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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

First rally, Finished! Doo Wops was great.

The first rally in the new car was this past weekend. The Doo Wops Rally, in Aberdeen, Washington.

The rally went FANTASTICALLY.

The only down side was that Dan couldn't make it.

However, at Dan's insistence, I took the car and shook it down along side longtime rallier Paul Eklund, who navigated for the event. Paul filled in at the last minute, also after having provided lots of advice on the build of the car, and providing many parts through his Primitive Enterprises.

Our goal for the weekend was modest: Finish the rally.

We set the car up for the minimum turbo boost on Saturday and I set out learning how to drive a turbo all wheel drive car. The first stage was tarmac- a good thing because it's more predictable than gravel. Then we moved to a couple of gravel stages. Our stage times were upper third. On the last two stages, which were 80% tarmac, we set top 5 times. On the Saturday rally, we finished 4th overall, out of 28 entrants.

On Saturday night, we washed the car and put some fuel in it. It's nice to have a car that's perfect, especially on the first rally. And this just shows how excellent the work was that all of our supporters did.

Sundays stages had more gravel. I learned a lot about using my left foot to brake- A common technique for making the car turn better on loose surfaces. We did turn the boost up one notch, and the car's power really was surprising. The first two stages were very marbly, and my confidence was still not high enough to be very fast. As the day progressed, we got faster. In the end, we finished 6th overall, behind some very formidable competitors.

Here are some links to some photos, videos, and results. Also keep an eye on the blog for more media as it becomes available.

Video by Doug Powell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afTGK_Myzr4


Video by Mike Schmeling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA6q8yIW2KQ 



Some good photos:

Here's the car at Parc Expose...

Here's our car parked next to the other RalliTEK car owned by Mark Mager. Mark's wing is cooler than ours.
Here's an awesome photo taken by Timm Von Derau on the Palix Stage...

Paul is way better at spraying champagne than I am...
Here's the whole 2010 Doo Wops team: Nicole Carrick, Sean Sexton, Bill Kostich, Paul Ekund, Doug Heredos, Doug Powell, Patrick Carrick...

Saturday Results
Sunday Results

Our next rally is the Olympus Rally, April 24-25. Hope to see you there!

Doug

1 comment:

Mom/Mommo said...

Looks like you guys did an awesome job! Congratulations on success in your first race. I think you need to practice with the champagne a little, you'll need to know how with all the wins you're going to have.