Friday, June 24, 2005
Hotel: McLean
Weather: Clear, sunny, temperature 90

The Sweet, Smooth and Sassy Team completed the Trophy Run (first priority) without getting lost (second priority) and with a respectable score of 1 minute, 39 seconds (third priority). Dawn (and the driver, too) was quite happy with this score considering the difficulty of the course and the fact that this was her first ever rally day. She really did a superb job of navigating, not missing any of the instructions. And we did not yell at each other more than a couple times!

This score placed us number 42 out of 100 competitors - there were many scores much worse than ours. The best score of the day, 10 seconds, was turned in by one of the expert veteran teams. The course today lived up to its billing as the most difficult we likely will see. Even though we rallyed for only about three hours, there were 20 pages of course instructions with instructions coming very rapidly with little time to transition from one instruction to the next. There were 8 checkpoints, more than there will normally be in a whole day of rallying. And there were a total of 37 turns. This is significant because turns lose time and require adjustments to make up the loss. By comparison, there will be only 4 turns tomorrow.

Our day did not start well when we tried to recheck our speedometer on the calibration run on the Beltway. Immediately we realized that we had a significant error that somehow had crept in during our 800 mile jaunt from Huntsville. We overcame this by making adjustments to the instrument. At the end of he calibration run, Dawn calculated the necessary correction while I removed the instrument to get at the pins on the back. After making the changes, I remounted the instrument and we were on our way, all in about 5 minutes. This allowed us to get to the specified start point on time. The first leg was the longest, 1 hour and 22 minutes, and we had a score of 1 second late, our best. It was kind of downhill after that. We were consistently late a few seconds at each check point but we think we know why that happened and hopefully can correct it. During the day, we also encountered a large construction truck that pulled out in front of us, a rural mailman making multiple stops, and a tractor doing bush hog operations and blocking our lane. Of course, this just adds to the challenge (and the fun!) The car ran great and is a very good rally car, since it has plenty of power to make speed changes very quickly.