No Excuses, Page 5

Day 9: Stage 7

Just a pre-breakfast quickie (message that is). I got up early to get under and find that squeak. I don�t know if I got it this time or not, but I did find the right exhaust hanger bolt (not the frame-to-cantilever, but the strap-to-cantilever bolt that is replaced in normal exhaust installation) was completely gone. That squeak had gotten worse yesterday, in that it went from being power-on only to all-the-time. Maybe that's when the loose bolt left us?

Just a quick word about the exhaust. Classic Restorations that finished this car in time for the Race did a GREAT job (not like the first shop in Branford Ontario that was really bad - you may see 1/2 page ads in Hemmings, RUN AWAY!), but there was little time for sorting out the details. The exhaust shop was a sub, and I'm not impressed. The U-bolts were loose and this is the second hanger fault. It's not proper parts, either. There 's a weld joint forward, where there should be a front muffler; and the bigger back mufflers are round instead of oval, eating up critical clearance in the intricate fit between frame and body. Clunks and squeaks and a booming resonance at 40-45 mph. sigh. The life of a racer.

I had noticed a popping when the hood first lifts and I found that this morning, too, when I checked the oil (another quart in). The hood is slightly too far back and while it clears the cowl when closed, it clips it on the way up. First paint chips there now, due to this minor misalignment. Still, I'll wait to deal with that! Off we go to the races!

OK, now we're talking! As we swept through the plains today, running in 90+ heat and sun from Springfield MO, through Miami, OK (where my mother grew up - bonus points if you know why it and that Florida place share that name), to Wichita, Kansas; we showed yesterday was no fluke! We had six timed legs instead of 3 - and we scored 28 seconds - a tie for third in Rookies!

[Here�s a picture of Yrs Trly in front of the BEEYOOTIFUL restored Coleman Movie Palace in Miami � remember this place, Mom?]

Note the growing case of trucker�s tan. When heading west, that door side arm is in full sun all day!]

We had a great turnout and a beautiful Main Street welcome in Parsons, Kansas; then the first really big turnout for a larger city - in Wichita. It seems we arrived coincident with the national meet of the T-bird folks! I met two IMLers today. Steve Christy and his Dad drove the 2+ hrs from Kansas City to cheer us on at Parsons (Steve's original hometown!). Thanks, Steve! Then, we met Chris Menges in Wichita. We had excellent placement in the show at both cities and we gave away ALL our postcards of the Imp and signed a load of autographs again.

The car was a rock today. I mentioned that I had some light knock on long hills yesterday. Today, with a degree less advance, we heard a ping or two on only one hill, late in the afternoon, when we were running really hot (Never out of normal range of course). The brakes were fine all day - our new, low-scoring technique is significantly easier on them, too, aas well as moving us up the ranks. There was some attrition today, as the heat took out some other cars and the lone Mercedes (190SL) that had dogged us the day before showed that the oil smoke we saw then was NOT benign: they rode in on the truck.

Tomorrow, we start early. It's another high-speed day as we are to make Pueblo, CO - which I'm told is normally a 7 hour run on the Interstate from Wichita. This should be another favor to the big cruisers, compared to the older swelter boards. We'll see. I think it's a top-up day, though - so we don't die of sun and windburn if we really are to blast along.

Still no pix posted of the Imp at GreatRace.com. This is starting to bug me! Oh well, we moved from #70 to #60 overall today. Pretty soon, they'll have to notice. Tomorrow, we do even better!

Day 10: Stage 8

Well. Humbled by Life again. If Pride Goes Before a Fall, then I guess we were proud going into today. We figured after two good days that we were dialed-in. Today's run was a LOOOONG one, mostly on US 50, from WIchita, KS to Pueblo, CO. There's no better cruiser for that run than an Imperial, so were looking to do really well and move on up in the rankings! We executed perfectly, too, with not a single uncompensated error: we figured at the end that there was no way we'd be over 30 seconds error - MAX - and we hoped for a 10. We were crushed to see 1 minute 21 on the clock as we pulled in to Pueblo! Early on every leg, and pretty near proportional to the leg lengths. I think we messed up our speedo calibration. You'd think a couple of engineers could work a simple instrument, wouldn't you? Sigh. We sure can't blame it on our car today!

