Thursday

A stupid day of getting the car teched, preparing the car to race, running around trying to remember everything that we would need in the car for rally racing and going to a lot of meetings where we get told how the race will work.

According to Steve’s 1^st law of racing in Mexico, any time written down for a meeting to happen is not the time the meeting will happen. And so it was today. You can spot the people who are here for their first time, they are the ones who are getting aggravated when they follow all the written down stuff to the letter and still miss the meetings.

Friday

Today was the first race day. As the event is based in Chihuahua and returns to Chihuahua every night, all the stages run in the morning of a race day are run again in the afternoon in the opposite direction. We went out North West of the city an on to some of the most amazing roads you can imagine. Moderately wide, two lane roads over the over mountain passes going up to over 7000 feet. The first stage was just over 40kms long, much longer than anything from the La Carerra Panamericana. That may not sound like a lot, but it added up to a whole bunch of commands shouted at Rachel. It has been a while since we’ve run this format, so it took us a while to get back into the rhythm. The other problem with this stage and some of the others we ran today is that there were some really long straights mixed in with the twisty stuff. We had the Elise pegged at around 120 a few times. The altitude kept us from going any quicker.

There were two pretty big wrecks, One Studebaker took a trip off into the woods. So far into the woods in fact that no one following could see them from the road. We spent the next couple of stages wondering where they had got to. Both Driver and Co-pilot are ok, but the car is a mess. The other one was a beautiful Fastback mustang that went off the road into a rockface at the corner, rolling right over and winding up on one of the doors. Again, the roll cage and belts made sure that they walked away from it.

After the fist stage Rachels driving just got quicker and quicker. In the final stage on the way back, we pulled off the first pass of the day on a Subaru WRX. He saw us coming and moved over to give us room. That made the whole thing easy. At least from the Co-Drivers seat.

The results came in and we are 7^th overall (out of 29 starters) and 2^nd in the under 2.4L class. We were pretty happy with that until we found that the one car in front of us is a VW rabbit. Seriously.

It gives us a goal for tomorrow when we’ll be going up to copper canyon.

Disclaimer: Spelling and grammar mistakes in this entry are because I’m too tired to go over what I’ve written.