After too many days of too many hours of lastminute prep, we got the car barely ready to make the event. Day 1 was only 3 stages, 35 stage miles. The 2 crane creek stages were canceled, downed trees in the road. Tahola is one of my least favorite stages and we ran it twice in one direction and once in the other. My plan was just to try to survive the day so we could do the really fun roads on sunday. So off we go, finish stage 1 and find that we put the Protege out there as 1st overall. Stage 2 we were 2nd fastest, there was a PGT Soobie that came in with a miraculous time almost a minute faster than anyone else. He never approached times like that again, so this may have been a timing error. In any case we kept the car on the road and were doing well. The Hintz bros. car, always very fast, had a busted exhaust on stage 1 and DNS stage 2 so all we had to do was finish stage 3 quickly which we did so we finished 1st in Open for day 1 and 2nd overall. Day 2 opened with 2 runs on pavement. I don't have much experience driving fast on pavement on rally tires. We played it safe and were 3rd or 4th overall after those 2 runs, then straight into Pico Left. This is a very tight tricky nasty dangerous road that I loooove to run. We did pretty good, 2nd fastest behind Hintz. Back into service, then out for Pico Right. Coming into the first acute right, we lost a boost hose and had less than 5 psi the rest of the stage, dammit. Turns out I used a T bolt clamp that was just a little too big, and in the rush, I hadn't noticed. Lesson learned. Cuz the lack of power made me miss that acute right by a little and we put the RF corner into the shallow ditch for a bit and bent what we thought was the tie rod. We got through the stage but now down 20 sec on Hintz, still 3rd overall. My crew got the leak fixed, along with reaaligning the front end, fixing a fuel leak at the filter in the trunk, and putting a new set of hard compound Michelins on the car. I haven't run hard compound before. Wanted to try em out, but this was the wrong surface and wrong temperature for those tires. Brooklyn Tavern West was very very scary on those tires, so we went with my old set of Falkens for Smith Creek stage. That was more like it. Tons and tons of grip and we set off at a very brisk pace. Then we came around a medium right and the front of the car went totally beserk. Before I could stop the car we sorta rode an embankment and took a tire off the rim. Looking at the skidmarks we could clearly see the LF wheel was scrubbing rocks to the inside, trying to steer left and go down the road, but the RF track just drove stright to the embankment; the control arm that we hit on Pico had had enough and broke... kinda hard to steer a car when a wheel declares independence. DNF for Sunday but we went down swingin'; my codriver looked at our times, and since Hintz was out from his DNF Saturday, if we had stayed on track at the pace we had, we'd have gotten the overall freaking win. This was um disappointing news. Still, Saturdays' results were a personal best.
Nothing expensive was broken. We have to unwrinkle that fender a little and replace a CV joint and reinforce a new pair of control arms. The car is going to spend some quality time with a couple REAL mechanics as opposed to myself, who will make the car reliable enough to be a real threat. Seems if we show pace to go for the overall, they think it's worth the effort. Olympus rally is mid april, we'll run it but *only* if the car is truly prepped, ahead of time...
Ooooh, someone caught us on video! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...52077502468579
Nothing expensive was broken. We have to unwrinkle that fender a little and replace a CV joint and reinforce a new pair of control arms. The car is going to spend some quality time with a couple REAL mechanics as opposed to myself, who will make the car reliable enough to be a real threat. Seems if we show pace to go for the overall, they think it's worth the effort. Olympus rally is mid april, we'll run it but *only* if the car is truly prepped, ahead of time...
Ooooh, someone caught us on video! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...52077502468579
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