BP
Great race home
FINISH , July 9
British Pacific has set a new world record
for the
longest time-speed-distance rally
run in a Land
Rover
Crossing the finish line, taking
the checkered flag! 4,250 miles from coast to coast and
the Land Rover was still running perfectly.
Well, we did it! We've completed Great Race
2005. We ran every mile, with no mechanical issues. But
first...
Day two of the Grand Championship saw cool
but clear weather. Today we only had 126 miles to run before
the finish. We ran around the local foothills, near
lakes and rivers, with winding roads that frequently were
through a canopy of trees. We always manage to get to see
some beautiful scenery, and it's often different from what
we had seen before. Tacoma is a beautiful city with a revitalized
downtown area.
Fatigue from two of racing plus the previous hard day
was a factor for many teams, including ours. We didn't
roll 10 feet from the start when the drama began. The dumb
driver had adjusted the speedo calibration and forgot to
plug it back in! We had to quickly back up and restart
the leg again; how embarrassing. After fixing that we made
some other errors, quickly caught and fixed, but we sure
didn't need to make it harder on ourselves. The course
instructions looked easy enough, but it turned out to be
harder because of civilian traffic, which was heavy in
many areas. There's nothing like people parking directly
in front of a stop, or obstructing a checkpoint crew, to
make your day more exciting than you really want it to
be.
Despite our large number of gaffes we did manage to fix
them pretty well, sometimes by hacking off other racers,
when we could see them on the winding roads. We never
got off course or miss any signs, which did happen to
others. From the scores, at least one team must have
simply given up and drove it out at any speed they chose.
One team simply couldn't handle the over 2 hour timed
section and had to stop due to 'personal discomfort'
a few hundred yards from a checkpoint. One team, friends
of ours, forgot to charge their speedometer battery (some
folks do use a small motorcycle battery to keep the speedo
out of the 'noisy' vehicle wiring for accuracy) and halfway
through the run the speedo quit; they went from 19th
to 36th in one day.
In the midst of all of this, we managed a 22nd finish
on Stage 14, and a Grand Championship Run finish of 13th
overall. This brought us up 4 places today for a final
score of 4:18:00, good for a 21st. finishing position
out of the 88 cars that completed the race (96 started).
Our goal was a top 20, which we missed by only :06 seconds,
and we were the highest placed car with no age factor.
We also won 5 ACE awards, for perfect leg scores, and we
were well up the list for those as well.
The Landie required no repairs on the entire 4,250 mile
trip. All we did was add 2 quarts of oil to the engine
and several washings, plus 3 jet changes for altitude.
We carried no spare parts on board at all, except for
a fan belt. We brought only a small bag of hand tools
for adjustments, plus a jack and a spare. We kept the
tires at the correct pressure using the on board ARB
compressor. The only spare parts we brought were for
replacing the overdrive, and those stayed in the support
vehicle.
We're very pleased with this result, especially since
we were turning good scores towards the end after several
frustrating days trying to sort out the performance charts
and techniques. The Land Rover earned respect and finished
well: we had no major errors, and all we needed to do
even better was to have practiced on the tires we raced
on.
Our thanks first to Keith Money, Janet's brother and
British Pacific's field sales and warehouse manager,
for the use of his truck. He spent many cold, late nights
working on the frame-up rebuild, and it hung together
perfectly. We received lots of compliments on its appearance,
and more than a few times heard from spectators that
we had the best car in the event. We agree. You're getting
it back in fully operational condition for your vacation!
Next to Pat Young, who builds our engines and transmissions.
Nice job, Pat. That motor fired up immediately every
time, and right now: no cranking like many of the Fords
needed. It hardly even seeped any oil, despite repeated
full throttle charges and some sustained high rpm running.
We could hold 50 on even the steepest hills. If anything
it's running better now, and it's ready to do it again.
Then, big thanks to TeriAnn Wakeman for her work on the
web site to keep you all informed of our progress. She's
done a great job, as usual.
Also to the crew at British Pacific, who have carried
the workload while I was away. They have handled everything
in my absence, and other business owners on the trip
had to keep working by phone and e-mail. Thanks for making
this possible for us. The same is true for Janet at Disney;
thanks for letting her off for a few weeks, even while
you're short handed.
We must also thank Allmakes in England for their support
and sponsorship; not only could we not have done this
without them, the quality of the parts used were top
notch and really did the job. There are Allmakes part
number stickers on much of the truck, and we had every
confidence we'd do well as a result. You can't argue
with success.
Thanks also to Orange Country Direct Marketing for printing
our postcards: they looked great and we gave out nearly
1800 along the route.
Finally to our support crew, Melinda Cohea and Laura
G. in the pickup, and Sheree Postma at home with Allison,
our youngest daughter. We couldn't have done it without
you, and those jobs had lots of stress and long hours
as well.
In every regard, we consider our trip a big success.
The Greatrace motto is "To finish is to win",
and we do feel like we've won, even if we were just seconds
out of the money. If we have the chance we would race
the truck again, and I think that's the highest compliment
we could give it.
Thanks for following along on this epic event, and we
hope we can do it again sometime.
Here are the race winners, Greg Cunningham and Sam Goeppinger,
in their Model A speedster that Greg built himself. Yes,
these two young men (college age) beat all the former champs
by a healthy margin, and the Roush Racing professional
crews as well. We're really happy for them. They pulled
in something like $60,000 plus that huge trophy for their
efforts. They had to replace a blown motor and were out
practicing as late as 2 days ago to get here. Way to go,
guys.
BP
Great race home
