Photo credit: Kurt Womack
Well we did it. With our 1st in Production AWD class/3rd overall finish at Prescott, we clinched the United States Rally Championship Production AWD Cup. Prescott was an awesome awesome rally. I thought the drop-offs at Gorman were bad but Prescott made those seem like child's play. I spent the first day getting used to ridiculous, RI-DICULOUS speeds. No amount of training prepares you for cornering at 100+mph.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2c81YWsMWM&hd=1[/video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J_TbQGEThc&hd=1[/video]
To give you a taste of what Prescott was like, imagine doing a track weekend except, the entire course runs over a fine, loose gravel surface. Now imagine flat footing it over completely blind turns. Add some sheer cliffs on either side of the turn and a dose of car eating ditches, and you're starting to get the picture.
It was great to see some familiar faces from Gorman Ridge rally. Like most rallies, Prescott had her fair share of cars. Hoche-mong/O'Hanlon, went off on stage 2, when they hit a bank. The dust got the best of Psara/Fahring and sent them off on a fast corner on stage 3, a night stage. On the first stage of the second day, Cem / Mustafa clipped the inside of a wall, spun, and came within inches of falling off the cliff edge. And proving that the rally ain't over till it's over, Joseph Burke/Alex Kihurani rolled their evo on the last turn of the very last stage, Gate/Hegel blew a a rear tire 1.5 miles from the end of the last stage and drove on it to finish, and we discovered that we too had shred one of our tires on the last stage and had to change it before transiting to finish! What an exciting rally!
Photo credit: TurnDriverSide.com
All in all, i'm pretty pleased to wrap up our first season rallying. We started off with a bang at International Rally New York, finishing 1st in class, 2nd overall. We ran our first canadian/winter rally at Perce-Neige, followed by our first tarmac rally; Rally NY USA. We got to compete at Hyperfest rallysprint at Summit Point and take the overall win - the same event that we were volunteers at the year before. We got to go to our first west coast rally, Gorman Ridge, won the overall AWD class, and followed that up another overall AWD win at Black River Stages, the rally we had originally planned to start at. We capped off the season at the legendary Prescott with our 6th class win since we started our rally adventure less than a year ago.
Those performances led up to us winning the 2012 USRC Production AWD Cup, but i'm also elated to be able to say that despite running an underpowered production class car, we also finished 2nd in the overall United States Rally Championship, against a field of predominantly open class cars. (we would have finished first had one of our scores not been dropped). Can't wait for 2013 - have some things lined up for the upcoming year i can't wait to unveil
!
