Wow! What a great past few days.
The weekend started off with a head to head stage around the dirt in the stadium. We went up against a Subie WRX. He spanked us down the front and back straight away, but Dean smoked the corners and we came right down to the wire. Dean stayed in the throttle the entire way around the last turn which was about 270 degrees and we passed through the finish line a second ahead of him! It was spectacular, the announcer couldn't believe that a Suzuki had beat down a WRX...
The next couple of stages didn't go quite as well as the fog rolled in and our headlights were pointed up a little high and were bouncing light right back in our faces. But we ended the night 4th in class and in front of a lot of fast cars.
Unfortunately, at the start of the morning stages our window wouldn't roll up (it's illegal to run a stage with the window down). So we spent a long time ripping the door skin out, unscrewing the window, and duct taping it in place. When we finally started we were behind a few slower cars and ended up passing two of them, which slowed us down a little. On the next stage, we again got caught behind a slower car; this time the dust was so severe we didn't get a chance to pass and our time suffered considerably.
That brought us into another stadium race again against a WRX. Yet again, the Reno crossed the line first bringing about plenty of cheers from the grandstand. We headed back out to the mountains and ran three great stages, making up a lot of the time we had lost on the previous stages. Came back to the third and final grandstand stage where we faced a fast Eclipse GSX. We gave him a great race, but in the end he nailed the last corner and took the tape. Dean had, however, turned in his fastest stadium time of the race. Before that stage started we had yet another window malfunction that we would have to fix before the next stage.
During transit to our final mountain stages we were experiencing horrible front end vibration. We pulled over a number of times to check the obvious things and found nothing wrong. Finally we thought that we might have some mud lodged in the wheels and sure enough, we got out and scraped off a few pounds worth of mud from the left front wheel. That, coupled with the window fix kept us from getting to the start line on time and we had to take a time penalty. About two miles into that stage we lost the lights and were forced to run at about 75% speed. We fixed the lights just before the last stage and figured we could finally get a great stage run to the finish. But about two and a half miles into the stage we encountered a competitor who had crashed into the side of the mountain and was blocking the whole course. We pulled him back onto the course, but lost a few minutes doing it. Just glad they were OK though.
So with all of that, we finished our second consecutive Rim of the World! We ended up finishing 3rd in class and 16th overall. Another success for the Reno. We had very few problems, and none that kept us going fast, except the lights. Thanks for all of the support guys! Next race -> Treeline, right in our backyard in the middle of July...
Rally on!
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