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Team 311
June 24th and
25th -
WeRock Rock Crawling Competition
June 24th and
25th was
our second WeRock rock crawling competition.
This event was at Hannibal Rocks Off Road Park
in Hannibal,
MO. This was our second night event
for us, running Friday and Saturday
night. Hannibal is a tough place to
compete, so I knew we were in for a rough
weekend.
The courses were tough. We were only able to
finish 2 out of 8 courses for the whole weekend.
We didn’t break anything and didn’t have any
rolls or flops, so that in itself is a good
weekend.
Our strategy was to try
and run consistent with what the teams in front
of us were doing. For the most part, we did. No
one in the stock mod class had scores under 100
for the entire day, which is not typical. We
only finished one course Friday
night but
hit 3 cones, so we still ended up with a score
of 35. By the end of the night, we were sitting
in 4th place,
but 5th and
6th were
only 5 points behind us. We had to step
our game up on
Saturday.
I wish I could report Saturday was a better day
for us, but it wasn’t. It had rained all day and
off and on during the competition, which made
the rocks slippery and muddy. We were only able
to finish one course but we finished it with 4
minutes left on the clock, so that was
impressive. At the end of the competition, we
finished in 5th place.
For the series, we are sitting in 3rd place.
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Team 311
2010 WeRock Eastern Rock Crawling Competition, at Rausch
Creek Off
Road Park in PA.
The weekend of May
22-23, kicked off the 2010 WeRock eastern
rock crawling competition, at Rausch
Creek Off
Road Park in PA.
The courses at Rausch are either sprayed
concrete, natural rock or a combination of the
two. We ran 4 courses on
Saturday and
4 on
Sunday.
Saturday: We were last
to run in our group on course C1. We use this as
an advantage to see how the competitors ahead of
us do, what lines they pick etc to help us when
it’s our turn to run. This course started with
huge rocks to climb to get through the first set
of gates. Once you made it up, you have to turn
right to side hill through the second set of
gates. We were able to get up the climb with no
problems, take our Atlas transfer case out of
gear to burn the front end around the rocks, so
we would be lined up for the side hill. We made
it through the second gate with no problems and
headed to the giant concrete mound for gate 3.
As we lined the jeep up for the climb, I pulled
the Warn winch line in to compress the
suspension for a better approach angle. The rig
climbed this hill with no problems and no
throttle – our Pro Comp tires were sticking to
this concrete like glue. One of the
modifications we did this winter was re-gear the
axles from 4.56 gears to 5.13. WOW – what a
difference this made! The rig is like a spider
crawling over and up rocks! After we crested the top
of the hill, we had a steep downhill to
get lined up for. The way the rig was sitting
was feeling a bit tippy, so I had to take a back
up point and get the right line. We made it to
the bottom with 45 seconds left and 2 more gates
to get through. We weren’t going to finish this
one, so we did everything we could to get
through at least one more set of gates so we
could get our progress points. We finished this
course with a score of 35.
Course C2 was next.
The 2 out of 3 competitors ahead of me, rolled
their rigs at the end of this course, so it was
all I could do to not let my mind race on this.
As we started the course, my spotter Aaron asked
me to take the front shifter on the Atlas out of
gear. As I tried to do this, the shifter lever
broke off in my hand! We had put custom levers
on, something like hot rod shifters, so I could
reach them when I have my harnesses tight.
Luckily, it broke after I got the shifter back
into 4L so we could finish the course. This
course had a lot of side hill climbs, so a lot
of off camber situations. We made it to the end
of the course where the others had flopped with
2 minutes left. With a little gas up and over
the concrete mound, we were able to finish the
course with a score of 29.
Course C3 had us
climbing up a concrete mount through the first
set of gates, then side hill through gates 2 and
3. You can then either take the bonus line down
through gate 4 and get -10 or go the normal line
through gate 4. At the bottom of gate 4, you had
to turn sharp left and climb back onto the top
of the mound and climb over the center of it,
make an off camber turn to the left and you were
done. We had no problems with this course except
the rear end sliding and hitting a cone. Score
here 18.
Our last course for the
day was C4. This was an all natural rock course.
This course started out with about a 4 foot
climb up a boulder.
