This was a very interesting and challenging rally day. It was supposed to be a relatively easy day but circumstances and weather dictated otherwise. Things began very well as the field of racers departed in perfect weather. We were the last in line this day. We had a good speedometer calibration run and hit our start point exactly on time. The first leg was long with many turns but we turned in a good time of 3 seconds. The second leg took us to our brunch stop at Kankakee, IL and our score was only 1 second. Much to our disappointment, we then learned that all scores for both these legs had to be discarded. It seems that after the course check car had completed the morning run, some county workers decided to close one of our roads to spread fresh oil and aggregate. These workers were not happy to learn that 96 race cars were bearing down on them. Cars had to be detoured until the work was done. By the time we got there, it was all completed so we had no problems. But, of course, our scores could not be used because the earlier cars did not get a valid run.

After brunch, we restarted outside Kankakee. All starts and restarts each day are at one-minute intervals from a designated location, usually a road sign of some kind. The photo shows a typical lineup of cars at the restart point queued up to resume rallying.

The afternoon course included a short tour of Kankakee River State Park, a loop through a residential development area at 15 mph, and a swing through Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. These included many turns, stops and starts, and long stretches at very low speeds. This would have been difficult enough but we also encountered a severe thunderstorm, which made maneuvers pretty dicey. Trying to accelerate to 48 mph with vacuum-operated wipers immobile in a downpouring rain raises the pucker factor a bit. After a long, hot transit on interstate highways, we arrived at Six Flags Great America for the parc fermé. The Park issued complimentary tickets to all race participants so we took advantage of those for a few hours.

The navigator did a very good job today under difficult conditions. She did miss one turn during the rain, resulting in a score of 14 seconds on leg 4. But she redeemed herself later on leg 6. An ill-timed traffic signal and a slow truck caused us to get 37 seconds behind. We were anticipating that the next check point would appear before we could correct this. She was able to manage our next few instructions to recover 30 seconds before we hit the check point so we had a score of 7 seconds.

So how did we do? Total score of 33 seconds with legs of 3, 14, 9 and 7 seconds. Not quite as good as yesterday but we improved from 50th to 49th position overall because other teams had worse scores today too. We are pleased that we are consistently getting scores on the legs in the single digits.

Today's conditions took their toll on vehicles. We saw at least six cars stopped along the road today and the hotel parking lot tonight is abuzz with activity as repairs are being made. Disabled cars are retrieved by the "sweep" trucks which follow along the course to pick them up and bring them in for repairs if they cannot be repaired by the driver and navigator on the course. Tommy's Trailers provides the rigs for this support. Tommy is quite the jokester and it is not unusual to see him sitting by the roadside holding a sign "Will haul cars for food". Close inspection of the photo of his truck shows he has corn stalks in the grill supposedly indicating a detour through a cornfield.