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Andrew Frick and I did Rally Tennessee last weekend. It was awesome. Another M2 car was a Ford Focus. Nowhere near in spec for the Spec Rally Focus program but quite well equipped otherwise. It was Brin Walters' (another brit) first rally in some 15 years and his wife's first time codriving. Brin teaches rally or rallycross in Florida I think. The Wimpey brothers were also in our class but we were seriously out-performed.

On day 1 we blew our transmission and only had third gear for the last 4 1/2 stages of the day. That made us fall back out of 2nd into 3rd for that rally, 11 seconds behind the Focus. Andrew and our entire crew team (my son, Kieran) with a little help from me (I was still preparing our stage notes for the Sunday stages) swapped out the transmission for the spare that Andrew just happened to put in the truck at the last minute. We completed that in about 4 hours, including having to get a broken front motor mount welded back together.

On Sunday we were fully in the game. The Wimpeys were well ahead of us and would secure 1st place unless they made a serious error so the battle was for 2nd. We were 18 seconds ahead after SS8 but Brin pulled a few seconds on us in SS9 to reduce the gap. SS10 and SS11 were repeats for SS8 & 9. We pulled another 4 seconds in SS10 but Brin beat us by 2 seconds in SS11. They were really friendly people and I managed to help their codriver with some confusing issues. At each stage were were comparing notes and exchanging some friendly banter.

SS12, SS13 and SS14 were all reverse repeats of a long 12.46 mile stage we ran on Saturday. In third gear only we were getting 13:02, 12:41 and 12:40. At SS12 we and the Focus team both did 12:29 - we were amazed! At SS13 we both did 12:18 - our flabbers were close to gasting! SS14 was halted part way through our run so we held on to 2nd place for the Sunday rally.

Over both days and nearly 2 hours of race time we were only 6 seconds ahead of the Focus. Exciting indeed!

At the lunch service on Sunday I was still finishing my stage notes for the afternoon runs. My Nicky Grist codriving school was worth every penny.

They haven't been published yet but we think Andrew has the ESRC championship sewn up. Congrats Andrew!

Simon

Great job guys! How was the weather? Did Andrew mention how this year's event differed from last?

_________________
Carl Fisher

Be Cool to the Pizza Dude:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=4651531

Weather was great. Cool, mostly cloudy but little rain. The locals were very enthusiastic. We had a slight rule-based hitch which had us disqualified for Saturday's event since we didn't make it into Parc Fermé as we were working on our transmission. Everyone was of the opinion that only applied to teams in the USRC competition (a 2-day rally) while we were in the ESRC competition (2 x 1-day rallies). We got it sorted and our finish reinstituted.

Everyone thought the event ran very smoothly.

I'll let Andrew post his comparison's from last year.

Simon