We had a late start this morning, and given today was the first of the Championship round, I decided to clean the whitewalls and rub off the new rust spots from the chrome with some 0000 steel wool. After 10 days of driving in rain, dirt roads, and downright dusty areas, The Hippo was looking a bit more worn than normal. Another racer, a real wisecracker, walked by while I was cleaning her up, and pointed to one of her dents laughing while saying, “you missed a spot!” Some might say that given the overall condition of the car, cleaning the whitewalls, and polishing the rusty chrome might be like putting lipstick on a pig, but given how well our chariot has treated us, I felt she deserved some attention.

As in the prior mornings, we received our race instructions exactly 30 minutes prior to our start time. Fortunately, the supplemental Race Change Instructions were minimal, and seemingly harmless. We hopped in the car and headed up the road for the time trial run. Most of the prior days, our time trial runs were coming in under the perfect race calibration time. Today we were a bit over. The speedometer was re-adjusted from 4-3-3-4 back to 4-3-3-2. Hal completed his computations, we got in line, and off we went. During the first Leg of the race, we passed a sign for Hamilton County, Kansas Limit, and below that was a notice that we had crossed the line into Mountain time. Now our late start time made sense, since the clocks were rolling back an hour from our start. That said, our race clocks were to be kept at Central time until we crossed the finish line. Our last stretch of Kansas was similar to what I recalled seeing there back in 1981 – flat with nothing to interrupt the line of horizon. I could have spun the camera all the way around the car, and this is pretty much what it all would look like.

We finished our first leg with 3 seconds off on a 37-minute run. Low single digits are GREAT! Driving into Leg 2, we had a programmed gas stop in Syracuse City, Kansas. There are three gas stations in that town, and all three had broken gas pumps, forcing the racers to wait in line. Every gas station we have entered, without exception, for the last 4-5 days has had pumps out of order. We get gas 3-4 times a day, and it just seems odd that this was such a consistent problem. In Leg 2 we ran the 1 hour and 16 minutes being only 1 second off! As my late mother-in-law would say, “Now we are cooking with gas!”

While running the 3rd Leg, we were traveling on a two-way, two-lane road that felt like it was only 1 1/2 lanes wide. We crested over a hill and headed down an incline at 50mph, and coming from the other direction was a HUGE farm tractor with devices sticking out all around. There was no way I was going to be able to maintain speed, I was imagining us clipping the side of the rolling machine, or spinning out of control from moving aside with 2 wheels on the road and two in the grass. I made a sloppy maneuver of reducing to 1/2 speed, trying to make the calculations for regaining time lost easier for Hal. The tractor pulled as far to their side as he could manage, and we were just able to skirt by at 25mph without getting impaled. We finished that 42-minute leg only 2 seconds off. Hal’s correction calculations were dead on.

We had lunch in Lamar, Colorado, and we were served freshly made and grilled hamburgers. All our other lunch stops have served grilled frozen beef patties, but in Lamar, they were proud to tell us we were getting fresh hand pressed Colorado beef patties. No surprise, so far, they were the best burgers of the trip. Like in Great Bend, Kansas yesterday, Lamar also has a big, beautiful steam engine on display in the town Welcome Center where we had lunch. They also had an impressive large cowboy bronze statue across from the steam engine.

During lunch we sat with two brothers who were driving a Mustang. They are mentors for quite a few Rookie teams this year. The race sheets showed lots of turns coming up just after lunch, and they suggested we make-up for our time loss at the upcoming starting line. If our start time was to be 1:38, we would normally start at 1:37 and 53 seconds to account for the 7 seconds lost getting up to speed at the beginning. The first several turns had an accumulated loss of 23 seconds, so we started at 1:37 and 30 seconds. We both liked this helpful hint. All those turns proved to be another course that had the cars driving all around one another. At one point running these boxes, something small blew into my eye, and I tried to rub it out. I then ended up with suntan lotion from my finger, in my eye. That burned and made my eye weep. We were not going too fast, so Hal could grab the steering wheel, my feet still controlling the pedals, while I used my shirt sleeve to get my eye back open and clear. It was a bit nerve wracking, but we got through it. In the same course area, last year’s Grand Champion, an open seated 1932 Ford Speedster, who went into today in 2nd place, was hit by a non-race truck. Fortunately, neither the driver nor navigator were hurt, but the car was damaged to the extent it is unable to finish the race.

As we got out of the maze of turns, we progressed down a road and started talking about how to make up some time. Occasionally during our drives, I will ask Hal to put his finger on the image on the race instructions of the next road sign we should be expecting. By doing that, I can quickly rotate my head to see the image, and dart my eyes back to the road and speedometer. We had an unusual condition ahead, and I could not understand Hal’s description, so I swiftly took a look at the image. As we were discussing possible tactics for regaining some time, we went around a sweeping left turn with a new artery starting off the turn, and I asked Hal if perhaps that was our turn. Yup. Slam on the breaks, swing The Hippo around on a hard right turn, and work our way on to the new path. There was no way to concretely know our time lost on that situation, so we took a good guess. The more we drove, seeing the distance between us and the next car ahead, the less confident we became in our guess. Ultimately our suspicions were correct, as we were 10 seconds off on that leg. All things considered, that is not bad for 1 hour and 45 minutes of driving.

The last leg… 1 hour and 11 minutes… We scored another 1 second. Woooo Hoooo!

With our handicap factor, we closed the day with a score of 15.39 seconds! We placed 15th overall for the day, AND we were the highest placed Rookies for the day. Our cumulative score moved up to 59th place, and on the cumulative rankings, we have 5 Rookies ahead of us, and 20 below. The race ends tomorrow, and the top 5 Rookie scores are in the money.

Other random thoughts, notes, and highlights:

In one of the later legs of today’s race, while making a right turn, a grasshopper jumped in my window and landed upon the top of the speedometer. He seemed quite content hanging out there for a bit, and eventually hopped off. When we had a break, I found him on the floor, opened the door, and away he went.

The temperatures today were substantially cooler. A much welcome change.

We finished in Pueblo, Colorado tonight, and we had the smallest crowds since the start of the event. We then left Pueblo, and motored to Colorado Springs for the overnight, and we will start and finish the last day’s race in Colorado Springs.

Hal is an addict. He is a Cheese Combo junkie. These are short pieces of pretzel sticks, hollowed out and filled with cheese. They can be purchased at virtually every gas station convenience store across the country. I am a Cheese Combo pusher. I buy the bags and keep them in the car. I take a sick pleasure in observing his lack of willpower. Hal is excellent at virtually everything he undertakes. I therefore feel it is my duty, as a good friend would, to capitalize on this weakness, and help him see that he is not perfect. I will open a bag, offer it to him, and like every pretzel junkie, he will say, “I am just going to have one.” Once he is about 3/4 of the way through the bag, he will plead that I finish the balance, to spare him the embarrassment of eating them all.

Today’s scores were a bit of a surprise, because I was having difficulty keeping the speedo needle on its required number. We were on many country roads, and they were anything but smooth. There would be a big crown in the road, and unending wobbly undulations. Those irregularities would make the car shake and bob front-to-back and side-to-side, and consequently my foot on the accelerator would bounce a bit. Somehow, we got lucky.

Tomorrow, Sunday, is the last race day. The Hippo has been GREAT, and Hal has been a terrific navigator. Anything can happen. We are going to try again to Just Do Better, and we will see how the chips fall.