Shooting Star Club Rally

[sideways motorsports]

slower than I would like. But that is more up to my budget than anything else.

Dan

[sideways motorsports]

So how did the event turn out ??? Storys.........


Dan

[MATCHBX]

Actually the event was really good. We were desparately short of workers but we pulled it off. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what to do.

As for the course, it held up real well. Of course we only had 13 cars running it. 10 of which finished. We had 2 electrical failures and one high centered off.

I got to see 3 deer, 2 rabbits, one beaver (that was sitting in the middle of the road gnawing on a branch and never moved when we drove past it) and one half-grown black bear. And that was all before the end of stage 1!!!!!! I was running 00 car for the first stage. Then Mark Larson (Rallymaster and 0 car) had to be pulled off the road to become a marshal at the end of stage 1. That meant I got to run 0 car for stage 2!!!! We made it thru stage 2 without incident. At that point the rally was only a few minutes behind schedule. Stage 3 ended up starting 10 minutes late and we were back to driving 00 car. Unfortunately the long stages took it's toll on my co-driver who started to feel a little woozy at about the middle of stage 3. She never got sick though. I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants to finish the stage as she couldn't read every instruction to me, only the marshal points and the hazards were all I needed. We were about 1.5 miles from the end of stage one when we heard over the net that start of 3 had released it's first competitor car!!!!!! We weren't the finish yet and there were rally cars in the stage. Thankfully though, the stage was nearly 25 miles long so we had a good 30 minutes to get set up before the first car got there. We got set up quick and had about 10 minutes to spare before the first car reached the finish. Oh yeah, forgot to say, the lead cars (000, 00 and 0) were the finish control for stage 3. You think that's funny, the sweep team was the start control for stage 1. Try to remember a time when both of those things happened at the same rally and were pulled off flawlessly!!!

All in all it was a good rally. There were things that could've been improved and things that were just fine the way they were. Most of the competitors were happy with the course and the accomodations. Some complained about too much of the stages run in the dark but they just need to grow a hairy set!!!! One and a half stages were in the day light so half the rally was during light hours. We are looking into running it again next year so stay tuned for further details.