My first camp on skis just came to an end. It was an awesome 3 weeks in Queenstown, New Zealand. New Zealand is always my favorite trip; Although the skiing is pretty decent, the scenery and the abundance of post skiing activities are what make me really love NZ. It’s definitely one our plushest trips too- we stay right on the Millbrook Golf Course, which is apparently a good course not that I know what makes a golf course good. There’s a tennis court right there, and we have Adam, our amazing cook, preparing awesome meals for us, so life is pretty good.
We ski at Coronet Peak which is about a 20 minute drive every morning. They have a whole section of the mountain closed off for race training, and it’s usually prepared icy (just the way we like it). One of the trails we train on would be one of, if not the hardest hill on the World Cup circuit for SL and GS if it were a little longer. So that’s a good test of how your equipment is working and helps develop your survival skills. NZ was also my first chance to put on some much needed miles on my new Head set up. I’m not sure exactly how many pairs of skis we had down there but it had to be in the 30 pair range. So my new tech Alex Martin had a lot of work to do get all those skis ready. Everyday we were either cycling through a bunch of different sidecuts and/or constructions or testing different boot set ups/stiffnesses or plastics.
As you can imagine it was a lot of stuff to sort out. So far I’ve narrowed it down quite a bit but still have some work to do to find the set up that’s going to win Solden. 
Rainer Salzgeber, the Head race team director, who was also a kick ass WC racer, was there taking high speed video so we could get a really good idea of what the equipment was doing and so we could talk through ways to improve everything even more.
Outside of skiing we played a fair amount of tennis. The most momentous match played was a doubles match between myself and Thomas Vonn vs. Felix Neureuther and Fritz Dopfer. Thomas was supposed to carry our team but the combination of falling rain and puddles on court hindered his game. I played okay but Felix’s net play and Fritz’s serve were just to much to overcome and we lost in straight sets, though it was close enough it could have gone either way.
The real highlight of the trip was car jumping. It’s become a tradition for us to buy a crappy car to rally and jump until it dies. We originally rallied the rental cars, but we decided we were lucky to not have done any major damage after driving it up a river, rallying on dry grass, catching the car on fire while rally racing, and then getting 2 flat tires simultaneously. Two years ago we decided we should start buying our own cars to rally rather than trashing the rentals. Our first car was a ‘89 Holden Camira, after getting too many flat tires racing in a dried river bed, we built a jump. After a few jumps we started sending it huge.
From then on we were hooked. Check out the video clips from 2008:
Last year I missed the action, but the boys sent it pretty big, in a free Subaru that Warner Nickerson found. This year Warner Nickerson, Jon Olsson, Felix Neureuther, Sean McKenna and I bought a ‘87 BMW 320i named Gertrude. After an hour of building a jump, I took the first jump then Warner jumped twice, but after Warner’ 2nd jump we noticed something was very wrong. On Warner’s second jump he nose the car in on the landing which pushed the radiator into the engine and cut the hoses attached to the radiator. We figured it was best not to drive Gertrude home in fear it would overheat, so we hid the her off a seemingly unused dirt road in the bushes and walked to the main road to get picked up. Because of bad weather we didn’t go out the next day. The following day we were all psyched to do some more car jumping, but when we pulled up to Gertrude, we were met with the horrible site of our beautiful baby, beaten with a sledgehammer all the windows knocked out, the hood ripped almost all the way off and worst of all, a fresh poo in the trunk. After a few minutes of tinkering with the her, she started up, and we were once again car jumping (minus windows and hood). Luckily, Jon had brought his helmet and some glasses, since without the windshield, smoke, dirt and the remnants of broken glass were blowing in our faces and bouncing around the car.
As the day progressed we went bigger and bigger until the gear box dropped, making it tough to get Gertrude in gear. In addition to the gear box problems, the air intake was loose and needed to be duct taped back on after every jump. The next day we returned to the scene to see if we could resurrect Gertrude for another few jumps. We had to wrap the air intake with some more duct tape and it took some wriggling and jerking of the stick to get it in gear, but she did manage to run albeit with not that much power. After a bunch of disappointing jumps I decided the go hog wild with the duct tape. I taped the air intake extra tight, taped all the hoses that go into the engine and put an extra layer of tape around basically everything that felt the slightest bit loose. All that extra tape breathed new life into Gertrude. She screamed down the in-run with same ferocity as she had the first day, but since the engine had broken off its mounts, the engine was just resting on the front axle, so as I hit the jump, the shocks compressed and the engine dug down into the dirt. As Gertrude and I left the jump, the shocks decompressed and popped us far higher then we’d gone before- perhaps 10ft above previous trajectories. As I landed getting fulling compacted in my seat, Gertrude ran no more. Gertrude’s insides laid all over the jump’s takeoff and landing with chunks of metal from the engine steaming in the dirt.
Thus ending rally fest 2010.
Check out video on Jon’s site: http://www.jon-olsson.com/?p=2666
I’m now home but I’m going to the US Open for a few days before we head back down to NZ for round 2.
lata Ted
One of the first jumps.
