Although this day ended well, the beginning did not bode well. We thought we might be done before we ever got on the clock. We departed Westminster by getting on I25 north for our speedometer calibration run. As we began the calibration, the speedometer suddenly began oscillating repeatedly, then shut down. Almost immediately, the engine began missing badly and within a few seconds, it too quit. We coasted to a stop on the shoulder, afraid we were done for the day. I deduced that the problem must be ignition, disgusted that I had just spent a day redoing it. I grabbed the tool box, opened the distributor and discovered that the condenser wire was broken. This was a brand new one (apparently defective) that I had installed yesterday. Fortunately, I had a spare in the trunk, installed it, reassembled the distributor, and rechecked the dwell. I did all this in about 7 minutes. The engine came back to life and ran perfectly the rest of the day. The speedometer also came back. Apparently, the arcing of the condenser wire sent so many interfering signals that it shut itself off temporarily until it got good signals. The remaining calibration run was a good one. We had left the hotel ten minutes early so we arrived at our morning pit stop and start point in Fort Collins pretty much on time. The pit stop was hosted by the Spradley-Barr Ford dealership in Fort Collins.

Our pit stop in Ft. Collins, CO...And our queue at the start point afterwards

The first leg was the longest one of the day, an hour and twenty minutes, through the foothills of the Rockies in north Colorado and on into Wyoming. This leg had many stop signs, speed changes and turns to negotiate so we were very pleased to have scored an Ace on this leg. Shortly after completing this leg, we made our lunch stop in Laramie, Wyoming. The town provided very good sack lunches in the beautifully restored old train station now used as a museum.

Lunch in Laramie

After lunch, we spent most of the next leg negotiating the very challenging terrain of the Medicine Bow National Forest. As we reached the higher elevations, we encountered snow pack still on the ground but the roads were clear and the air warm. The steep climbs to over 10,800 feet and the hairpin turns produced a lot of high scores as many teams struggled to maintain speed. That was not a problem for us but we apparently failed to fully account for additional acceleration loss on the grades and we wound up with a 10 second score.

The Parc Fermé in Rock Springs

I80 brought us to the Parc Fermé in Rock Springs, Wyoming. This was held in the White Mountain Mall Parking lot in conjunction with a local automobile and motorcycle rally. The crowd was large and enthusiastic and they fed us a barbeque dinner on site. As we were about to cross the finish line, we were surprised by Great Race CEO Wayne Stanfield jumping into the back seat to ride across the finish line with us. He had a mic and pumped the crowd by trying to talk Dawn out of her Ace award. She would have none of that!

Our 14 second score was the 18th best of the day and 4th in Sportsman Division. This also moves us up to 32nd overall in cumulative score.