I went into 100 Acre Wood knowing it would be a battle. My goal for the weekend was the RRC, with a secondary goal of 2wd overall. I had no idea we’d take so many knockout punches. But, much like Rocky, we made it to the finish. Unfortunately, this was Rocky I, and we lost.

Round 1: We started out fast and aggressive. I wanted to put enough time on Greenhouse early to make him either push hard enough to crash, or give up and try for second. We set the fastest 2wd time, and took an 11 second lead in the RRC.

Round 2: I was having trouble committing to the 5’s, and we lost the 2wd time to Burak, but put another 3 seconds on Greenhouse.

Round 3: Seeing the results at service, I decided to step it up a notch and try to beat Burak again. I lost the rear end over a crest in the middle of a R6> and almost saw the end of the rally. After the impact, the car was noisy and the steering wheel was cocked 90 degrees to the left, but we finished the stage (and put another 3 seconds on Greenhouse). After the finish we saw that the front right tire was now rubbing on the fender, the axle was banging against the subframe, the right side tires were full of treebark, and I no longer had any rear brakes (tore a line).

Rounds 4 & 5: Surprisingly, the car wasn’t actually handling too bad. But braking was sketchy, and with no rear brakes, I couldn’t use LFB to get the car to rotate. Also, anytime I compressed the suspension, the axle noises got a bit worse. I passed Greenhouse stopped on SS4, and decided to take it easy to keep my RRC hopes alive, giving up on the 2wd victory. Amazingly, we still finished in first place G2 for the Friday regional, and were seconds out of 3^rd in 2wd overall.

After we got back to Salem, I called Ron and made him drive back down from Rolla to help fix the car. We got the rear line changed, bled the brakes, changed the front A-arm & steering end. The good news was, I had spares. The bad news was they weren’t in great shape. The spherical bearing on the A-arm was loose, and the tie rod was rusted frozen. We used the ball joint to adjust toe and eyeballed the alignment the best we could.

Round 6-9: Snow was back at 100AW for day 2. I still had a decent lead on McClelland, so I played it safe. The car was floating around under power, and I couldn’t trust the handling on the high speed corners. We gave up quite a bit of time to Greenhouse, but maintained our lead in the RRC.

Round 10 was short and sweet. Greenhouse tried to goad me into a side bet for the SuperSpecial, but I was sticking to my “drive to finish” gameplan.

On the transit to number 11, the ISV started acting up. I unplugged it and the car was back to normal.

Round 11 looked to have decent grip, and I opened it up to see what I could do. But whether it was the car or my driving, I wasn’t able to match Greenhouse and only got the 3^rd fastest 2wd time. Then, pulling up to a stop sign on the transit, the car died. We tried to push start it, but it wasn’t happening. Greenhouse towed us to the start of 12 so we could work on it there. We fiddled around under the hood, and eventually the car fired & we took the start.

Round 12: Another knockdown. I started the stage hard, shifted into second, and the car died. We stopped, and I set about fiddling under the hood again. Nothing was working, so finally I decided to check if the fuel pump was running. It wasn’t, and from the back of the car it was obvious that the wire that was bypassing the fuel pump relay had come disconnected. I got it fixed just as sweep pulled up to us, and we took off. This was a repeat of stage 3 from last night, and I considered stopping to sign my tree, but thought better of it and finished with a 22 minute time.

Round 13: Luckily this was a short stage, so we didn’t have to worry about passing all the cars that had gone by us on 12.  We made it through and my duct tape wiring job held.

We were now sitting in third in the RRC, and too far back to make it up on the final two stages.

Shortly before service ended, the rally officials came by and told us that there was a lot of snow on SS14 & 15, and they were recommending snow tires. Since our only hope of salvaging anything was to finish, we changed tires, ensuring we’d make it to the finish.

Round 14: They weren’t joking about the snow. This was deep two track. And the car’s handling was getting worse. Every time I stepped on the gas, the front end would jump around. I finally got too far out of control on one straight and ended up in the trees. We bounced back into the stage, but had de-beaded the RF tire. I decided to try to drive to the finish on the flat. Then the tire started slipping on the wheel, so I couldn’t go over ¼ throttle. I still tried to finish on the flat. Finally we came to a big hill, and could only get halfway up. I had to change the tire. Too stupid to back to the bottom, I told Jay to stand on the brake pedal and tried to jack up the car. It didn’t work, and we broke the jack. I had to back down to bottom of the hill and convince a handful of spectators to lift up my car so I could put on the spare. We took another 20 minute time. On the transit, Jay reminded me multiple times that I needed to take it easy on the last stage because conditions were nasty, we didn’t have a spare, and didn’t have a jack to try to rotate a flat to the back, so if I had another off, we’d probably DNF.

Thankfully, the officials called the fight and Round 15 was cancelled. We followed Richard Miller around for a while, then Jay looked at the map in the route book and we headed back to Salem.

I’d say this year’s 100 Acre Wood was more disappointing than last year. I kept hitting things, the car broke down, and I was consistently off the pace. Oh well, I’ll get the car together and be back for the next event.

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