A typical day in the La Carrera.

Yesterday was our first day of proper racing. Despite telling the organizers about their Qualifying screwup, we couldn’t change our start time from 12th position, The race is disorganized enough without trying to make changes at the last minute.

Basically the rules are set up so that you have to go through a checkpoint about 300 yards from the start of the speed section in order, but after that checkpoint, cars can switch order for the running of the speed stage. We knew that we were going to be faster than the cars in front so in that 300 yards we tried to juggle position so that we would be not stuck in traffic. The guys directly in front of us let us move up for the first stage, but the next cars, didn’t want to.

The first stage just went to show how wrong the qualifying time was. In the first 21km stage we passed two cars in front of us, starting 30 seconds and a minute before. We weren’t just quick, we were flying.

Again, because of the rules we had to let the cars that we passed in stage back past us for the Z control. The car 2 places in front showed up and went through the check point, but the car directly in front (a ford falcon) did not. We found out later that the car had slid off first stage. They were able to rejoin the race again the next day.

The second speed section was shorter, only 9 kms, but we again caught the Yellow Volvo of Karl Scheible, who came 3nd in the race last year. The signs were good that we were by far the fastest car out there.

The first Stage after lunch Karl let us by before the run, and again we caught and passed 2 cars in 15kms. All of these cars were fast, so it just went to show how fast we were going. For the start of the forth stage I had persuaded 3 more cars to let us past before the run, that meant that we were running around 4th in the pack. The fourth stage was also very long, and around the 8 kms mark we caught and passed a car that was running the race in fourth. To emphasis that, we were going fast enough that that we were 30 seconds faster than the 4th place car for roughly every 8 kms we ran. The car and Driver were more than quick enough to win this event.

That’s when everything went wrong. In a downhill section with a complex of 4 quick corners, I called the left 3 at the end too late. This was totally my fault, in that as soon as I said it I knew that I hadn’t given Bill the time he needed in a downhill fast section to brake for the corner properly. Bill tried to slow the car down and make the corner, but the back right of the car slid out and hit an earth bank on the right, kicking the car straight. We were on loose rocks, and there was no way that we could slow the car in time. The car bounced up onto an earth berm and down over the edge of the hill. We came to rest with the nose about 10 feet down, and the tail of the car still showing above the edge of the berm.

That will do for now, but this is only the beginning of a shit day. I’ll write more later.