Its been a week since the offical start in Philadelphia and we all are still having fun, but it is hard work and intense!
Stage 8 is the longest drive of the whole race…about 450 miles I think. Both of our Coker cars are out with early start numbers. The first car was at 715 AM from the Wichita Airport Hilton. We have to get moving earlier when the start is at another hotel and we have a long day ahead.
Theresa and I have enjoyed getting to know the “rookie challenge teams” from the National Guard. Three of the four of these young people are Olympic Champions in snowboarding, and bobsledding. Great folks.
We were rallying through Kansas so obviously it was LONG and STRAIGHT! Some of the little Model A s probably had trouble keeping the 55 mphs we did for hours!
We had a nice pitstop in Dodge City Kansas and were greeted by real Cowboys with long colts in their holsters and mustaches almost as big as mine. I reminded my friend Barry Daugherty that Wyatt Earp was once Sheriff of Dodge City only to hear him say he had never heard of Wyatt Earp! I was shocked. I thought every boy grew up idolizing all the cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Barry’s from PA. Yankees! By the way, Barry and Charlie won the day for Rookies with a 13 second day!
The Lunch Stop was in Garden City Kansas. They fed us steaks. Smart people. They were good too!. I asked em if the steaks were from good ole Tennesee Steers. they said they might have started in Tn but they corn fed em there in Kansas. On the way in to town we passed feed lot after feed lot with tens of thousands of cows (steaks to be) being fattened up! Theresa said they stink. The feed lots not the steaks. She likes the steaks too!
Met a Hot Rodder at lunch from Garden City who drove his 39 Ford in to greet the Racers and said that he had just bought a New Old stock aluminum Edmund Racing head and two carb intake for a Packard 120. Curtis Graf and GR Pike were sitting there with me. We all three went to his car to see it. I was the only one with a Packard 120 so I stepped forward and made a deal on the price. I did not have a card but he insisted I take my new NOS speed parts and he would trust me. I signed an IOU on a Coker hat.
We left the lunch stop late because of my transaction so I was hurrying down the road to our restart after lunch only to be greeted by one of Kansas’s finest wanting to meet me. He walked up to the Shafer 8 told me something about traffic laws in KS and then wanted to talk about the car. He did not write me an offical Kansas love letter and we made our restart with only 2 cars in front of us before we started. Got my adenaline flowing.
The rest of the day seemed like two days across Kansas and the plains of Colorado. We had a pitstop in Lamar Colorado, the hottest climate in Colorado. It was 104 when we finally went off the clock a pretty good ways east of Pueblo. Our instructions said we had 1 1/2 hour drive into Pueblo, so after hydrating at a stop and go, we took off toward some REALLY ominous clouds over head. It was really strange because all day the sun cooked us and the final bit of the day looked scary with big black clouds.
As we got closer the first 1/3 of the sky was brown! We drove into a Huge dust storm which looked like “Grapes of Wrath”. The big clouds had a hole in them too. Found out later that it was a tornado and that a bunch of folks behind us had to be routed around downed power lines.
Curtis and Bruce finsihed the day with a 13 and we had a 19.
We are not sure but think that moved us up in overall standings. Bruce and Curtis are still in great position to win this thing. One of their biggest competition is Sawyer Stone (13yrs and a junior in high school) and his grandfather Dave Reeder, one of my partners in Rally Partners who owns the Great Race. Sawyer and Dave got a 22.
I will finish with a quote from my favorite President, Teddy Roosevelt as he spoke to the crowd of 250,000 and the seventeen men in the six competing cars in the Original Great Race departing Times Square on February 12, 1908: “I like people who do something, not the good safe man who stays at home.”. Then the pistol fired and the six cars including the team from the USA piloting their 1907 Thomas Flyer hit the road!
From the road in Pueblo, CO,
