40
  open to if he was going to go to a school for katsu because you have to train someone for pace name with both driver and co-driver it's it's got to be led by the driver so i've never conducted pace note training for just a co-driver it's a combo and fred was just on board with the whole lot so they went on to some great successes together
• 29:00
  As indeed Cody and Greg Folletta, I did both of them at the same time.
• 29:05
  And, yeah, it's been Chris.
• 29:07
  I only had a conversation with him, you know, just sitting talking about the fundamentals of pace noting and why.
• 29:14
  But you've met him lots, and he's a very smart and astute guy.
• 29:18
  And he understood that this is about going fast on the fastest bits of road.
• 29:22
  You know, it's about...
• 29:24
  winning on the fastest pieces, you win down the straights.
• 29:27
  You know, it was those fundamentals.
• 29:29
  You write the notes however you like, call them whatever you want to, but they've got to be focused on that.
• 29:34
  You know, you can look at somebody's page of pace notes.
• 29:37
  If they haven't got the distance of the straight on the same and the last line of a set of pace notes, if they've got a beginning so that it's 250 to get to a corner, they're missing the whole point.
• 29:49
  because it's got to be about the run-up to the straight.
• 29:52
  Every pace note line should be a run-up.
• 29:54
  And so, you know, Chris was all over that.
• 29:58
  And you can do that.
• 29:59
  You can wander around a rally now and just have a look at the page.
• 30:01
  Does it end in the distances?
• 30:02
  No, it doesn't.
• 30:04
  Great takeaway.
• 30:05
  Great takeaway.
• 30:06
  In the goal setting, in the timeline here, we've talked about the early...
• 30:12
  And, you know, generally the tally of wins in Group N at Rally Australia.
• 30:16
  What about the Australian title that you alluded to before and chalking that one up as well before we get to some of the other international events and how much that meant to you?
• 30:25
  Because that's a pretty exclusive club in this country, right, isn't it?
• 30:29
  It is, and I'm very proud to have won the national championship.
• 30:32
  I only won it once outright, but I've won it outright in a Group N car.
• 30:36
  That's what is meaningful to me.
• 30:38
  So I had a job by then to do the ARC in the VR4, but the job was to win the Group N national championship, not to win the championship outright.
• 30:50
  And although Mitsubishi Australia couldn't support me in that, but I was doing a lot of work from them that allowed me to be able to go to all the rallies,
• 30:59
  They were quite specific and if you look back at the history of the sport, the championship then was sponsored by BP.
• 31:06
  BP had prize money for both outright and Group N, so they were seen as two distinct championships just like the WRC.
• 31:14
  And Mitsubishi put up an amazing prize pool of many thousands of dollars per rally, big prize pool for the season, again, focused on outright wins and Group N wins.
• 31:26
  And a lot of competitors, you know, like George Fury started in a VR4 for that year in a really well-built Group A car, like a beautiful car.
• 31:34
  Les walked and bought that car, but he only had the finances to do three rounds, whereas I did the whole series.
• 31:44
  But almost all of them were in the PRC or Group A category.
• 31:49
  Few wanted to leave the car stocky standard in Group N. But the Group N cars were fantastic.
• 31:54
  And so, you know, we took the lion's share of the prize money, both categories.
• 32:00
  And that was the first time I had to talk contractually with Mitsubishi because I said, hang on, if we win the rally outright, doesn't that get us the prize money for both, which they had to agree to?
• 32:10
  So that was quite...
• 32:12
  Quite good.
• 32:13
  But yeah, look, it meant a lot winning it outright, but it meant a lot because I knew it was really important to Mitsubishi globally to have done it with a group N car.
• 32:22
  But it wasn't the goal, you know, so the big ticket item to us was that we won the group N championship.
• 32:30
  And, you know, I was very proud to do that.
• 32:32
  And, you know, we went on to win another three of those, I think.
• 32:35
  Yeah, three.
• 32:36
  three more group and championships, which was always what I was tasked to.
• 32:39
  You know, so even when I went to drive with Les, which was Mitsubishi-sponsored, etc., rally-out supported, I was up against Neil Bates those years, but he was in his either Group A or World Rally car.
• 32:52
  Maybe one built here, not as good as the ones you ended up with, but, you know, it was never a head-to-head competition.
• 32:58
  Hey, the cars were too dissimilar.
• 33:00
  and Neil's a great operator, but my role was, you know, we felt like we were winning everything because we were winning the Group N Championship.
• 33:08
  And I always would say to Neil in those days that, you know, I actually would base the level of effort I put in against his times.
• 33:21
  I really set out to try and beat his Toyota even though I had no chance because that got me prepared for Rally Australia, which was actually my main job.
• 33:29
  Got you.
• 33:29
  My job from Mitsubishi globally was to win Group N on Rally Australia every year, which is why I did it for so many years.
• 33:36
  So even the ARC was a build-up to Rally Australia.
• 33:39
  We'd get a brand-new car for Rally Australia.
• 33:42
  The best, you know, by the time it was humming along, then you got HKS Group N engines and all sorts of things in them so that you arrived on an equal footing with everybody else.
• 33:52
  So it was still geared towards Rally Australia.
