The Ziptie Rally Team 171 car of Carl Siegler and Dave Goodman took on the STPR rally out of Wellsboro, PA this past weekend. Accompanying them was crew chief Matt "Chux" Alexander. Chux was assisted by Martin Asao, Andrew Browning and Mike Rhode. The team left Carl's house in Golden Valley Monday May 31st at 7pm for PA in the K2500 service rig and the Forester XT recce car. Andrew drove in from MA Wed morning in his Impreza wagon. The drive took 20hours as the K2500 doesn't do great with stuff like hills or fuel economy. The drive pretty much looked like this the whole time for Chux and Martin. We ended up camping at Ives Run Campground which was about 20 minutes out of Wellsboro. We had 2 very nice sites next to a lake and no one around for most of the week. Wednesday was a "rest" day for us as all we had was registration. Here's half of the campsite Thursday Dave and I were up bright and early for recce. We got there early and ended up in Group A right behind Antoine L'Estage and Nathalie Richard and ahead of Bill Bacon and Peter Watt. Recce was a new experience for us and I was glad the FXT had plenty of ground clearance - some of the recce cars didn't do so well (like the rental prius that had to be abandoned on the waste management stage). While we were at recce the crew ran the car through tech. Afterward we met back up and headed to the practice stage. Dave and I ran it twice, the first time we were off pace and not synced up. Second pass everything was good so we packed up and headed back to camp. Dave gets serious at the practice stage. Chris Greenhouse is checking his tires in the background Friday morning we got up, did some last minute checks on the car, fueled up and cleaned the car off for the parade/parc expose. freshly washed and leaving for rally hq Friday's stages were tough. The two waste management stages were brutal on the cars and stage 2, rattler was extremely fast. on ss3 I hit a 4" diameter pine tree at low speed and subsequently got the car stuck in a mud puddle. This took us off the podium pace for Friday. sliding by a corner on waste management powering onto a straight Our car survived and we went on the the super special at the fairgrounds. Dave and I walking the course attacking a corner at the sss landing off the jump Friday concluded and we had 3 more stages to go in the Finger Lakes regional on Saturday. many teams washed their cars right after the sss as parc expose was early Saturday Dave and Chux reviewing stage notes and movement plans overnight Saturdays stages were very technical. Lot's of fast sections with tight narrow stuff mixed in. Not much room for error out there. I botched a few other corners and we dropped a couple minutes getting stuck again. This put us off the podium for Finger Lakes. We ended that rally 5th overall and 4th in class. After the 1st service we started the Sherwood Forest regional rally. We would finish Sherwood 3rd overall and 3rd in class. If you combine the regional and national competitors we would have finished STPR 13th overall and 6th in class. A few pics from Saturday: [/IMG] for more pictures visit here http://carl-s.smugmug.com/Car-events/rally/STPR-2010/DSC9169/896030184_dYjNF-L.jpg ZRT STPR video [YOUTUBE]G5X-aNmXZRo[/YOUTUBE]
W00t!! yea, had an awesome time. The time lapse pics of service turned out great! nice. Although I'm not sure I wanted to see some of the close calls in that video. EEK! But, HUUUGE congrats to Carl and Dave for their performance at this event. 37 cars entered, and 12 DNF'd at some point. Not only was ZRT not on that list, but putting down some seriously competitive times the whole weekend. Despite a few little oops moments, the car kept coming back into service in great shape. other than replacing the headlight ziptie and removing the fender liner after the tree, we had no un-planned repairs to make. I was proud to be sitting in the #171 service area this last week! Beer: Check. NOS: Check. Grill: Check. Pink Pin Stands: Check. Alright, we're ready.
I just got done watching the video....great job on the recovery. I just started playing Dirt 2 for more LFB education, I can't imagine what it must feel like in a real Rally car. I have a GT25 wheel w/Playseat and Stereo that's as close as I've gotten and will probably want to get for a while. That was a great video.
Not sure exactly, that's the super production STI of Travis and Terry Hanson. Doesn't look that bad really. The Mirra/Headland STI looked worse. There were a few other offs but they were behind us so we didn't come across them.
a picture of those pin stands are hurting my eyes they're so bright, nice job guys, way to beat a WRC competitor twice now
yea Ken is not having such good luck with that car. watching the videos of it being towed behind burke's evo at speed down the stages is pretty wild though
^ that's awesome, do you have some links to said videos, i would love to see that. That's got to be a good way to bend the tow point if block doesn't drive right.
block could have continued if they had replaced his tranny at the service after ss10, correct? cause he didn't need help from sweep? Could they not swap a tranny fast enough in that service? It's also interesting that block lost the lead on ss9, I just wounder what part broke and how it broke. I bet a lot of organizing people were angry after this: [video]http://www.youtube.com/user/wifeandhusby#p/u/31/9aeSIHJNzFE[/video]
block had fuel delivery issues on stage. I think they got that fixed in service but then blew the transmission. Also the service was scheduled for 1 hour but was cut to a 30min service because of that 0 car fail.
Yea, block's crew was having troubles all weekend. They tried replacing the Turbo at the service for the practice stage, and once that was done, whatever problem they had was no better. And yea, he might not have DNFd if the 0 car hadn't held everything up so badly. The service was supposed to be at least an hour, and since they were expecting 50+ cars, and only got 37, it might have been longer.
My girlfriend. 0 car fail was a failure. I bet that dude is about as embarrassed as it's possible to be. :laugh:
The sound that it makes when he tries backing out makes me cringe. Such a loud an metallic pop, ughh.... cant be good.
Excellent write up and thanks for sharing! Glad you guys did well, not breaking too many things. Looks like you got pretty lucky on the two offs. ~Dan
