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The weekend of April 25-26 marked our first WeRock rock crawling competition of 2009. We made the 10 hour drive to Dayton, TN Friday and arrived just in time for tech inspection. We made it through tech with no problems, so it was off to the hotel for a good night’s sleep.
Saturday morning, the competition started at 10am. After we received our running order and had our driver’s meeting, we were ready to get rockin’! We started last in our group of 3, which is ok with me, I hate going first. We watched the first 2 competitors finish our first course, so we knew it could be done. As we broke the starting plane of the course, our Pro Comp Tires gripped the small rocky hill climb with ease to get us through gate 1. Our next gate was up a rocky ledge. This ledge had rocks along its side, so I knew our new paint job was about to get wrecked. As we tried and tried to get up this ledge, we finally got the momentum we needed to get up and over the ledge, but we also took out one of the cones on the top. And put our first scrape on our Gen-Right rear corners. Once on top of the hill, we pulled our cutting brake levers to lock up the passenger side rear tire to burn our front end around, so we could be lined up for the next downhill and gate 3. This next ledge, we were going down forward. I was a little apprehensive with this descent since that is how we rolled twice last year. But I cinched up my Warn winch in the rear end and we made it down without the rear feeling light at all. Once at the bottom, we had to turn around and go back up the hill and drive along the top to a rocky area that had our 4th and last gate. We came into this turn as wide as possible to avoid hitting another cone. We ended up taking a back up point here to get the right line, but we were successful in missing the cones. We took the rear Atlas shifter out of gear, shut off the rear ARB air locker and burned around this boulder so we were lined up with the finish gate. We finished this course with a score of 24. But as we crossed the finish, my spotter Aaron told me we were leaking transmission fluid pretty bad and to take the jeep back to the pits.
From here the news goes from starting out good to ending horrible. We started unbolting the skid plates, thinking we just needed to tighten the adapter bolts on the transmission. As we got a closer look, there was about a ½” gap between the transmission and transfer case. As we began to tighten the bolts, we came to find out the mounting holes were stripped and this was not going to be an easy fix after all. My team and I were back and forth with the announcer asking for parts, sending some guys to the parts store etc. Needless to say, we went through our 45 minutes of break down time and we didn’t get to run our other 3 courses for the day. After finding another team with a drill and tap, we drilled out the holes, put longer bolts in it and bolted it back up so we could at least compete on Sunday. We broke down at about 10:30 in the morning. We had it back together at 5:30 pm that night.
The jeep was back together for us to compete on Sunday. I knew we were in last place and there was no place to go but up. So our strategy was to wheel the crap out of the rig and try to make up some ground. We started first on our first course, which was the same one we started on Saturday, except we run it in the opposite direction. We started through a big boulder pile through gate 1 and up a hill to trek along the top to get to gate 2. As we got into the rocks, we turned off the ARB and took the rear Atlas out to try and dig around the rocks as much as possible to avoid any back up points. We made it through with ease and headed to gate 2. This gate was the downhill we had on Saturday, except this time, we were going up it. The skinny pedal is definitely my friend. Once Aaron had me lined up, it was a nice gas bump up and over. Once on top, we did another burn to line up for the downhill through gate 3. We climbed down that with ease and out the finish gates we made it. Score on this course -1. Finally something to be excited about.
Course #2 was a rocky ledge surrounded by sand and loose dirt. Only one competitor in our class completed this course and it was because he went first. After everyone attempted it and dug holes around the rocks, we were sitting ducks. Score on this course 40.
Course #3 was do-able. We saw other competitors finish this course with no problems, so we knew it could be done. I had to gas the jeep enough to get up and over the rocky ledge. We made it on the second attempt. The first attempt we hit the differential on our Solid axle. So we lined up for another go at it and we made it up. We did a burn at the top to come back down and line us up through gate 2. There was a huge rock on this turn, so we used it to our advantage. We took the rear Atlas and ARB out again to burn around this rock. Once we thought we were around, we tried to make the turn to get through gate 3 when the front tires stopped spinning. We were literally 2 feet away from gate 3 and another 10 feet from the finish and we couldn’t move. We broke a front driveshaft. We were in such a spot that no matter how hard I tried just to get through the rest of the course, we just couldn’t move. So back to the pits we went to change out our driveshaft. Score on this course, 38.
Course #4 was our last course for the weekend. This course had some side hill climbing and a nice steep climb up and over on the other side. We move through this course with ease. Everything just hooked up for us. We were able to finish this course with a score of 2.
This is our first event and outing since we painted the rig pink for the Crawl to Cure Cancer cause and let me tell you, it was a hit. We received a lot of compliments on the color and I have never had so many people ask to get their picture taken with it, even in the pits with all of us laying under it trying to fix it. So that makes us feel good and we know the hard work all winter is paying off. Even though it seemed like the odds were against us, we received a lot of feedback from the fans, and even had cancer survivors come up and tell us their story. It was truly amazing. Our next event is May 29-31 in Hannibal, MO. I have more pictures that we took from this event, but they’re not resized yet. Once I get those, I will send you all the link to them.