We placed 60th today; 15th in Rookies. Bleeaaah. I'm feeling very annoyed with myself and Dave is almost as put out as I am (he needs more sleep, so he's put off his mad til morning). We fell to 65th overall and to 13th in Rookies. There are still five other rookies within a minute or so, so we aren't doomed to the bottom, yet. I'll write in brief notes, because it was an interesting day (until we got our score, anyway).

1) Kansas is flatter than a pool table and the roads go straighter than a parolee in a police station.

2) It was hotter than a blow torch today. The local bank showed 101 F at our afternoon pit stop. There were 8 DNFs today and a lot of those were heat related. We each drank over 5 litres of water today, and still found little need for restrooms!

3) Great heat mirages! The road shimmered like water ahead. Ha! Just hot asphalt. It's easy to see how the early settlers went nuts seeing those in their heat and dehydration. We ran top-up all day in hopes of keeping our faculties functional through the whole stage (prior days had shown us that the last leg was where we made all our significant errors). That seems to have worked, anyway.

4) This is cattle country and we passed feedlots and rendering plants. Feedlots make a lot of flies - but how they get into cars passing by at over 50 mph is beyond me! It's clear why the ancients thought flies just appeared out of thin air. Of course, once they're in the car, they can't find a way back out. They just flit about annoying the hot, tired people there with them. 4a) Rendering plants are really odiferously malodorous in the summer heat - 'nuff said! On the other hand, we passed one field that had a strong and very nice scent of lavender! We couldn't see any source, but it was sweet strong - most refreshing.

5) We hit one of those summer thunderstorms that seem only to come in the high, dry plains. The wind whips up a visible wall of dust ahead of the storm (and we drove into it); then the lighting crackles all over the darkening sky and you can see torrents of rain ahead and above in the clouds- but none makes it to the ground because it evaporates faster than it falls! That evaporation cools the air as if all the heat's oppression were broken by a cool revolution in the sky! We felt it fall from over 100 to the low 70's in no time at all.

6) The wind here comes continually from the south. It shapes the trees (almost all of which stand alone as arboreal sentries over grassland and fields). They mostly look half knocked-over in the steady blow. Today's storm gave us high headwinds from the west, twisting the trees and power lines in new directions. One let go in front of us and we had to leave US 50 and detour on to local unpaved roads for many miles (or around one block, in local scale). One other car had a flat in the rough, but we made it through OK. While there, we flushed a pair of wild pheasants! [the 59 DeSoto had a flat back there in the sharp rocks. We stopped to help, but Imp wheels are different from all other Chryslers. Fortunately, we had a can of Fix-a-Flat, too, and we got them back into town!]

7) Today we left Wichita, passed through Dodge City KS, Garden City (?) KS, and Lamar CO. Several Days ago, you saw a Lincoln in an Imperial: today we had an Imperial in Dodge! It's amazing how fast the land use changes right at the Colorado line - from irrigated fields to sage brush. We learned that there is a century-old water-rights deal in effect that prevents Colorado from drawing 'Kansas water' and so prevents irrigation there.

8) We ended in Pueblo, CO. It's home to all US government publications, y'know - I wonder if there's a huge Indiana Jones style warehouse around here someplace, where they keep all those free publications, just waiting for us to write and request one? We didn't see it, but the old downtown is very cool. The train station (Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe Depot) is a redstone beauty - all restored as a meeting and banquet hall! I could stand to live in this town!

