For reasons I cannot explain, the last Chapter, #15, was shorted several of its final paragraphs when it was posted. One of significance that was missing, was the paragraph explaining the title, of being In The Money! You should be able to access the complete version at 1951hippo.com, and scroll to Chapter 15. Very Sorry for any inconvenience! -Willy-

It has now been 7 weeks since the end of the Great Race, and there is an apparent need to close the loop by answering a variety of questions, and maybe sharing another story or two.

How Did We Place? – Well, I think I had shared that 158 cars had been originally registered, and only 101 crossed the finish line. The Baltimore Bohs and the Hippo ended up in 80th place overall. That poor placement has to do with the 3 minute and 30 second penalty we received on the last day, by failing to stop at the final checkpoint on our way to dropping Hal off at the airport. With that penalty, we ended up in 100th place for just the last race day. Had we not been assessed that penalty, we would have finished 67th for the day, and in 57th place overall. Even that does not sound great, but our overall time would have been 5minutes and 15.35 seconds. The 5th place Rookie, which was a money winning position, finished at 5 minutes and 1 second – so we were VERY close. Ultimately Hal and I had much to be proud about, and safe to say we performed well better than we expected.

Did I Drive the Hippo Home? – NO! After 12 days behind the wheel, I had had enough. The Hippo was packed away in a covered transport on Monday, July 3rd, and was delivered back home in Baltimore on Friday, July 7th. I drove the car into the trailer in Colorado, and there was a delay in getting it back to Baltimore by the expected time. As luck would have it, I had a client meeting that I could not reschedule when the car arrived, and my gracious and helpful neighbor, Joe Bennett, was kind enough to oversee the offloading process. Joe later reported, “Willy, I’ll be amazed if you have any clutch left on that car! The transport driver had no idea how to drive it, and he revved the engine to its peak, and was burning the clutch plates trying to get it to move.” Fortunately, The Hippo survived, albeit with a couple thousand miles less of driving capacity on the clutch!

The Unexpected –

1. Getting three Aces. An Ace represented a perfect score on one leg of a day’s race. For all the craziness that happened within each race leg, it was simply inconceivable for us to get even a single perfect score.
2. I lost 9 pounds! When my wife Caroline picked me up at the airport, she said it looked like I must have birthed a 10 pound baby. For all the Bar-B-Q, hamburger, hotdogs, and desserts consumed over all the days, I would have NEVER imagined that I was going to lose weight! As I had mentioned previously in the blog, this racing stuff is the BEST exercise EVER! No more Nordic Track for this guy. Hop in the Hippo and GO, and watch the pounds evaporate.
3. Armadillos – I had never seen one until driving through Arkansas, where there was one walking down the middle of the road.
4. When one spends hours on a boat, it is fairly common to have the sensation of movement when stepping out of the boat on solid ground. Standing still, one feels as though they are still on the boat, bobbing up and down. On the last race day, after 7 days of focusing on the Timewise speedometer, and driving mostly with peripheral vision, we pulled up to a stop sign, and with my foot firmly on the brake, I had the sensation that the car was still moving. I had to elevate my eyes to look directly at the road to convince my brain we were not moving. This was either a byproduct of the 7 preceding days of exhaustion, or some other brain trick at work, and it happened throughout the last day at every stop sign.

Frequently asked, “Are you and Hal still Friends?” – YES! Of course. There were occasional tensions, but we both have way too much history of fun times together to let subtle issues get under our skin. We went through stresses and great excitement, and our collective sense of humor had us frequently laughing at each other and ourselves. Candidly, I feel quite fortunate to have been able to have lived the experience with such a great friend. The end result proved to be another great experience together. One for the books!

Was it Great Seeing the Country Through the Back Roads? – Candidly, I saw much less of the country than Hal. My gaze was so fixed on the speedometer, I did not have a chance to look much at the surroundings. I did get to see plenty while we were in transit between race legs, but I was unable to get the full effect of the scenery of the full trip.

