Still recovering from the weekend.. I wasn't planning on running this rally but decided at the last minute to try to get the car ready, which mostly meant retrofitting my old GTX shocks to fit the rallyprotege...This turned out to be not easy. But, mostly, everything else on the car seemed ready to rumble so off we went on a 6 hour tow to Pomeroy, WA, for a brand-new location for a rally. We get there and find the revised start order. Fastest drivers start first, and on down from there. They have us starting 2nd....no pressure...
The main worry with a new unfamiliar event is, how accurate is the route book? Mostly, it was pretty good, 'cept for one corner about a mile into the very first stage, it said, "over crest into downhill easy right" and it shoulda said "over crest into double caution immediate downhill hard right ditch outside" and we kinda rode that ditch a while and took the LF tire off the wheel. Tried to finish the stage like that but it was beating the car up too bad so we stopped and put the spare on. Well, that thing broke apart about 3 miles later. So there we are, no spare, 2 dead tires. We took it off the front, and put it on the rear, and that way we had 2 good tires up front so I could steer. We got through the stage, raced the next stage on 3 tires, and made it into service. We thought the only damage was to the tire, but from then on, the car just didn't wannna run right. Way, way down on power and we still don't know why. But it got so bad that we just let the last 3 stages of the day go. We would have lost a drag race to a Geo Metro, there was no point in thrashing on it under those conditions; not when we were at the bottom of the pack after losing 2 tires on one stage. All the same, we were lucky; 4 other cars got totalled on that one corner.
Day 2 and the car isn't running very well at all but it's a bit better after plugs and filterchange and such. But by by the end of stage 1 it's back down to about 100 hp again and I got a bit frustrated.... stage 3 comes and I drove that fuquer at 10/10ths, almost never lifted off the gas and won the stage. The rest of the field musta been napping! And then on the last stage of the day, a repeat of the one we won, some power magically showed up at around 4 grand and we took 22 sec off our time. We ended up 4th in class for the day and called it good. The car needs some serious luvin', which it's gonna get before the next rally. We're talking GT28RS, new ECU, new suspension, not old GTX handmedowns. But that rally was FANTASTIC... fabulous roads, short transit stages, enthusiastic locals (one stage got lengthened a little bit becasue a homeowner wanted the cars racing past his house, and the local cops came out and radared us on a few of the long straights so we could seee how fast we were all going), great organization. Next year it's gonna be even better.
The main worry with a new unfamiliar event is, how accurate is the route book? Mostly, it was pretty good, 'cept for one corner about a mile into the very first stage, it said, "over crest into downhill easy right" and it shoulda said "over crest into double caution immediate downhill hard right ditch outside" and we kinda rode that ditch a while and took the LF tire off the wheel. Tried to finish the stage like that but it was beating the car up too bad so we stopped and put the spare on. Well, that thing broke apart about 3 miles later. So there we are, no spare, 2 dead tires. We took it off the front, and put it on the rear, and that way we had 2 good tires up front so I could steer. We got through the stage, raced the next stage on 3 tires, and made it into service. We thought the only damage was to the tire, but from then on, the car just didn't wannna run right. Way, way down on power and we still don't know why. But it got so bad that we just let the last 3 stages of the day go. We would have lost a drag race to a Geo Metro, there was no point in thrashing on it under those conditions; not when we were at the bottom of the pack after losing 2 tires on one stage. All the same, we were lucky; 4 other cars got totalled on that one corner.
Day 2 and the car isn't running very well at all but it's a bit better after plugs and filterchange and such. But by by the end of stage 1 it's back down to about 100 hp again and I got a bit frustrated.... stage 3 comes and I drove that fuquer at 10/10ths, almost never lifted off the gas and won the stage. The rest of the field musta been napping! And then on the last stage of the day, a repeat of the one we won, some power magically showed up at around 4 grand and we took 22 sec off our time. We ended up 4th in class for the day and called it good. The car needs some serious luvin', which it's gonna get before the next rally. We're talking GT28RS, new ECU, new suspension, not old GTX handmedowns. But that rally was FANTASTIC... fabulous roads, short transit stages, enthusiastic locals (one stage got lengthened a little bit becasue a homeowner wanted the cars racing past his house, and the local cops came out and radared us on a few of the long straights so we could seee how fast we were all going), great organization. Next year it's gonna be even better.
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