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FT Rally Team: 100 Acre Wood Rally Recap
April 01, 2019
The 2019 100 Acre Wood Rally two weeks ago had a lot of Colorado representation: Racer Dave (who provided us with a recap of their race experience last week), Heli-Flick Rally, ODD Racing, as well as our own Flatirons Tuning Rally Team. The scenery for the race was amazing, with a ton of spectators from near and far showing up to watch the race, including the Mayor of the local town! We sat down with some of the Flatirons Tuning Rally Team to discuss how both days of racing went… It sure was an eventful race for us!
The excitement for this event began early. We were driving our trailer, with the FT Rally Car in-tow, out east for the event, when we caught the tail-end of the crazy storm that hit Colorado a couple weeks ago. High-winds were blasting the highway, with trailers getting overturned left and right. Luckily, we were able to make it out there without incident, but it was some white-knuckle driving to get there!
When we eventually arrived at the 100 Acre Rally, we did a recce (i.e. walkthrough) of the course and noticed that some of the course’s natural water bridges had flooded as a result of the storm. Luckily, by the first day of the race, these bridges had receded enough to no longer be a major concern.
This brings us to our first race day… We passed the tech inspection without issue and were excited to get out on the course. We finished the first day in the middle-of-the-pack, without any crashes or mechanical failures to note. However, our co-driver Rebecca got very sick during this first day and had to drop out of the race before the start of day two.
We began making phone calls around to the other teams we knew out there, seeing if there was anyone who wasn’t currently racing who would be able to step-in as our co-driver for day two. We were thrilled and very grateful when Preston Osborn from ODD Racing (another local Colorado team) jumped in to help us. Unfortunately, as a result of having to switch our Co-Driver, we were instantly disqualified from the whole rally, but were still able to run the race.
Day two, unlike day one, was much more eventful for us. By our first service, we had a flat tire, and bent rear lateral links as a result of an unfortunate run-in with a ditch (see pictures below for some air-time that may have also been the culprit). We had also broken our (first) CV axle of the day. We got everything patched up, then sent the car back out to continue racing.
By our 2nd service, we’d broken another CV axle. We sent the car back out to finish the race, effectively running it as a 2WD car (something Subarus are not too keen on), but still managed to finish 19th overall in the National Rankings, and 2nd in the Regional Rankings. Despite the mechanical issues, we were pleased with how the car ran (engine-wise), were pretty stoked on the air-time we caught, and were quite happy with how the race day weather turned out. Scott also drove very well, especially considering all the mechanical snafus we were fighting against!
We’d like to give a big shout-out to the teams at Boost’d Scoops, Flatirons Subaru, Flatirons Tuning, and Preston Osborn/ODD Racing… We couldn’t have done it without the help of all these fine people, and we’re very excited for our next race!
- Flatirons Tuning Rally Team