The People were Terrific! – Many will suggest our nation is in a state of divisiveness. This trip took us through every political spectrum, and between the race participants, and our hosts in every town where we stopped, everyone was wonderfully welcoming. If there was a problem, folks wanted to help. My 12 days were a refreshing reminder of what makes our country a unique and wonderful place.

40th Great Race – The 2023 Great Race was the 40th year the race has been run. I hope it lasts for many, many more years to come.

Spirited Rivalry – The owner/organizer of the Great Race is apparently a graduate of Auburn University. One of the longtime Great Race participants is a graduate of Alabama, the Crimson Tide, Auburn’s archrival. All race cars had to pass a safety inspection prior to being able to compete, and the race organizer decided that the confirmation of passing said safety inspection was the required placement of an Auburn U sticker on all the compliant car’s windshields. When the Alabama graduate Expert Class racer suggested he would refuse to place the Auburn sticker on his windshield, he was politely informed that he would be disqualified from the race. With great objection, the racer reluctantly acquiesced. Once passing the finish line, his windshield sticker was swiftly removed!

Spelling – Apparently I have an affinity for a healthy dose of sand after a nice dinner. Most blog postings were happening around 1:00am. I was exhausted, but committed to making daily posts. I would proof read everything before posting, and then would reread and make corrections again the next morning. The weekend after my return, I reread the posts in their entirety, and was appalled by the extent of my spelling and grammar errors. Among the many blunders, I saw reference to my enjoyment of deserts over desserts. Perhaps I have something in common with Andrew Jackson. According to the NY Times in 1985, “When Harvard granted an LL. D. (an honorary doctorate-level academic degree in law) to Andrew Jackson in 1833, John Quincy Adams boycotted the graduation ceremonies, calling Jackson ”a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar.” To which Jackson replied: ”It is a damn poor mind indeed which can’t think of at least two ways to spell any word.”” I have since corrected many of the indiscretions, but my grammarian friends will surely be able to point out plenty more needed corrections.

My Hero, Andrea LaBarbara – Andrea, a commercial aviation pilot, was riding her 1934 Indian motorcycle for the race. This bike has a manual gearshift knob, fondly called a suicide shifter, next to the gas tank, which requires the driver to remove one hand from the handlebars to shift gears up and down. Andrea’s motorcycle had no side car, so she was singularly responsible for the navigation duties along with the driving. She had a wooden box with a plexiglass screen on top, which carried her daily race navigation pages on a scroll. As she drove, she would need to take a hand off the handlebars and manually roll a wooden wheel on the box to advance her instructions. She had her speed charts and Timewise speedometer also mounted on the handlebars, and had no ability to write calculations, rather leaving her to compute everything in her mind alone. She was one of three motorcycle riders sharing similar circumstances, but Andrea managed to finish in 4th place amongst all the Rookies. Hats off to Andrea!

In the Money! – A little over a week ago, I received an email from the Great Race announcing that The Baltimore Bohs and The Hippo were prize winners, and we would be receiving a trophy plaque and a check for $250 in the mail. Back in Chapter 13, in the notes from the second to last race day, I shared that we were the best scoring Rookies for the day. Unbeknownst to us, there were prizes for the best in race class for each race day, and our being the best Rookie score on that day earned us the plaque and the check. Woooo Hoooo!

Will We Do it Again? – Hal and I both approached this as a one and done experience. It proved to be well more complicated than we had initially imagined, and perhaps some more fun and excitement than expected. I have ZERO desire to do the race again with someone other than Hal, because the learning curve for the two of us was dramatic. I have no interest in spending all the time for someone else to have to learn everything that Hal and I have already learned as Rookies. Additionally, the race requires a big time commitment, and with both of us working, it is hard to justify spending so much vacation time away from family. That said, Hal and I are both happy to reconsider another race when we have transitioned into retirement – whenever that may happen to be. The 2024 race will be going from Kentucky to Maine, and will pass through Maryland. I will certainly be planning to meet up with the racers if we are fortunate enough for there to be a race stop in Maryland.

