SCCA

ProRally: Wild West ProRally Saturday Notes

44.) Good morning and welcome to day two of the Wild West ProRally. It's cloudier and grayer today than yesterday, but the betting is on a good day overall. The first car left Parc Expose at 8:00 a.m. and headed out into the woods for a full day of ...

Edited: Dec 21, 2009, 6:07 AM

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44.) Good morning and welcome to day two of the Wild West ProRally. It's cloudier and grayer today than yesterday, but the betting is on a good day overall. The first car left Parc Expose at 8:00 a.m. and headed out into the woods for a full day of rallying. There will be 10 stages today, including a 23-miler that will be run twice.

45.) There wasn't a whole lot of news for several hours. So it's after noon before we begin hearing what's going on out in the forest.

46.) The first to stop by the press room are Gordon Gaude and Tim Maple, who are looking a little rumpled. It turns out that they've had a big off. They got off the road on the first 23-miler, did a double roll and wound up sitting on a huge tree stump with all four wheels of their Volkswagen Golf well clear of the ground.

47.) Not quite an hour later, Doc Shrader is spotted walking across the parking lot here. It is way, way too early for him to be back. He says that he and Garen were running well on the 23-miler when the rear CV joint on the driveshaft to the rear wheels failed. At first, Garen thought they had one or two flats, because of the snaky way the car handled. He drove to the end of the stage and asked the control worker how many flats they had. When the worker replied, "none," they knew what had broken.

48.) Crew Chief Murray Thomas considered removing the driveshaft and running the Shraders' Evo IV in front-wheel-drive only. However, when they looked at the points situation and their position within the rally, they elected not to risk doing serious damage to the car. There was nothing to be gained, and a crash might keep them from getting their shot at the championship. So they retired in order to begin preparing for Maine Forest, which will take place at the end of July.

49.) Northwest performance rallying fixture John Forespring, one of the organizers of this event, has had a hard-luck weekend. He and his family had made some interesting suspension modification to his ex-police car five-liter Mustang; and he was looking forward to trying them out. Things were going along well until he doubted his navigator's word on a fast 90 left. They went off the road, lost some arguments with nearby stumps and wound up with a car that Forespring figures totaled. They're bruised but other wise okay.

50.) George Plsek is in a test mode with his Open Class Audi Coupe quattro. "I've been taking it pretty easy. Just trying to finish the rally, to test the car out."

51.) Karl Scheible and Gail McGuire are enjoying themselves in the Production Class Volkswagen New Beetle "It's going very well," said Scheible. "It's a very rough rally and due to the design of the car, we can't run very much ground clearance. So we're hitting a lot of rocks. It's kind of rough for the car. We're gonna take it easy, to make sure we finish. We've already changed a strut and I don't think we want to change any more.

52.) Noah Third figures that his Group 2 Volkswagen Rabbit has the cat-like ability of landing on it's feet. After flipping his car in Stage 8 he said, "We slid wide on a lefthander, caught a rear wheel and it flipped -- a corner over corner roll. We managed to do it without touching the roof. It collapsed the front end and did some damage to the back end as well. It felt pretty normal. I don't think we've damaged the suspension too much."

53.) After stage 9, both Hyundai's are doing fine according to the crew chief. He says everything seems to be under control. Buffum's car will certainly finish, he thinks. He says that Buffum is watching all the gauges, is really keeping his eyes open and knows when to get into the boost and when to get out of it to save the car.

54.) Paul Truess, crew chief of Production GT Mazda 323 GTX driven by Gail Truess and Cindy Krolikowski, says that things are going really well. "After the second service here, things have been going fine with the car. There have been no problems. We're checking it over really closely to make sure there is no rock damage. Some of the other people ahead of us on the road have suffered punctures. We just want to make sure that we do everything we can do to avoid something like that because there are some big rockadillos out there."

55.) After nine stages, Noel Lawler (Open Class Hyundai Tiburon) said, "It's going great. It's going brilliant. We're not even pushing awfully hard and we're leading by a fair amount. So, we're in good shape. Hopefully, it will be a promising lead and we'll win this rally."

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