2022 Missouri Ozark Rally
- unamusedrallysport
- Nov 13, 2022
- 3 min read
Missouri Ozark Rally recap time! This was an interesting rally for sure. A new hosting location, new roads, and a new co-driver. This was James's first rally in the car and our primary goal for the weekend was to see how we meshed before moving on to note rallies where the corner commitment is much higher.
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The weekend looked to be a wet one. The days leading up to the event, the weather each day was changing except for Saturday. Instead of removing rain from the forecast, the chance of storms continued to creep up to 100%. No problem. We were going to take it easy anyway. At least there wouldn't be dust!
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In the early morning before the event, it absolutely poured to where we had to bail out nearly 3" of water behind the seats (no idea where that's coming in from). We got our service area quickly set up and headed out to Parc Expose at the City of Houston Missouri fairgrounds. There was a 15 car field consisting of nearly all St. Louis area local teams, which was more than anticipated for this event.
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Stages 1, 3 , 5, and 7 we're the same 7+ mi road run in both directions while stages 2, 4, 6, and 8 were shortened to slightly longer than 2mi. We started stage 1 second on the road. This proved to be the most fun stage with some WOT sections, tight corners, and a beautiful hairpin that all flowed together relatively well. We put down a decent time the first run and bettered it on the second. The other road, however, did not flow that well. This short stage caught many competitors out contributing to very high attrition. At least 2 competitors slid off into a berm doing significant damage to their cars. We slid off at the same corner but escaped relatively unscathed due to a cautious first pass. We ended up with only a slightly bent lateral link.
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Service was, luckily, nothing more than snack time since it got cut from 45min to 25min due to numerous stage start delays. We headed back out to do all of the stages in reverse order. The short stage was even more unnerving in reverse with a lot of "gotchas" that didn't exist in the opposite direction. We kept it tame and relatively drama-free since it was raining pretty hard at points.
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Stage 6 was NOT drama-free, unfortunately. There were issues with keeping the stage clear and the roads closed by the 0 car and Troubleshooting. At one point, a local on his side-by-side arrived at the start in the opposite direction we were about to race. That's terrifying. At that point, the right call was made to cancel the rest of the stages. We were forced to transit the rest of the stage and turn in our time cards.
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In the end, we walked away with a win in class and overall! James did great with everything as he adapted to what I was used to from Rachel. We can't wait to get back out there to keep up this momentum. We wished we would have gotten to finish all of the stages, but we understand things happen. Also, the new intake worked splendidly! No issues with water on the maf!
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Thanks to all of the volunteers and 100 Acre Wood Rally group for putting on a great event! Thanks to Houston and Cabool, Missouri for being great hosts. And, as always, thank you to Misha Avrushenko for the continued use of Recce Riccardo.
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J-Spec Auto Sports Inc.
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Photos by Memories in the Fast Lane
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