RE: Rim of the World?

[Mark Nelson <mnelson@brls.com>]

My dad and I just got back from competing at Rim, yesterday.  It was a
very good turnout, but there were a couple of disappointments for Audi
fans.

1)  The Sprongls failed to show up for the second National race in a
row.  The reason was that they were in the middle of signing a
sponsorship contract with a major oil company.

2 & 3) Rui's S2 was not finished in time for Rim, and as a result was
running the 4KQ again.  As a side note the motor is being built by Ron
Wood, who runs a UrQ with a 16V VW Turbo 4cyl.  Rui lost his motor after
night stages on Friday, so as a result the crew could not get the car
prepared in time for Saturday's stages.  He DNF'd

As far as the rest of the race went, Choinere DNF'd on the last stage
after having major left rear suspension problems on the car, when the
entire left rear tire and brake assembly came off of the car on Stage
10.  Buffum and crew raced to get the car back together, but one of the
struts (not related to the accident) broke, and he DNF'd.  Henry Joy
went on to win in the RHD Mitsubishi Lancer.

>From my perspective, the course was very fun, but extremely challenging
as well.  The hardest stage, by far, was Del Sur, which was run on Stage
6, then run backwards on Stage 7.  Several people ended up with flat
right rear tires on Stage 7, including ourselves.  These two stages were
undeniably the hardest stages of the rally.  In my opinion, the most fun
stage, was stage 10, which had around 20 Waterbars, with lots of air
time, and very fast.  You could kind of relate the terrain to the Rally
of 1000 lakes in Finland, except this is a one lane road.  Overall this
was a very good rally.

My dad and I were simply happy to have finished this rally, especially
this being our first.  We only had a couple of fairly minor problems,
that fortunately were not repeated.  The first being that we did not
know how to come up with our next ATC time to check in, so on the second
stage, we showed up three minutes early, but the officials were kind
enough to show us how to do it, and we never had a problem after that.
There were a couple of errors I noticed pertaining to the Route Book
which gave a couple of wrong turn instructions, which we caught well
enough in advance.  Other than that things went pretty well, and the car
ran extremely well.  I have to hand it to that 323 GTX, although it
didn't quite have enough beans, it was an EXTREMELY forgiving car.  We
had no mechanical problems to speak of, other than the one flat, and
that was it.  The car performed impeccably all day.  The last we
checked, we had finished 8th in our class out of 14 cars, which we were
pretty satisfied with.  As I mentioned earlier, all we had to do was
finish the race to get our national licenses, and we did just that.  We
are *really* looking forward to getting my S2 finished, so that I can
run the Open Class at the end of the year, and really go all out next
year.

Anyway, if I have missed anything, or if anything needs to be corrected,
please let me know.  This was a great event, and it was good to be able
to meet three other Q-listers in person, as well!

Best Regards,

Mark Nelson (happy to have finished in one piece :-)
================================================================
mnelson@brls.com
Borealis Technology Corp.
SQA Engineer
   http://www.brls.com
Incline Village, Nevada
Carson City, Nevada

1990 Audi S2 Quattro (Building for SCCA Pro Rally)

Past Audis: 1987 5000CSTQ, 1987 5000CSTQW
================================================================


<<Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 06:18:08 -0400
From: "Mike Hopton" <mike@genesis-microchip.on.ca>
Subject: Rim of the World?

     Any news from Rim of the World?
     
     Regards, Mike>>