Our car ran beautifully today, as we knew it would. The heat never bothered it at all (it never ran above normal range). As usual, it attracted an appreciative crowd both at stops and honking and waving all along the route. We've arranged it with US flags in the windshield bar receivers when the top is down. A perfect parade car! Still no official photos on the GreatRace website (is that photographer BLIND?!), but we were interviewed by the Hutchinson News in Dodge City, maybe he'll post some in tomorrow's paper there, see www.hutchnews.com ( Editor's note: the interview no longer resides on the hutchnews.com website). We're all out of handout postcards of the car, and I tried to get new ones at the all-night Kinko's in Wichita, but it turned out to be far away late at night. Sleep seemed the better option. Refilling will just have to wait for our rest day in Durango! Sorry, Kids!

The sudden dust and rain today got the car filthy. We did a wipe down 'wash', but it needs a real bath. Not tonight. Off to bed!

Day 11: Stage 9

OK, we were both bothered all night by the mystery of what we did wrong the day before. I did mental math and was convinced that the speedo calibration change, if reversed by accident, would match our accumulated error awfully close. And yet.... Dave got up EARLY, after waking several times (he says) tossing around thinking about what went wrong. We spent several hours in calculations, eliminating the possibilities one by one. It was not the speedo calibration - we did that right. We even checked on the thermal expansion of the tires in the hot Kansas sun (possible, but unlikely). We eliminated everything but our corrections for acceleration (we must account for not instantly going from rest or from one speed to another, as presumed by the ideal times we're trying to match). Yesterday's long highway run had many 55-40-55 mph transitions (to allow normal traffic to pass up the old cars on those occasions when Kansas provided a passing lane section). There it was! We had inadvertently used the whole measured times of acceleration to adjust our timing of acceleration starts, rather than half of them (which gives the average lost time for a linear speed-up). That meant we gained a few seconds with each time we accelerated! In earlier days, the starts, stops, and corners had dominated the days' performance figures, but yesterday, they were almost non-existent and these speed changes drove the error! RATS! But - Lesson Learned! Immediately after we figured this out, we went out and rebuilt all our acceleration tables, too, by making a new set of measures for stomp-it-to speed runs. We are at higher elevation now and the engine is fully broken-in, too. We found some more minor error there. Now we're confident the good days we had earlier were not just flukes!

So today we got off to our usual ragged start - it seems we must make some kind of minor error, followed by a panic to correct for it, just to get our adrenaline up to functional levels! We've done that every morning so far, except for the long run in Kansas. The early going was still flat, and now we were tired from our poor night's rest. We were both a little drifty at first. Then we tightened up and made a good run with only one serious error and that one mostly corrected, too. We scored 39 seconds overall for the day, with 19 of those in that one error. We also earned our second Ace (a perfect score on one leg of the day). It was a six-leg day, from Pueblo, CO to Durango, via Alamosa and Pagosa Springs. I love those San Juan mountains!

It occurred to me while taking a pit stop today, that I have been writing about 'we' on this trip, maybe even mentioning my co-pilot/navigator by name, but I haven't really told you who he is or why we're doing this (skip this part if you want just the day's events report). David Ullman lives in Corvallis, OR - the opposite side of the continent from my home in Melrose, NY. We've been friends for about 30 years. We met in Schenectady, NY, when he was a young Engineering Professor and I was an old Engineering Student (thereby hangs another tale for another day!). I did my Master's work with him as advisor (his first go at having a grad student), and we became fast friends. We are both total engineering geeks with artistic twists and silly senses of humor. We've done projects together that range from flywheel energy storage to human-powered hydrofoils, to restoring the Detroit Electric car that belonged to Charles Steinmetz, the genius engineer behind Edison's General Electric Company. He is an accomplished sculptor, pilot, and multi-published author who now makes his living consulting to major companies on Decision Theory (the means to make good decisions from incomplete fact). Even our wives get along! When he and his family moved to Oregon (where he took a teaching position at Oregon State), we needed a way to stay in touch, so - since we both travel in our work, we fell into a habit of coordinating trips occasionally to meet and goof off a bit. That grew into some road trips and eventually into our decision to try the Great Race. After ten hard driving days, we're still friends - each convinced the other is a blithering idiot perhaps, but a best friend sort of blithering idiot.

