2011 Sno*Drift Day 2: Stages 1-7

We kicked off the morning by attending another mandatory novice seminar, and then we tried to rush to the Practice Stage in the half hour or so that we had left. We got there with 15 minutes to spare and promptly found that we had low pressure in one of our tires, so we spent the whole 15 minutes seeking out a team that would "lend" us some air and eventually didn't get to do practice. Bleh.

While we were gone, our crew found us a really good spot for service in Lewiston, just outside of a nice restaurant/bar. We all hung out in service for a bit as Brandon and Dmitriy cooked up some food and made some coffee.

We were both pretty anxious to get going, so we were pretty happy when it was time to leave Parc Exposé on our way to the first stage.

The stages were great, and we were going even faster than I expected after recce. After a couple of wild corners on SS1, Sean got the hang of driving on the surface and we started going really fast. In fact, we had to make two passes on stage, which was exciting. Here's a video of us running SS3: East Fish Lake.



Somewhere in the middle, we get caught out behind an Open Light Subaru and after some frustration, we passed them in a huge spectator area. It was pretty exciting. By the time we got back to service, everybody had heard about this story and it had really grown in scale. Now people thought that we entered the corner side by side and we almost hit them...and they were 12 feet tall and ate children! It was crazy. We rolled back into service after the infamous Ranch stage which is rough and tight, and really didn't have a lot for the crew to do. The car held up great. We pretty much installed and aimed the lights and checked that all parts and fluids were still present (they were).

And off we went on the night stages. Halfway through SS6 Greasy Fishlab (I love that name), I started feeling a little bit motion sick which sucked. Then, we had a very short transit to SS7 Orchard Lake so I had no time to recover and then we embarked on the longest stage of the rally. I managed to survive and Sean drove admirably with my kind of distant note-reading. I made it all the way to the control at the end of the stage and politely asked if I could use their woods. That sucked, but at least I didn't throw up in the car. I think I'll put on a new Scopolamine patch tonight.

Now we're all very tired, and we resume the second half of the rally tomorrow morning with Parc Exposé in Atlanta at 8AM. I'm excited but apprehensive. Rally is hard. The results haven't been published as of the writing of this post, but I'll try to get them up when they get posted.