[thechat] Car/Racing Nerds (was Gas Prices)
Judah McAuley
judah at alphashop.com
Fri Apr 13 11:22:43 CDT 2001
I am a car nerd in the making. Don't really have enough money to be a good
car nerd. But the family hobby is putting on ProRally and RallyCross
events. Last weekend I was in Tillamook, OR to put on the Oregon Trail Pro
Rally (http://www.oregontrailrally.com/ It has some great photos). This
year I finally got around to getting my Ham license, so I was working
communications controls.
We had 61 entries from US, Canada, and the UK this year. It was a pretty
good event this year, although the weather was a bit freakish. We're about
20 inches of rain shy of where we should be this time of year (bad drought
coming this summer) and didn't have much of a winter this year. But the
weather tried to make up for it last weekend. We had sun, rain, sleet,
hail, and snow pretty much constantly. It made for some pretty spectacular
crashes, although no one was hurt thankfully. Best two crashes of the
event: Noel Lawler in his 600 hp Hyundai Tiburon hit an obstacle at about
100mph, flipped end over end, and ended upside down in a creek. No
injuries and, sadly, no in car camera footage. Other best crash: A VW Golf
slides through a snowy downhill corner, goes off the road about 50 ft, down
a 30 ft cliff (wheels below him) and lands squarely on a fallen 4 ft
diameter tree. Driver and Co-Driver were ok, and with the aid of a tow
truck crane and 3 cars with winches, we were able to extract the car and it
drove out under its own power.
I've got to say that this year the Brits really showed us how Rally is
run. Brits finished 1-2 this year (2001 Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi EVO
IV). Previously the Tiburons were the hot cars on the block. Parity was
reached this year with Mitsubishi and Subaru taking the top 6 and 4 of the
top 10 spots respectively. This year also marks the US entrance of the
European ProDrive group and also brought the US it's first official FIA
sanctioned Rally.
Ok, I'm just about done being a rally nerd for the morning. And for any of
you with high bandwidth connections, here is a pretty good RealVideo file
of some of the action. It includes a nice rollover around a corner.
http://www.subiegal.com/images/Movie/SCCA2001.ram
Sigh, back to work now.
Judah
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