May 6 was the first day of competition. We drove over to the Tire Rack headquarters and prepared for the wet skidpad challenge. Somehow in spite of bringing along the Trailex trailer with two lockable storage boxes, we still had a few things in the car to remove – duffel bags with our clothes, a small bag of food, and a few other miscellaneous items.
The back of our Fiesta drew a big crowd at Tire Rack…wait no…that was the Roadkill guys. Their assigned parking spot was right behind ours, so there was a crowd of people gathered around to see what they were up to. I hadn’t heard of Roadkill before, but now I’m kind of curious what they do…
As he had been doing for something like 20 years, the Swiss chocolatier Robert Dubler and a few of his associates showed up, this year in a pack of identically-prepared Chevy HHR SSs. They handed out some yummy treats to all of the teams! I figured out later these were not for kids; they were all infused with different types of alcohol. For the record, bourbon and dark chocolate are two flavors that go together surprisingly well.
Pretty soon it was down to business! We spotted the other Econo car and it looked pretty mean...#37 was a newer VW Rabbit that had been lowered and had some wide wheels and fender flares. Most of the interior was gone, leaving only a couple of racing seats - the “Killer Rabbit” name the team had chosen seemed pretty appropriate.
The Killer Rabbit did kill us at the wet skid pad. In fact, most of the cars killed us - we finished 61st out of 68, and 68th was the Griswold family wagon. The Bridgestones could only muster about 0.6G in the cold conditions. The stock Focus RS on Michelins took top prize in the wet skid pad challenge.
We were off to Grissom AFB in Peru, IN right after that for the autocross. I had been looking forward to the autocross since the event schedule was posted, and I was eager to see what the Fiesta could do - hopefully better than 61 out of 68! It was my first time at the site...it was big, flat, and on the day we were there at least, it was very, very windy. The Indy Region SCCA hosted us and set up a fast, fun course.
Photo: Highland Design Studio
I was fairly happy with my first run, which put us into the upper half of the pack, but then everyone started to learn the course and get faster. I still managed to shed a couple of seconds and not hit any cones on my third and final run:
The autocross worked out much better for us than the wet skid pad - we ended up 38th out of 67 starters - not too shabby!
As soon as we were done, it was back to the paddock to hitch up the trailer and head to Memphis. It was about 3pm and we still had about 8 hours of driving ahead of us. Our route took us pretty close to the Mississippi River valley in a few places and we could see the results of all the rain...in some places the water seemed like it was not all that far from the road!
We reflected on some of the bad weather or after-effects of bad weather that we had seen before on One Lap.
In 2007 the route took us from Pueblo, CO (Pueblo Motorsports) to Jennings, OK (Hallett), but somewhere in the western tip of the Oklahoma panhandle in the middle of the night we hit something and blew a rear tire. We only had one spare wheel/tire in the MR2 and it was for the front, so we limped along to a tire place and slept in the car until they opened. In the morning while everyone else was starting the first time trial at Hallett, we were getting a random tire of roughly the right diameter mounted on the wheel to get us back to Cincinnati where I had an official OLOA spare. We didn't want to try a track event on the random all-season tire, and we could only score points using the event tires, so as soon as the tire was mounted, we started the ~16 hour drive back to Cincy. Our route took us through Greensburg, KS, but unbeknownst to us, the town had been demolished the night before by tornadoes. We knew something was up when we were sitting in traffic for a long time - this was before either of us had smart phones - but we finally got to a point where an emergency worker was diverting traffic. We asked what was going on, and I can't remember exactly what the worker said, but it was something to the effect of "The town up ahead is not there anymore - only local and emergency traffic." Suddenly our tire problem, missed event, long wait in traffic, and long drive to Cincy didn't seem so bad. We got back to Cincy around 3 or 4am, slept a couple hours, then showed up at Walmart at 7am with our spare (they opened earlier than any other tire place)...then we re-joined the One Lap in Indy.
Back to 3 weeks ago...it was a bright and sunny for the drive to Memphis. The first transit was not bad at all; we were at the hotel by 11:30 or so, and in bed a little after midnight.
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