soomcraft Racing

The third event in the winter rally series was called “A Relaxing Country Drive.” Jake “Guardrail” Massey took us on a 180-mile tour starting in Bloomfield and heading south through Bristol, Naples, Cohocton, Avoca, Kanona (I think — we never really know where we are) and back. Cassie navigated again, Jim rode along to witness the insanity. We had 17 cars competing, including a few first-time novices.

Brad took his first shot at navigating in George’s very photogenic Evo MR.

We got off to a good start and made it to the first few checkpoints with no problems. The roads at the beginning of the rally were mostly paved, but then we turned onto Dugway, a twisty dirt road with lots of elevation changes, over 3 miles long. It’s the road that runs from the top left to bottom right in this picture:

There was light snow and some ice on the road. About halfway through we came over a hill around a curve and saw the checkpoint sign; I hit the brakes too hard and slid off the road, stuffing the car into a ditch up to the headlights! The snow was so deep, I couldn’t even open the door to get out.

Fortunately another competitor had a shovel in the car (it looked just like the one I left on my front porch). We started to dig the car out using the shovel, an ice scraper, and our hands! The sweep truck pulled up shortly, they were pretty close behind us. The driver wanted to turn the truck around so he wouldn’t have to tow in reverse — and in the process, almost drove into the same ditch! So we pushed the truck out, and then towed the car out. No major damage; just some plastic splash guards, and the fog lights had to be re-aimed. 25 minutes later, we finally left the checkpoint. Since the off happened after the timing line, we didn’t even have to take a time allowance.

We continued on, a bit timidly at first, but got back up to speed. Cassie started checking our leg scores and we were pretty consistently around 20 hundredths… that means that we were no more than 12 seconds early or late. Things were looking good.

Just before the break we missed a route instruction somehow, a misleading tulip and/or mileage being off by just a little bit may have been involved, or maybe we weren’t paying close enough attention. We kept going but things seemed wrong; when we tried to back up we couldn’t figure out how many steps back we were going.

If you click this image to enlarge it, you can see where we were on Smith Pond Road, turning onto Smith Pond Road…

We did get back on track, but with no idea of how much time we had lost. Cassie guessed 19:50 (the maximum time allowance) and since the next checkpoint was the last before the break we didn’t get our scorecard back.

Our assigned time to leave the break point passed when we were still four miles away. We took a few minutes anyway, and another time allowance. As far behind as we were, I KNEW we shouldn’t be seeing any other cars until the end of the night. So when we came over a crest and saw a line of cars at a checkpoint, I figured something was up — sure enough, we had a left turn just before that. One seven mile loop later, we turned back onto that road for our time. (They ended up tossing that entire leg, though, because the rallies aren’t supposed to be confusing — a lot of people missed the turn and went straight into the control.)

The rest of the night continued without incident. Towards the end, some of the legs were really long, Jim definitely fell asleep and Cassie was pretty close. Despite all the excitement we thought we still had fairly good scores. Somehow we caught up enough that we were only about 10 minutes behind the last car in the rest of the group.

Back at Cheap Charlie’s restaurant, we collected our stuff out of the car and went inside to find all the competitors and workers seated, calmly eating their dinners. So I did the only reasonable thing: threw the door open and held the snow shovel above my head. We weren’t expecting applause, but I guess people heard about our incident. Alan announced that if I wanted to keep my second place trophy from the January rally, I had to tell everyone what happened. (Happened? I just drove off the road… no big deal!)
Scores were posted and then recalculated. We finished first in class (out of 5 cars) with a score of 233. Wow!! 8th overall! I didn’t really think it would be that low. Even the last checkpoint before the break, after we got lost and stopped counting, we were only off by 28 hundredths!
So there you have it, our first victory in the winter series! Thanks to everyone who made the event happen!

Link to the results: http://www.flr-scca.com/rally/2007/WinterEvent3-Results.pdf
I leave you with a shot of the unavoidable dirt.