Ziptie Rally STPR Recap and media

[Numbchux]

got home a couple days ago, but still recovering. Our driver/owner, Carl, just posted a write-up with a bunch of pictures and a video from the event.

 

 

The Ziptie Rally Team 171 car of Carl Siegler and Dave Goodman took on the STPR rally out of Wellsboro, PA this past weekend. Accompanying them was crew chief Matt "Chux" Alexander. Chux was assisted by Martin Asao, Andrew Browning and Mike Rhode. The team left Carl's house in Golden Valley Monday May 31st at 7pm for PA in the K2500 service rig and the Forester XT recce car. Andrew drove in from MA Wed morning in his Impreza wagon.

 

The drive took 20hours as the K2500 doesn't do great with stuff like hills or fuel economy. The drive pretty much looked like this the whole time for Chux and Martin.

 

We ended up camping at Ives Run Campground which was about 20 minutes out of Wellsboro. We had 2 very nice sites next to a lake and no one around for most of the week. Wednesday was a "rest" day for us as all we had was registration.

 

Here's half of the campsite

 

Thursday Dave and I were up bright and early for recce. We got there early and ended up in Group A right behind Antoine L'Estage and Nathalie Richard and ahead of Bill Bacon and Peter Watt. Recce was a new experience for us and I was glad the FXT had plenty of ground clearance - some of the recce cars didn't do so well (like the rental prius that had to be abandoned on the waste management stage). While we were at recce the crew ran the car through tech. Afterward we met back up and headed to the practice stage. Dave and I ran it twice, the first time we were off pace and not synced up. Second pass everything was good so we packed up and headed back to camp.

 

Dave gets serious at the practice stage. Chris Greenhouse is checking his tires in the background

 

Friday morning we got up, did some last minute checks on the car, fueled up and cleaned the car off for the parade/parc expose.

 

freshly washed and leaving for rally hq

 

Friday's stages were tough. The two waste management stages were brutal on the cars and stage 2, rattler was extremely fast (several cars above the 70mph maximum average. we averaged 65.33 mph). on ss3 I hit a 4" diameter pine tree at low speed and subsequently got the car stuck in a mud puddle. This took us off the podium pace for Friday.

 

sliding by a corner on waste management

 

powering onto a straight

 

Our car survived and we went on the the super special at the fairgrounds.

 

Dave and I walking the course

 

attacking a corner at the sss

 

landing off the jump

 

Friday concluded and we had 3 more stages to go in the Finger Lakes regional on Saturday.

 

many teams washed their cars right after the sss as parc expose was early Saturday

 

Dave and Chux reviewing stage notes and movement plans overnight

 

Saturdays stages were very technical. Lot's of fast sections with tight narrow stuff mixed in. Not much room for error out there. I botched a few other corners and we dropped a couple minutes getting stuck again. This put us off the podium for Finger Lakes. We ended that rally 5th overall and 4th in class. After the 1st service we started the Sherwood Forest regional rally. We would finish Sherwood 3rd overall and 3rd in class. If you combine the regional and national competitors we would have finished STPR 13th overall and 6th in class.

 

A few pics from Saturday:

 

 

 

 

 

for more pictures visit here

 

ZRT STPR video