The Championship Run began today with Stage 8 of the 2024 Hemmings Motor News Great Race presented by Coker Tire. The Championship Run is important, because it means no scoring legs can be thrown out. It also means that there are often more checkpoints than usual. Today, there were a total of eight checkpoints, and the route was a tough one all day long. We started at our hotels in Augusta, Maine and zig-zagged our way to a wonderful lunch stop at the Seal Cove Auto Museum. We have visited Seal Cove before (2018) and just had to come back again to view the incredible collection. After lunch, it was back on the course, which sent us into the Acadia National Park for a quick loop. The afternoon route retraced some our steps from the morning course, but ultimately led us to the Owls Head Transportation Museum. We also visited this museum in 2018 as a lunch stop, but we got to spend a little more time this year as an evening stop. The museum is packed with amazing artifacts, including airplanes, commercial trucks, beautiful cars and more. At the end of the day, the cool temperatures, brisk breeze and misty rain put a damper on the celebration, but we still saw a great crowd on hand. The Stage 8 daily winners laid down an incredible score of six seconds in a vehicle that doesn’t have an age factor, due to engine and suspension modifications. Congratulations to Eric Frankenberger and Aaron Read for an outstanding score, which moved them up to fifth place overall and first place in the Expert division by only nine hundredths of a second. Howard and Doug Sharp have the overall lead by a 2.43 second margin over Jody Knowles and Beth Gentry going into the final day of competition. It’s going to be a tight one!