Thanks to you all for your warm responses and reactions to this blog. It was the first time I had done a blog, and were it not for Marcus Ranum’s suggestion and help with the set-up of the site, I would have never undertaken the task. It has been great fun speaking with many of you about the Great Race and our experiences, and if/when we do it again, I will attempt to do the blog yet again.

Thanks for your interest and support!

Best to All,

-Willy Moore- (Driver and Blogger)

Hal Burnett (Navigator)

Marcus Ranum (Blog Support)

We started and ended our final race day in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We were in the Antlers Hotel, whose backside overlooks Pikes Peak, the highest summit of the southern front range of the Rocky Mountains.

Image from the hotel. Pikes Peak is the snow capped mountain on the right

There have been car races at Pikes Peak since 1916, called the Hill Climb, or the Race to the Clouds. When I woke up this morning, I noticed a wonderful photo of a Pikes Peak racer on the wall next to my bed. It was the perfect image to get me in the right mood for the final race day.

We picked up our race instructions and the supplemental change document, and Hal added the changes onto our 15 pages of instructions. Today was a half day, with the first car planned to cross the ceremonial finish line at 1:00. We were position 67 – thereby 1 hour and 7 minutes after the morning’s first car.

Complicating our day was the fact that Hal had to get to the airport in time to catch a flight back home. He had patients scheduled for tomorrow morning, and when we booked flights, we thought Hal would have plenty of time to get to the airport. We later learned that teams were penalized if they removed their cars early from the car shows at the end of each race day. We did not want to get hit with a two minute penalty, so we spoke with the Race organizer the night before. After some back-and-forth, we were told we could skip Sunday’s lunch, I could run Hal to the airport, and then swing back to roll across the ceremonial finish line without a penalty. Hal would be at the airport, I would have the car in the show, and all would be wonderful

Every morning racers and navigators are milling about, discussing the prior days’ highs and lows. It is a great chance to get pearls of wisdom from the experts. We heard from several race veterans that today would be the most difficult. We ran the calibration run, and our time was a bit different than prior days. We had heard that the high altitude impacts the tire pressure, which in turn alters the tire circumference, and thereby the speedo. We started at 4-3-3-2 and changed it to 4-3-2-9. That was a good setting, because we got 1 second on our first leg, which was 1 hour and 4 minutes long! The routes for the day were running up and down extreme inclines, and The Hippo’s engine was being taxed running at very high rev’s to be able to suitably climb and maintain speeds.

The Hippo was a tad off today, but that was to be expected. Colorado Springs is at an altitude of 5,994 feet, more than a mile above sea level. The Hippo’s carburetor pulls in the same volume of air at any altitude, and it supplies a consistent flow of gas regardless of elevation. The problem is that at higher elevations, there is less oxygen in the air, and less oxygen mixed with the fuel means the system is too rich with fuel.

There were lots of stops and turns, and we were crisscrossing with other racers for the first three legs. Leg 2 was still respectable, coming in at 3 seconds over 19 minutes.

