Internal Links: JPIII Maine Forest Press Release
External Links: |
Disappointment
Jim: The piece that connects the right-front spring (and thus the suspension) to the rest of the car broke. The roads in Maine are a bit rough (to put it mildly!) and the Prelude is a heavy car. The roads have bridges that consist of two big wooden planks. We hit one too hard and it hit us back. Q: How were you doing up until then? Jim: Maine was a super-important rally for us because Lon wasn't entered. We spotted him some points during the three west coast rallies we skipped and we wanted to make up a lot of that ground in Maine. The problem occurred in the middle of stage six and we had been leading the production class up to that point. We limped back to the service area and the crew tried some pretty heroic things to fix the car but we ran out of time and had to take the DNF. Q: When did you first sense something was wrong? What did it feel like? Jim: Well, the skid plate started hitting more rocks because the right front was now several inches lower than it should have been. There was also a scary-sounding whirring noise that turned out to be the tire rubbing on the fender well. When we got to the next bridge, I took it very slowly but we still hit the skid plate. Next the headlight and battery brackets broke sending headlight glass flying over the hood. That kinda told me we had a big problem! The in-car video of the event is actual pretty funny. Q: How did it affect your overall strategy for the season? Jim: If we had won that race, we would have retaken the points lead in production class. As it turned out we only got 2 points for starting the event. What it really meant is that we had to finish ahead of Lon in all of the remaining national rallies to have a chance. It also meant that we had to go out to Washington state for the last rally of the year, Pacific Forest.
|
[Next] | [Previous] | [1996 Season Recap] | [Home]
1996 JPIII Rally Sport Official Sponsors:
(Click on the logos below to visit them)
Feel free to send Jim email.
Copyright (c) 1997 by JPIII Rally Sport
Please read our copyright notice before copying
any content from this site.
Site designed by Chip Anderson
Report technical problems to our webmaster.
