Black River Stages - Actually Rallying

I'm lazy so I didn't update yesterday after our first day of rallying in New York. We had heard a lot of stories about waiting around at stage starts during NASA events, but we didn't realize how totally un-exaggerated those stories actually were. At the very first special stage, everybody just sat and waited for nearly an hour because the emergency crews weren't in place yet to be able to run the stage. We waited around a lot more than that at other stages, though one time was because two Evo X's went off badly enough on SS4 that the stage was canceled. In the end, we only ran 4 of the 9 planned stages. So...that was disappointing, but a good way to get familiar with rally again.

Here we are leaving Parc Exposé

Day 2 was more interesting, though we still ended up with a stage cancellation due to delays. The stages were really exciting though, with some big air on the first two stages and some fast but fairly technical elements on the other three. There was a lot more waiting around too, which can be fun when used to socialize with our fellow rallyists, but not as cool when it causes a stage cancellation.

One of the most exciting stages was Goose Pond which is known for being pretty heavy on the jumps. It did not disappoint. At one point, we ended up so detached from the ground that we had no chance of correcting our trajectory and ended up shooting off toward the side of the road. Sean had the wherewithal to correct it though, and I didn't really understand the severity of the situation until I watched this video. Excuse the terrible camera placement that heavily overemphasizes the importance of the rear view mirror...

Crazy jumps at about 0:30

As much as I'm complaining about missing a stage though, we ended up being very lucky that the stage was canceled because our fuel gauge lied to us and we ran out of gas while on the transit back to service. If we had tried to run the final stage, we would have ended up with a DNF. Which would have sucked. Thanks to Michael Hall and Carl Lynn in the super badass Mitsu Mighty Max for flat towing us back to the finish of the rally.


The adventure wasn't over though, as when scores were posted, we were showing up as last place by a MASSIVE margin due to a one hour (!) penalty. The penalty notice said "At TC14B was due at 16:39:00 but arrived at 15:39:00." This was ridiculous because it meant that we traveled at least 30 minutes back in time during service, so I filled out an inquiry form to get that changed. I didn't really know how to state it, so I did it bluntly.

This actually worked

So we got our hour back and ended up finishing in 3rd place in Open 2WD Light, just a single second out of second place. I'm happy with it though.


The other thing is that this was Dmitriy's first rally in his new car and on the suspension that I built, so I was being paranoid and asking him about it after every stage. It seems to be holding together just great and Dmitriy has been saying that it's performing well, so that was a huge relief.

Gorgeous car!

They ended up third in Open 2WD Heavy, so overall this rally was a great success! Huge thanks to our crew chief, Kyle Steinkamp, and our transporter/random advice giver Matt Bushore for getting us through this weekend.