Then we hit Leg 3. We were going up, down, and around in the first portion, and felt really good that we had it knocked. We came out of the valley and onto a road under construction, and were traveling 45mph through traffic cones separating us from oncoming traffic, climbing a twisty hill. I saw a yellow sign suggesting a reduced speed of 35mph, and asked Hal if there was an instruction telling us to slow. Nope. I white knuckled through the construction (being a Sunday, there were no workers, and 45mph was still the posted speed) and we ended up on a two lane two way road at 40mph for 36 seconds – then increased to 45mph. Our next instruction was to turn right on Wolfensberger Rd. Coming out of the construction, I expressed reservation to Hal, “There is no way the race designers would have us go faster than the suggested safe speed limit. Something’s not right.” We had a blue 1969 Oldsmobile 442 in front of us, and our distance apart was getting shorter. We looked at our race order sheet, and saw they were Rookies. Clearly, they had messed something up, and we were right as rain. The longer we drove, the more we questioned ourselves. Should we turn around? 10 minutes in, we were sweating. If we rode this out for 15 minutes, it would take another 15 to get back, and we would potentially be over the allowable excess, and be given a DNF (Did Not Finish). Expletives were flying. We were not upset with each other, we were upset that we might have blown the day. After about 15 minutes, Wolfensberger Road presented itself, and we literally screamed with joy! We were a car full of tense nerves, and the release of knowing we made the right decision by sticking to our guns was liberating.

There was however, still the matter of the Olds 442 in front of us. We were now VERY close to them. We drove through the checkpoint ending that 3rd leg, and then starting a fuel and bathroom break. This means all racers line back up for a new start, and while we were all 1 minute apart at the beginning of the morning, the times between cars change, because clocks reset at checkpoints. That pesky Olds was too close to run another Leg, so we opted to submit a Time Allowance Request of 30 seconds – meaning instead of starting 10 seconds behind the 442, we would start 40 seconds after them. Time Allowance Requests are encouraged to be used to prevent unsafe conditions, and this was a textbook case. We watched our clock, started 30 seconds late, created a good safe distance on the Oldsmobile, and felt very good about our times. We clocked out of that Leg and had the final Leg after that.

Once we hit the end of the race that was clocked, we pulled away from the rest of the racers and headed to the airport. Hal arrived with plenty of time to spare, and I then needed to circle back to get in line with the other racers. I looked at the Race Instructions and discovered a labeled highway exit, found other race cars, and jumped in line. We drove through the Garden of the Gods, a National Natural Landmark of rock formations and worked our way to the ceremonial Finish Line.

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, CO

I bet you’re wondering about our scores…

Well, the 3rd Leg, the one with the traffic cones and the slow Oldsmobile 442 in front of us… remember the Supplemental Change Instructions we get every morning… one of those changes added an instruction of looking for a speed limit 50mph sign on the right. The way the instructions were formatted, that 50mph sign was a trigger for us to do 35mph before and through the construction zone. In the absence of the note, it read like we were to travel at 45 through the zone. The note was handwritten at the top of the page with an arrow between two task numbers. In the craziness of going through the construction zone, our focus was going from instruction to instruction, and we both completely missed this change. Well, the Olds was on the money, and we were the inexperienced Rookies! But we were in great company, because everyone we spoke with at the next stop was complaining about being run through the course at the elevated speed. Even several veterans made the same mistake.

Remember the Time allowance Request?

I was solo, working my way up to the ceremonial Finish Line (the actual finish was when the clock stopped prior to taking Hal to the airport), and I was greeted by the gentleman who provides our scores at the end of each day. I dutifully handed him our Time Allowance Request, and he clarified that he was unable to accept it. When the race clock halted, we were supposed to stop at an Observation Checkpoint prior to the scheduled lunch, to submit our request form. And without having passed through that checkpoint we were assessed a 3-minute penalty!

So, at Leg 3 we were 48 seconds fast. Leg 4, the one where we tried to submit the 30 second request, we clocked in at 31 seconds late. Had our time request been approved, we would have had 1 second. Leg 5 we had a respectable 5 second run. We could have had a 57 second total, handicapped to 52, but instead we ended with 4 minutes and 1.64 seconds.

The one day’s disappointing score did nothing to dampen the excitement and relief of crossing the ceremonial Finish Line, where I was presented with two Olympic style gold medals: one for the driver, and one for the navigator.

