2019 100 Acre Wood Rally
- unamusedrallysport
- Mar 30, 2019
- 3 min read
We finished the 2019 American Rally Association 100 Acre Wood Rally ... kind of! We had a great time as always despite a pretty big screw up from me. Awesome roads, friendly competition, comradery, and fans! Definitely our favorite rally and rally town!!!
Day 1 started out uneventful. Kevin Young of Poor Boy Racing was hammering down early to put some time on us. Of course we had to fight back! We clawed some time back after service until we found out that they suffered one of the many engine failures that occurred that weekend. By stage 8, we were sitting comfortable in a national podium position, however, the last turn of the last stage would ruin our chances for a decent result.
The roads were dark and with fog beginning to settle in, the dust was no longer clearing. I missed the call out for a L3 and by the time we were out of the dust, the turn was behind us and we were on a collision course with a huge fence post. We hit the post at about 10-15mph. Luckily the ground was so saturated that the post laid over causing only minor flesh wounds. Several spectators rushed over to give us a hand trying to free the car. These guys were awesome! Thank you! As they were pushing and getting muddy, the upper radiator hose burst (unrelated to the crash). Unfortunately, we would be stuck here until Jon Fugina yanked us out as our skid plate had dug in to the post and the car would not budge. Time card turned in, rally over. 😩
We were then flat towed to service to load up our bruised machine. Pack it up or #pressonregardless? The skid plate came out and we were able to strategically flatten it enough to remount it by driving over it repeatedly with Vince Donan and Misha Avrushenko's trucks. We borrowed the radiator hose from Kevin's car and put in a fairly late night to ensure that we could continue for day 2.
Day 2! Parc expose gave us a pretty good scare. We had driven the car the previous night and morning to make sure that the car was race-able and our fixes had held. No issues. However, after we had been in parc expose for 5min, steam began pouring from the hood vents. The new to us radiator hose had sprung a leak from the previous hose clamp location! Thankfully, we were able to press it on further to stop the leak and top off the radiator with our water bottles.
Since we were out of the race, we planned to take the day fairly easy and bring the car home in one piece. That didn't mean that we wouldn't still #sendit over the cattle guard though! We used our road time as practice to learn how to left foot brake, try different turn in techniques, and, of course, put on a show at the spectator points! (Tag us in any pictures or videos!). We put down a few respectable times and had some fun. The car drove onto the trailer at the end of the day without any additional off-road excursions which is exactly what we wanted.
Thanks to all of the Salem, Missouri locals, volunteers, paramedics, 100AW Performance Rally Group, and the American Rally Association for putting on another great event! Vince was awesome servicing the vehicle as usual! Congrats to Jeff Hueser and Dylan Stevens for a well deserved 2nd place. We will be gunning for you next year 😉. Thanks to Kyle Williams and Dylan for the places to sleep and thanks to Kevin for letting us rob parts off of his car! Also, SORRY for the owner of the fence post that we plowed over!!!
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