I had to gas it a bit to get up and over it,
which we did with no problem, onto gate 2. Once
at the top of the hill, we had to do a rear dig
to burn the front end around so we wouldn’t have
to use a reverse point. We had an off camber
side hill going down through gate 2. As we did
this, the rear end slid into the cone. We didn’t
have problems with the rest of the course and
finished it with 4 seconds to spare. Score on
this course 18. We finished the day in 5th place,
not far out of 4th.
Sunday: Typically,
we would run the same courses we ran the day
before but in the opposite direction. Today, we
had all new courses set up to run. We were first
to run course C1 and of course, it started to
rain. The rain made this course very interesting
and slick. The first gate was at the top of a
double mound of concrete. We tried and tried to
make it up this, warming up the Pro Comp tires,
trying to get them to grab, when they did, but
we used up a lot of our time. We had a side hill
through gate 2 and then a straight descend down,
with a mound of concrete at the bottom we had to
climb up. We got to the bottom and got hung up
on our skid plate. We tried to work the rig back
and forth to get it unstuck and eventually it
worked its way loose, but at this point, we were
out of time. Score on this course 37.
Course C2 was next.
The entrance and start of this course was a
climb up about a 4 foot rock face. Aaron had to
stack a ton of rocks for us to get a good start
to our climb. Once we made it up and over, we
had to come back down the other side, through
gate 2. At the bottom of gate 2, back on level
ground, I had to burn the front end around so we
could be lined up for the hill climb up to the
next set of cones. We had to gas it up this
climb, since it was wet. Once at the top, we
just barely hit the cone. The rest of the course
gave us no problems. We were able to finish this
course with a score of 8.
We headed over to
Course C3 next. No one ahead of us finished this
course, so we knew it was going to be
interesting. The lines on this course was crazy.
We had to go up through the first set of gates
and side hill through gate 2. But with the
courses being wet, this hill was fighting us. We
made it through the first 3 gates and timed out.
Score on this course was 37.
We started our run
on Course C4. This was an all natural rock
course. No one ahead of us was able to finish
this course either, so our strategy was to try
to run as clean as possible. We made it through
the first 2 gates with no problem. Gate 3 was on
top of a 4 foot rock ledge that every competitor
ahead of us had to gas it up and over and took
out the cone in the process. Aaron stacked a
path of rocks for me and once the rig started
the climb I smashed on the gas and we cleared
the climb – we didn’t hit either cone. However,
after the launch, the landing put one of our
steering lines into the fan and we were done.
We found out we were 23 points out of 4th place
and there was going to be a shoot-out bonus
course. We fixed the steering line and were able
to run the bonus course so we could catch 4th place.
We made the first climb and heard snap – broken
outer axle shaft! We tried to finish the course
anyways and ended up flopping it on the driver
side. We finished the competition in 4th place
and have a lot of work to do before the next
event.
Kelly Young
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_small.jpg) Team 311
2010 WeRock Eastern Rock Crawling Competition,
Dayton, TN
The
weekend of May 13-14 kicked off of the WeRock rock crawling competition, eastern
series, in Dayton, TN. This event was run Friday and Saturday night, so we left
OH on Thursday and arrived in Dayton, TN around 8 pm. Friday, we looked the Jeep
over one last time and went through tech inspection. We drew a number 10 for the
running order and that put us in the middle of the pack.
I have a new spotter this year, Jason Layne, so
we were sure to walk the courses and talk over
our strategy before the competition started. Of
course, strategy always seems to go out the
window when you follow someone who tears up the
course or weather comes to play.
The courses for this weekend were very tough.
For the whole weekend, we finished one course! I
think the entire stock mod class only finished
one, maybe two courses. The one course everyone
else finished, we got the short end of the stick on,
so that hurt us. The judge told us we ran out of
time but it didn’t seem like 10 minutes yet.
Since we also had a video camera, we watched it
and looked at the time and we were stopped at
7:24 (we get 10 minutes to finish a course).
 So
we had proof that we had time left, but it’s not
in the rules to allow any outside timing devices
to decide on time, so that was that – we were
done. We were very upset and felt ripped off,
but what could we do? We had one more course
left after this one so our plan was to go all
in. We made it to the last set of cones and
timed out.
We
finished the weekend in 3rd place
and luckily, we didn’t break anything, which is
always a plus! Our next competition is June
24-25, another night event, in Hannibal, MO.
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