As the top of the medal says – TO FINISH IS TO WIN. This is not a statement of making all feel good by calling them winners, rather it is emphasizing that the race is designed to be very hard on the vehicles, and if they survive, then they have accomplished an extraordinary feat. Remember, 158 cars were registered, only 125 were able to start, and only 100 crossed the finish line. When we finished our clock time and started to head to the airport, we passed a race car broke down on the side of the road. The driver was kicking his car in frustration. I later learned this was that driver’s 3rd Great Race in three different cars, and he has never finished one race yet.

As this blog is titled, I really had no sense how this was going to go. Every day The Hippo survived was genuinely a bonus day. Somehow, we accumulated 12 bonus days! I got to spend 11 days with one of my oldest and best friends, on a true wild adventure; what could be better? Hal knew D.Donnelly, the man who had such an impact on my life, and every day the two of us would remark how D.Donnelly was looking down upon us and smiling. Every day I thought of him, and in its own strange way, the race helped me turn a page over the grief of D.Donnelly’s passing.

Hal sent a text from the airport with the following that was worth sharing:

“I have heard that if you orient yourself to all five senses you remember more vividly, and I had tried this on the trip… the Great Plains, the rolling Ozarks, the hot muggy flats of central Florida, the cow manure of Kansas.  The jolt and accompanying squeak of the clutch and brakes on decelerating on 5-4-3-2-1- .  The smell of (non-rancid) sweat mixed with the gasoline that always seemed to spray onto my leg when filling up The Hippo. The high-pitched roar of the engine on the open road and the hesitant straining as we climbed hills.  The smell of burgers grilling and sounds of kids playing as we pulled into small town lunch spots.  The baking heat seemed to vibrate tactilely in the Deep South heat.  Wow, so much.” 

If all goes per plan, The Hippo gets picked up by a covered transport service tomorrow (Monday) morning and will get delivered back to Baltimore on Friday. We closed with 115,415.9 miles on the odometer, which means we logged 3,601.8 miles on the journey. The Hippo was fantastic. I am asked in every town if I would be driving her back to Baltimore, and I always respond with a quick, stern NO. This has been an amazing trip, but I am anxious to get home to my wonderful wife, and my back and posterior are looking forward to something more comfortable than a 72-year-old vinyl seat with badly worn cushion springs.

I loved the cars, the racers and their teams, the company of my good friend, and the generous and welcoming people we met in every town. This has been an amazing experience. If you love old cars, I highly recommend you consider placing your name on the waiting list for a future Great Race.

Thanks to Shawn Lednick, Hal and my Coach, who was so generous with his time in training us, and then checking in on us every day. Shawn is a brilliant guy who I have enjoyed getting to know. He occasionally does business in Baltimore, and we look forward to connecting again soon.

Willy Moore (Driver/Author) & Shawn Lednick (Racer/Coach/Mentor) after crossing the finish line.

Special thanks to Marcus Ranum, for helping bring this blog to life, and for helping manage it from the start. And Extra Special thanks to Caroline and Jeremy, the wives of the Race Navigator and Driver, who supported us in this endeavor, and who have been worrying about us since we left. Hal and I are lucky guys!

Thanks for joining in on this wild ride. Hopefully we will now have something to laugh about the next time our paths cross. Cheers!

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.

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Hal, his wife Jeremy, and their two kids, Molly and Ben, along with Caroline, our two sons, Henry and Ben, and yours truly, had a wonderful long run of summer vacations together. There was always a lot of waterskiing happening amongst our group, on Lake Norman in NC. 10-15 years ago, Caroline and I thought it would be great to find a waterski instructor to help us all improve our game, and somehow we found Bill, the supposed Assistant Coach to the Davidson College waterski squad. Bill was an interesting character, and we quickly learned that he was really no more than the boat driver for the team. He was an extraordinarily good water-skier himself, and we thought he could surely pass along some good pointers. Upon wrapping up our time with him, we asked if he had some good advice for us to take away – guidance to help improve our skills. Bill thought for a moment, and said, “Just do better.” We all had a good laugh on the way home, realizing we paid good money to learn better techniques, and our lesson was to just do better. That mantra has been frequently repeated over the years when our two families get together.

