BP
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Stage 2 , June 26
Sunday started early for the Great Racers
as a group of faithful racers gathered for the traditional
chapel service at 6:15 am - we had an early 7:15 start
with lots of miles to cover today so chapel had to happen
even before that. We have a chaplain, Jim Sommer, who travels
with us as part of the GR staff and who does double duty
as one of the gate announcers. Come to think of it, a pastor
has a pretty good voice for that sort of thing! Your intrepid
LR team was there helping to provide and lead the worship
music so it was a great way to set the focus for the day.
The morning started out cold and cloudy
as we went through the tire warm-up stage before the speedometer
calibration. We finally had a full hour to calibrate the
speedo so we got tricky and pulled over halfway through,
made an adjustment, and ran the second half to see how
close we got. Made a tiny adjustment at the end and smugly
thought we were setting ourselves up for a great score
today.
Today's run was very unusual in that we
ran a short timed section in the morning between about
9:30 and 10:45, then had 5 -1/2 hours of off-the-clock
driving including both our lunch stop and afternoon pit
stop, then another timed section from 4:30 to 5:30, with
an hour drive to the finish line after that. Very long
day!!!
Much of today's timed routes were along
winding roads in the Blue Ridge mountains of West Virginia.
Beautiful scenery, but also some very bumpy roads. Of course,
the Land Rover performed like a champ and just ate them
up while some other teams no doubt had a few difficulties
- or at least a few loose fillings. Most of the maneuvers
were straightforward and uneventful in the morning, except
for one glitch where I (Janet) informed Steve we had a
sign coming up on the left and he'd be going down to 15
mph. This is why cockpit communication is critical: my
intent was to stress that we needed to look for a sign
on the left rather than on the right as usual, to mark
a speed change down to 15 while we continued on the same
road. What he heard was to look to the left for that sign
and turn on that street since we make every turn at a speed
of 15 mph so we control our speed loss and know what to
make up. So you know what happened...we had to try to correct
for the time spent stopping and backing up and getting
back on course, which we thought we'd done pretty well.
More on that later...
Very clean second leg, we came into the
lunch stop pretty cocky. Compared notes with several other
navigators - we have this bizarre ritual where we write
down the seconds at which we passed the checkpoints on
our hands, and everyone compares the palms of their hands
when we get together to see how close we are to the others.
Since ideally we're all one minute apart, hypothetically
we should pass the same checkpoint at the exact same second,
regardless of the minute. Works in theory anyway. And our
scores looked good. Or so we thought.
Lunch was delightful. Beckley, West Virginia
really showed us some southern hospitality and a very enthusiastic
crowd turned out. As we arrived, greeters handed us tall
glasses of ice-cold lemonade, then individual hosts escorted
us to a local restaurant where they had box lunches available,
and presented us with a disposable camera to keep, on which
they'd taken a picture of our car coming into town. On
the way out they gave us a insulated lunch bag with four
bottles of ice cold water, all of which (including the
lunch bag) had been printed with the Great Race logo and
name of the town. Class act. Even better, on the way out
of town we drove on the West Virginia Turnpike and the
city had paid our toll in advance.
Then it was on to Charleston and the State
Capitol for an afternoon pit stop before our final timed
run. The venue was very special as the lined up the cars
along the circular brick walkway at the front of the Capitol.
A moderate crowd milled among the cars but mostly sat on
the sides and sedately waved as cars arrived and departed.
The photo shows the Land Rover at the foot of the steps,
alongside a 1934 McQuay-Norris Streamliner from the Lane
Motor Museum in Nashville, which has as its motto "Peculiar Moments in Auto History".
Both are aluminum-bodied, but the similarity certainly
ends there!
Jeff Lane, the Streamliner's owner, sponsors
the High School X-Cup competition in Great Race, so we
encourage you to check out his website and support someone
who is promoting the future of the old car hobby by supporting
these kids: http://www.lanemotormuseum.org/ And if you're
in Nashville, stop by and tell him Steve and Janet sent
you.
On to the finish - the last leg of competition
should have been a piece of cake. Winding roads, low speeds,
multiple speed changes. Easy ace if you keep focused. Which
is hard to do at the end of a day like this. We had one
left turn from a highway onto a side road, and got stuck
waiting for oncoming traffic so had 40 seconds to make
up. No problem if you're thinking clearly early in the
day, but brain fade had set in and even the Red Bull they'd
given us at the pit stop didn't make it work and I made
up 20 seconds instead of 40, then looked at it again and
thought I'd only made up 10, so made up an other 30. Realized
I was 10 seconds early just as we approached a checkpoint
so had Steve cut to half speed and got close. I thought.
As we pulled into the gate, they announced
our score: 37 seconds. You can't mean us. We don't have
scores like that. Our leg scores were late across the board:
8 seconds, 5 seconds, 15 seconds (that was the overcorrection
so it really made , no sense!) and 9 seconds. Scores today
were all over the board. Some extremely low scores and
some extremely high ones from top teams. We heard a theory
that sounds intriguing that could explain a lot - that
there is a distinct loss when consistently running at
low speeds and you need to compensate for it. We thought
we'd identified it during our practice sessions in the
desert, but disregarded it. UNTIL NOW. So, watch this
space tomorrow to see if our ongoing learning curve makes
progress and brings honor to the Land Rover community.
We'll do our best.
As for our status, we came in 47th overall
today (ack!) but our cumulative scores put us at 30th.
We understand the GR
website has finally been brought up
to date so you can check scores there by 10:00 each night.
We've also been getting a lot of attention from the photo
crews, so look for some great shots of the truck in action.
Until tomorrow -
Steve and Janet for Team BP!
BP
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