This morning we left Hershey, PA, in perfect weather for rallying.  Molly ran great all day without a hiccup.  The navigator did perfect, until after the last timed section.  More about that later.  The driver did a little better and we ended up with a total score for the day of 12.45 seconds.  We placed 16th overall out of the 54 remaining cars and managed to do better than some of the Grand Champion and Expert division cars.  We are in the Sportsman division.  As you may remember from our previous blogs two days ago we averaged about 10 seconds per hour late.  Yesterday we adjusted the speedometer to make us earlier and we ended up about 8 seconds per hour early on each leg.  So today we set the speedometer halfway in between and we ended up with scores of 2 seconds late, 2 seconds late, 3 seconds early and 8 seconds early, which was a good balance.  We will probably leave it alone for tomorrow.

Even with our good score today, overall we only moved up from 50th place to 47 place due to the DNFs on the first two days.  Maybe with a good score we can move up to 46 position tomorrow!!!!  Through today each team in our division was able to throw out their worst 5 legs.  The Championship run starts tomorrow and teams must use their scores for all legs.

After we finished the last timed section today we missed the turn to get to Binghamton, NY, for dinner and ended up in Endicott before we realized we missed the turn.  We raced back and found the turn and drove quickly into Binghamton and were one of the last cars to arrive for dinner (no penalty).  As we arrived at the grand party put on by the town we found that we had a major gasoline leak on one of the fittings that we installed to fix the vapor lock problem.  It was a quick fix. 

We fixed the speedometer problems on the first day by installing a separate motorcycle battery to run the speedometer.  We charged it before day 2 and since the speedometer draws very little current we have not recharged it since.  Well today it quit during the lunch break.  We scurried off to an auto parts store during our lunch break and bought a new battery which solved the problem.  So we lucked out today with two problems occuring when we were off the clock.  You can bet that both batteries are on the charger tonight!

We still don’t have an ace, so we will push for that tomorrow.