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We were pole position #119 today. There was only one car behind us; we were second to last. When the 2023 Great Race opened, they had 158 cars that registered for participation. By the time the official race started in St. Augustine on Saturday, only 125 were cars were left. As of this morning, there were 120. The Great Race team has a long-bed car carrier that follows behind the race to pick-up any car that become disabled. McCollister, a car transport service and Race sponsor then carries all dead cars from town-to-town with a team of mechanics working to get them running again. There have been some great stories of people working to help get cars back on the road. A 1976 Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser, who is neck and neck with The Hippo for being the least restored car, had its fuel pump seize, and a team worked furiously to find one for it, drove out of state to pick it up, brought it to them, and got her back on the road. I think I mentioned an Oldsmobile that started leaking transmission fluid on the exhaust and created a rolling smoke bomb. They got their car to a mechanic in Russellville, AK, who had worked on another great race car a few years back. The mechanic pulled the transmission, sent teams out to multiple parts supply shops to collect all the needed parts, and had the car back in the race the next morning.

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Every morning we receive our race instructions 30 minutes before our start. Accompanying the instructions is a single page of corrections to those race documents. Presumably the instruction packets were bulk printed weeks ago, and they had since found some errors. And sometimes outside influence may force last-minute changes. Today’s start time was modified from the original time, and there was some last minute confusion over when to leave the finish line. We knew the car in front of us was to be a sky blue 1954 Chevy Bel Air convertible, and the one behind was to be a white 1965 convertible T-Bird. We approached the start area and had last minute reservations about our start time. There are no Race officials to guide who starts when, rather all the cars approach the designated spots and start when they feel they will have the best opportunity to run the course in the exact time. Some cars do a running start, while others do a dead stop start. The choice is determined by the team, and how they choose to calculate their run times. We the Baltimore Bohs (that’s our official team name listed in all race literature), always use the dead stop method. As we were deliberating over the correct start time, the car in front of us took off, and we saw the T-Bird moving in next. We went from being convinced they were all wrong to realizing we were the knuckleheads. Into rocket mode we went. We raced up close to the blue Chevy, and then timed ourselves to be as close to one minute behind them as we could. We scored an 8 second time on that leg which was GREAT. Then on the second leg we missed a sign, and two cars were ahead of us. You guessed it, rocket mode yet again. We passed the 2 cars and jumped behind the blue Chevy again and recalculated to try and place ourselves in the right slot. We did a better job on that leg, ending within 1 second of design. I can’t even remember what happened on the third leg (it’s all a blur), but we were 25 seconds off.

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We started today at pole position #91, which meant we received our course instructions at 9:01 sharp. Hal sat next to The Hippo in the shade running calculations for the day. I had 30 minutes to kill, and after ensuring all was organized and in good working order with the car, I decided to check in on my Oura Ring app. Most folks are well acquainted with Fitbits, a watch-like device that monitors one’s vitals (heart rate, etc.). I enjoy wearing real watches that tick, so my wife Caroline found the Oura Ring for me. This is a ring worn on one’s finger that transmits vitals to a phone app via Bluetooth connection. It measures activity levels, heart rate, sleep cycles and much more. When I opened my app, I was expecting to see that I had burned virtually no calories, because I was sloth-like sitting in the car all day. I was startled by the following:

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Our morning started well. Hal picked up our race instructions at their first available moment at exactly 8:31am. The car had been in a multi-level parking garage for the night, so I drove it out and had it ready for our 9:01 start time. Today we were in the middle of the pack, a MUCH better position than yesterday’s spot at 7 cars from the end.

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This morning our start position was #118 out of 125 cars. These positions are generated randomly every day. Being in the back of the pack just makes for a long day because we start 118 minutes after the first car, and thereby end hopefully 118 minutes later too.

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