Friday, JUNE 10, 2011

This is Bill’s short blog update since it is 11 pm.  Today started with mentoring a rookie team.  Each rookie team has a mentor.  (This was my idea which GR decided to use).  Our rookie team did fine, even getting on ace today.  The rest of the morning was filled with Rally School.  The the Trophy (practice) rally started at noon and finished at 4 pm.  Our speedometer immediately started acting up again and we finally disconnected it for the rest of the day and ran the rally on gut instinct and hacking off of other teams.  We did pretty good with scores of 1sec, 47 sec (wasted one min. working on speedo), 16 sec, 5 sec, and 3 sec.  We finished in 30th position out of 59 cars.  Not bad for not having any speedometer.  If we had not stopped to try to fix it we would have scored much better.

Best time for today was  2.51 seconds TOTAL score!!!!  Our total was 59.6 seconds.

Had big kickoff dinner in Corky’s museum tonight.  This was followed by a mad rush to the parts store to get a motorcycle battery and misc supplies to put the speedometer on a completely separate electrical circuit.  Ran brief test and it seems OK.  Tomorrow will tell.

Also tightened fan belt this morning and ended up with a horrible noise near the fan.  Loosened (sp?) the belt and the noise reduced but did not go away.  Had no time to do further work, so drove car anyway.  Noise seemed to get better during the day.  Had no time to fix tonight so we will see what tomorrow brings. 

Car is running cool in these extreme temperatures which is very good.

More excitement tomorrow with the big kickoff and then over the mountains to Maggie Valley, NC.