• 33:55
  Or indeed, I did Rally New Zealand as well, and it was...
• 33:57
  The same level of support from MMC and Mitsubishi Australia and Rally Art gave us successes.
• 34:05
  We won in New Zealand as well.
• 34:07
  So it was geared towards that.
• 34:09
  But if I just – I knew from a performance point of view, if I only raced –
• 34:15
  And I don't mean to be disparating, the group N competition was strong, that was great, that made you go fast, but it was going to go up a league when you got to Rally Australia.
• 34:23
  So if you solely raced against group N competitors, I think you'd find yourself a second of K off the pace against the guys who are doing the whole WRC of the likes of the drivers we spoke about when the WRC round comes round.
• 34:37
  So we always set our targets on Neil.
• 34:41
  And, you know, if I could stay within a second or a second and a half a K off Neil, I knew that was going to be WRC Group N pace.
• 34:50
  And that was hard to achieve.
• 34:53
  This conversation has been fascinating, mate, because if I looked at...
• 34:58
  the history pages, the results for you, you just, without knowing you, you just go king of group N, unbelievably good.
• 35:07
  You know, was that because he was mechanically sympathetic?
• 35:11
  But that's not it.
• 35:13
  In fact, it is the sum of all these things that we've been talking about today.
• 35:17
  And where you've gone then in terms of a yardstick against Neil, but also even the little gamesmanship when you front to back the tyres, all right,
• 35:27
  All this is also about mental toughness, isn't it?
• 35:32
  Yeah, it's such an important and often overlooked part of the sport.
• 35:37
  You know, if somebody was listening to this and they're from athletics or, you know, an Olympic Games competitor, they'd go, no, no, that's all just standard stuff for us.
• 35:45
  But in motorsport, we don't really study those things.
• 35:49
  I studied mental toughness for a couple of things.
• 35:51
  One, I'll talk about mental toughness in itself.
• 35:54
  But by the time my career had really taken off after Rally Australia, you know, don't forget I was 35 years of age by then.
• 36:00
  So I was thinking that's late in my career.
• 36:04
  Mental toughness is a big factor in how do you stay high performance capability at an older age.
• 36:11
  You know, you need to be accepting that...
• 36:13
  you might be declining in various faculties and how do you become mentally enough tough enough to cope with that and still stay at the top of your game.
• 36:20
  So it's something I certainly did study consistently.
• 36:23
  And, you know, look at the WRC event recently that we just saw between Thierry Neuville and Sébastien Ogier.
• 36:31
  You know, Ogier shocked me by being the one to crumble on the mental toughness.
• 36:36
  Who would have thought that?
• 36:37
  You know, Newville demonstrated textbook mental toughness.
• 36:42
  And, you know, obviously we're talking about the Cropless Rally in Greece.
• 36:46
  You know, I saw an Ogier that makes you...
• 36:49
  I'm a big fan of Sebastian Ogier.
• 36:50
  But, you know, I looked and thought, you know what?
• 36:52
  There's the first messages here that you are doing the wrong thing.
• 36:56
  You know, you should think about retirement or doing something that doesn't allow people to see you crumbling like that.
• 37:01
  Because, you know, that was classic...
• 37:05
  It's kind of the worst form of a failing of mental toughness where what you thought you were doing to try and alter someone else's mind causes you to come unstuck yourself.
• 37:15
  It was sad to see that.
• 37:16
  I felt sorry for him.
• 37:17
  But it just goes to show, isn't it?
• 37:20
  It's at every level.
• 37:21
  Mental toughness is everything.
• 37:22
  This is pre-internet.
• 37:23
  So how are you researching?
• 37:24
  How are you studying to, you know, acquire this knowledge?
• 37:28
  Textbooks, libraries, buying books, listening to things on the radio, you know, whatever it might be.
• 37:34
  Yes, I've still got books on my shelf there, you know, on mental toughness.
• 37:39
  And, you know, one of the main things...
• 37:41
  mental toughness books cover is how to go about goal setting and how to be mentally tough enough to stay on them it's not the um so much the mind games that people play on you but that's rife in the sport you know it's about dealing with that but it totally being something completely irrelevant you know and uh
• 38:04
  But it's about getting your life in order.
• 38:06
  So most mental toughness things are about setting your life goals, what's meaningful to you, and then what are your goals for living, your goals for sport and so on, and making everything align if you possibly can and reverse engineering everything, how to achieve goals, how to document your goal-setting plans and all of that.
• 38:24
  There is a structure to it that's established and it takes a lot of time.
• 38:37
  That's the end of part two of my podcast with Ed Odinsky.
• 38:40
  Normally, that would be it for a feature ep, but with the Rally Fraternity, we seem to get such gold that there's enough for a part three, and that's a win for you, our listeners.
• 38:50
  Ed still has some great things to share.
• 38:54
  From the circumstances that led to him calling time, the final rallying he did, the eco-challenges, electric and hydrogen vehicles he's driven, lending his expertise to the sport...
• 39:05
  when it comes to investigations and the cool cars in the shed.
• 39:10
  Don't miss it.
• 39:10
  Part three in the garage and ready to fire up when you are.