Jennifer Rudder:What is wrong with a little rain to keep the dust down? As long as it is not raining all day the gravel tires will be fine.
LOL, so it was you who brought that storm upon us
And, FWIW, when it did stop raining for the night stages, it was dusty/foggy....
I'm going to keep this short as I feel another nap coming on and I'll post a full account of rally #3 in a few days.
The short version is that we had a great time. I'd like to thank Cody for his great job calling the notes and keeping us on time (mostly). I definitely owe a debt of gratitude to my fantastic crew of Jeef, Phil C and James E for creative and quick fixes and care of the rally car in entirely too miserable of conditions. Without them we never would have finished. Its also important to thanks Scott at Izzy's Custom Cages, Dave at SPS, and Mark & John with 321GoVideo.com for all their support which is the only reason I could take the start in the first place.
Fri. went better than expected. We finished 7th out of 27? regional competitors and 2nd out of 5 in regional PGT. It took some getting adjusting using the Stage Notes but Cody and I got on the same page (tee hee) more or less from SS2 onwards.
Sat. went even better. We hoped to maintain 2nd in class (and thus the regional championship) as 1st was way faster than us. However, at least one of the people behind us had a faster WRX but had had some mechinical and driving issues the day before and was a few minutes down on us. It got close for a while, especially as we picked up a 90sec penalty and put 3 of us within a minute of each other after nearly an hour of racing! We pushed and persevered, so focused on stage that we didn't realize the busted up WRX we passed on the last stage was the first place car. This we were told as we entered the finish, much to our suprise. It made waiting for our other competitors to show up very nerve wracking as that not only put us in 1st place for the rally, but also 1st for the Regional Rally Championship. When our nearest competitor showed up on a tow rope, it started sinking in that we had just won a national championship. It honestly hasn't sunk in completely yet. For the day we finished 5th overall and 1st in class. I think we were something like 18th overall out of 58 starters (including everybody, regional & national) and fourth in class, which is pretty amazing given that I finished around 30/50 last year.
Well, that's more than I had planned to write and I'm still very excited, but the details will have to wait for later
Jeff Templeton
00 Impreza RS-671 PGT
Special Thanks to:
Izzy's Custom Cages321GoVideo.comSolo Performance Specialties