continued from above
Left: Jimi Day of the USCA ran things smoothly behind the scenes. Right: Show host Chad Reynolds of BangShift.com was always making us laugh
We were told to take two laps then to line up and everyone would stop at the Start/Finish line for pictures, then proceed out of the infield via the south tunnel and then follow the route on the rally instructions and map we were given. We tried to get our Vorshlag folks to all stick together but we lost most of our group by the first stop light. It wasn't a hard route to follow, and with nearly 40 cars all stickered up in Optima graphics it made it easy to see someone from this event no matter where you ended up. I was lucky enough to have a navigator (Amy) riding shotgun, but of course, like the stereotypical married couple, we had to argue over the instructions the ENTIRE time!
The first couple of miles of the route were on highway 114 right outside of the Speedway, but the route quickly diverted to secondary roads and even some residential streets. We got to see some beautiful homes in the city of Trophy Club, went through a school zone (the school kids went bonkers seeing all of the classic muscle cars go by!) into Grapevine, skirting around Grapevine lake. We drove through Flower Mound, Lewisville, and into my hometown of Plano. All of these secondary roads are concrete with expansion strips, and going slow you could feel every one in our Mustang with stif 800# springs. As the temperatures crept up into the 84°F high for the day, we rolled the windows up, turned the air con on, had the Satellite radio playing and the nav screen showing us the upcoming turns.
Amy and I have thousands of miles experience doing "TSD" rallyes, so the route instructions would have sufficed, but they gave us all detailed colored maps with the checkpoints clearly marked. They even had marks for what we quickly noticed were Optima film crews along the route, so we'd smile and wave for the dozen or so locations where we saw folks with tripod mounted cameras situated in medians and on road sides (some competitors said they never noticed them!). Having a navigator definitely helped, and we picked up more than a few strays - solo drivers trying to drive on unfamiliar roads while looking at a printed map - along this series of city roads that we had mostly driven on in the past.
We drove way across the Dallas metroplex and all the way east to Plano, then headed north to Frisco. Mike Dusold from Lewisville had made this route for the USCA folks and he did a fine job of keeping all of the competitors on real streets with the normal street car challenges and bumps. With the shocks turned down on our Mustang it really wasn't that bad. One of the 5 checkpoints was at
Pole Position Raceway, an amazing indoor kart track facility in Frisco. I hadn't driven at this Pole Position yet and I knew I had to give these karts a spin!
About half of the competitors were too hungry to stop for karting and instead stopped for lunch along the route, or wanted to get to the Holley Welcome Party dinner at the race hotel's final checkpoint. But at least 20 of the entrants stopped in for some karting fun. These were decently quick electric karts (45 mph) on a slick concrete surface in a climate controlled building, which was nice because it was a bit warm outside that day. Mike had arranged for a killer deal - half price races at $10 each - and I ended up buying 4 races. Each race is about 12 minutes long and they can have as many as 20 karts on track at once. I got into a decent kart my first two races and had the fastest lap times in each race. My next two races I ended up in two stinkers, with no front tires left and no top speed, and was 1-2 seconds slower on my best laps and got 4th and 5th fastest laps, ugh. So even the rental indoor electric karts can be as inconsistent as those of the gas powered variety, heh! Still, it was a lot of fun.
Amy had a spring pollen/sinus induced headache and sat out the karting, which she normally enjoys. She instead went to get some much needed food for about 7 of the competitors that were there - a real life saver. We scarfed down Whataburgers and fries between races and by 4:30pm we had burned enough of the day at the kart facility and got back on the road, as we still had two more checkpoints to meet before dinner. By now we had three playing cards and a pair of fours, so my "poker run" hand was looking more like a foot. Marc Sherrin was already giddy with his budding hand of 3 eights, but we had no idea what the prizes would be for the poker hand at the end (not part of the points competition, of course).
Left: The cars in the road rally stopped traffic everywhere. Right: First street drive with the new ABS computer - lots of lights, as expected
In the next leg we noticed a ~2 mile section of road on the route that was under serious construction and made a slight detour, not saving any distance just avoiding a traffic clusterfox, which worked beautifully. Thank you, Ford Sync Nav system! This construction detour we made (and were followed by a few others in the road rally) lopped off some time, as we made the next checkpoint ahead of people that left the kart track 20 minutes before us. The final stretch was a route along an old highway that was little more than a 2 lane road with a bunch of stoplights, which ran parallel to I-35. We could have taken the Interstate, and that was tempting, but we were worried about straying too far off the route and any consequences we might see. Unfortunately there were none, and we found out later than many competitors got to the party hours ahead of us by just using highway and tollway routes instead of the surface streets that made up the rally route, going directly from one marked checkpoint to the next. Oh well, live and learn... we waved at all the camera guys along the actual route, at least.
continued below