We climbed out of Pueblo (elevation about 2800 ft) and up through the La Veta pass in the Front Range, then on up over the famous Wolf Creek Pass in the Rockies (10,850 ft) - two M&M's to anyone who remembers that trucker's song about crossing this pass during the CB era! The driving was a bit more challenging than before (real slopes! actual curves!), but there were still many miles between most events. As Janis Joplin once wrote, "we sang every song that driver knew." The day was beautiful, and the temperature actually dropped as we climbed through the morning. It was just 65F at the top. When we came down into Durango, the heat returned, but no humidity - and no storms! Just some of those big old water balls that sometimes splatter from the sky this time of year in the high country. Hey, no problem - the wipers work fine.

On days like today, one of the hardest parts of the task is to stay focused. The scenery and visual beauty of this area is enough to make us both think it might be worth just tossing the schedule for a while, to go explore the countryside - or at least stop for some pictures! Nope! Our competitive juices are flowing. It's not about winning, exactly. It's more about knowing we can do this better than we have so far!

Durango turned out a big crowd for us! Another very attractive Main Street (do you all know about the Main Street program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation? It's making these small downtowns vibrant and beautiful again). I backed the big white ride into its berth at the curb and right in front of the announcer's booth - live on ESPN radio (103.3 FM from Dallas-Ft. Worth). We had a good interview about the Race and the pains and pleasures of doing it in a restored Imperial (plusses: VERY reliable and comfortable, and fast. minuses: BIG for tight turns and narrow roads, no engine braking for precision speed control on hilly terrain). I didn't know that was coming, so we may never hear how it sounded on the air or hear anything of it again. However, the other interviewee there with me was the famous Bobby Unser, multiple Indy champ! That was kinda cool.

We have struck up some friendly one-on-one competitions with some of the other rookie teams: the Goudeaus from Louisiana, and Kasson & Bull, from Troy, NY. There's even a few quarters riding on the outcome. The Goudeaus are one of the teams chosen by Hemmings for their Rookie Challenge, which is the basis for a TV show on the race, on the History Channel (I think), sometime in September 2006. Also, today if anyone had managed a perfect score ALL DAY (it's never been done in all 24 years), that team would have won $100,000 - rather like the hole-in-one prizes in golf (and probably less likely). However, the best today was a 6 second score. Our 39 seconds (with no age handicap, having the newest car) puts us back in 7th in Rookies and 61st overall, pretty much recovering what we lost yesterday.

As we pulled out of the post-race display parking tonight, it felt as if I had left the parking brake on (I have been known to do that). Nope, yet the car felt oddly draggy. Once rolling, it felt OK, so maybe it's a trick of the tired mind - or maybe the elevation here (6500 feet) is still enough to make it sluggish. I dunno. I'll get the wheels up tomorrow for the first time since we left. Something to watch.....

As some of you have asked why no Imperial photos are posted, I asked the media head of the Great Race organizers. He swears there's no editorial policy, just the chance outcome of shooting 200+ pictures of 100+ cars every day and trying to select and post some by that night. Today's images aren't yet posted as I write this, but the photographers drove right along side us at speed for a while today, snapping away - so maybe there will be some Imperial photos to see in the Stage 9 section tomorrow.

Part 1, Background and Prep	Part 2, Day 1, 2	Part 3, Day 3, 4, 5	Part 4, Day 6, 7, 8
Part 5, Day 9, 10, 11	Part 6, Day 12, 13	Part 7, Day 14, 15	Part 8, Day 16, 17, 18

Dave and John's Cross-Continent Road Rally, Part 5

Day 9: Stage 7

Day 10: Stage 8

Day 11: Stage 9