As day 1 wound down I was making plans for a quick video introducing our team. When day 2 began I prepped the camera and gear for a shoot, loaded it in the cruiser, and my co-driver Marie and myself headed off to meet with our PT Cruiser club for our monthly meet. That's when my plans for the day got a bit off track. We met up with some friends and hit the road for the 30 mile trip to our meeting place. The trip was filled with radio chatter between the cars and I forgot all about my grand video plans till we arrived at our destination. 

As we arrived I glanced around the parking lot and realized that my camera operator was not at the meet this month. Hmmmm.... maybe I should have called him to confirm? Well, the shoot was going to have to wait till the ride home. We made our rounds, talked about our Cruisers, what we planned for our Cruisers, what we've done to our Cruisers, listened to stories from the car show in Laughlin, NV we missed last weekend, and had a great lunch with our friends.

So I'm thinking this is okay, we still have the 30 mile journey home to film some footage. Until the idea popped up in the group to go see a new vetrans memorial in San Marcos, CA, and then the group would go visit a fellow member who was at home recovering from knee surgery that occurred earlier in the week. My plans were now shot, but we had a good time. With daylight pretty much gone, we arrived home and now I have to get ready to head out of town on a business trip for a couple weeks. I guess I now have plenty of time to plan the video. 

I've spent part of the evening thinking about what participating in Bullrun would actually be like. It's easy to say that you want to be on the show, it's more difficult to actually be prepared. Vehicle preparation is one thing, but mental preparation is completely different. I have been on rally's before, although not on the same scale as this.

I was thinking about the road rally's my Dad took me on when I was young. The local Mustang and Corvette clubs near Clearwater Florida during those years produced some amazing rally's. We didn't have a Mustang or Corvette, but we always showed up in my Dad's Mazda Cosmo. If you don't know what a Cosmo was, it was a mid 70's coupe with a 13B rotary engine as the power plant. It was heavier than the RX3's of the time, but it handled well (I did have the opportunity to drive it years later),  was fast off the line,  and the cloth seats and wood steering wheel and shift knob were a nice finishing touch to the interior trim (it also set off my unfulfilled dream of owning an RX3SP).  I was to young to drive at the time, but my Dad trusted me as a capable navigator. We never placed first, but we also never placed last. The most important thing was that I learned some valuable lessons about how to perform well in these types of events.

A few years down the road, I was an extremely active motorcyclist. When I got actively involved in the planning of my motorcycle club's semi-annual poker runs, I took some of the things I learned from those earlier road rally's and started incorporating them to make our poker runs more like a rally and less like a typical poker run. Finding the next check point became a challenge and riding skill competitions were introduced into the route. We found that the participants enjoyed that much more than following a route and picking up cards along the way.

A few more years down the road, Marie and I entered an off-road navigational rally. This was the event of my dreams. It was a rally, it was an off-road event, and there were skill challenges thrown into the mix. WOOT! Preparations lasted four months. I prepped the Jeep and I prepped my Marie to be my navigator. Since this event was in Nevada, we headed off to the Anza Borrego desert every weekend for four months to teach her how to use the GPS and feed me the information I needed to drive the route. After four months of bouncing around in the jeep over hundreds of miles of desert roads, she was the navigator I needed her to be for us to be successful. This was a two day event, with the first stage being a night run in territory we had never seen. We hadn't trained at night, but Marie performed like a pro, we had a good time, performed well as a team. and we had a decent finish for the first stage. The 2nd stage was a daylight run. We suffered a near catastrophic mechanical failure after a hard landing, and then after dealing with that we misread the clues and got lost. But we got lost as a team, found our way out as a team, finished poorly (although not last) as a team, and had a great time as a team.

Now it's a few years later once again and we discovered Bullrun. After watching a few episodes, I looked at Marie and said "We can do that." She looked back at me and said "In a stock PT Cruiser?" "Yes" I said, and then explained my philosophy about what needed to be done to perform well. She thought about what I said and when she smiled and replied "We can do that!", I knew that I had my co-driver/navigator once again.

Now I won't give away all my secrets, since I view anyone reading this as potential competition, but I will share the following:

Believe in yourself, your co-driver/navigator, and your car.

Understand your teams capabilities, your strengths and your weaknesses.

Know your car, it's capabilities, it's strengths and weaknesses. (there is no perfect car for this type of event)

Once you know and understand these things, you'll understand the lines you should not cross for your team and for your car. Recognize those lines and push the limits of those lines when you have to, but do not cross those lines. When you cross those lines, you FAIL.

And always, respect the competition.

Todd

aka Bootlegger