WeRock US Grand Nationals Spring, TX

The weekend of September 15-16th, marked the WeRock Grand Nationals final rock crawling event for the 2007 season. This event was held at Spring Creek Off-Road Park in Spring, TX and came down to the top teams from the east coast series vs. the top teams from the west coast series.

Our team decided to make this journey and compete in the big show. Luckily for us, we were able to get the Jeep on the back of a trailer with another team that was headed down from Ohio, while my teammates and I flew down and met up with everyone at tech inspection.

Saturday morning, we saw that the temperature for the day was in the high 90s with 90% humidity. Quite the change from what we were used to in Ohio in September, and with me having to wear a firesuit, I knew it was going to be a long day.

As we pulled into the pit area, we could tell this event was going to be big. There were vendor booths, trailers and inflated display balloons everywhere. The amount of spectators was larger than any other event this year. We found our running order and saw we were last in our group to run, so off to our course we went. This was the first competition held at this facility, so the WeRock crew had been there for weeks spraying concrete to make man-made courses. For us stock modified guys, we had one man-made course and the rest were natural rock mixed with chunks of concrete.

Our first course was man-made. We had to start up a hill and guide the Jeep through a few tight turns once we made it to the top. It was so tight in there, we were wedging the tires between the trees and letting them pivot the Jeep around so we didn’t have to take any back ups and lose points. Once we were around all of the trees, we made a tight turn and came back down another hill. We chose to go down this hill in reverse, thinking the weight of the engine would have helped to keep the rig from feeling like it was going to roll. We cleared through this backwards hill descend and headed through the last gate, and out the finish gate, completing the course with a score of 27.

Course #2 was markedly more difficult. Only 2 people the whole day were able to finish it, so we knew that as long as we were able to do what the rest of the group was doing, we would have still been ok in terms of points. We made it halfway through and timed out. Score of 39.

Course #3 looked easy enough to us, and we found everyone else was finishing it, so we were hopeful. We maneuvered through this course with ease, minus sliding off a rock into a cone, and finished this course with a score of 10.

The 4th and final course for day 1 had us climbing up one side of a hill, come back down on the other side and then drive through a little muddy rock section and over a steep upgrade to finish. We had no problems on this course and finished with a score of 2. Our total score for day 1 was 74.

I wish I could report Sunday was better or about the same, but our luck took a turn for the worse. The running orders flipped to the reverse order on day 2, so that put us as starting 1st on our first course.

As we started our first course, we lined up to go over a piece of concrete, but didn’t give the Jeep enough gas to bump over it and there we sat, hung up on our skidplate with none of our tires touching the ground. We timed out and had a score of 39. This definitely hurt us, since the other competitors saw what happened to us, and knew what needed to be done to finish that course, which they all were able to.

Course #2 was just as hard on day 2 as it was on day 1. Only 2 competitors were able to finish that course, and we were no different, scoring a 37.

Course #3 was ours…or so I thought. All of the other teams were finishing it and clearing the bonus gate, so we were hopeful we could finish this one and score the bonus points. Yet as we made it through the first 2 sets of gates and on our way to the finish, SNAP – a broken axle shaft! We were sitting ducks. We had 3-wheel drive and the driver side tire was wedged so good and not moving due to the broken shaft, we couldn’t go anywhere. We had to get pulled off of this course, with a score of 38.

We had one more course to finish so it came down to us deciding what we wanted to do with the rig. We only have 45 minutes of breakdown time and by not finishing one single course this day, we knew we dropped from 7th place to dead last. So we called it a weekend. For the east coast series, we finished in 9th place and for the grand nationals, we finished 10th.

So back into the garage we go to get the rig ready for the 2008 season. First thing we are going to address is our front axle. Our plan is to upgrade to 60 outers, so hopefully that will help us minimize what we break during competition. That, along with a few other changes, should put us at the top of our game for next season.

Thank you to everyone for your help and support during this 2007 competition year. I could not have done any of this without you!

Kelly Young

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