Great Race Day 6 - Fort Smith, Arkansas to Norman, Oklahoma
Oklahoma normally gets around 33 inches of rain per year. They’ve already past that so far this year and the year is just half cooked.! It looked like rain in the direction we were heading (west of course) for most of the day. But thankfully it did not rain until as we pulled into Norman.
The speedo run took us up 1200 ft elevation (we now carry an altimeter in the car…high tech rednecks!) during our speedo run. We had some adjustment to match our rallymaster’s speedo. We did so and were ready to continue our “Cinderella story”.
Forgot to tell you yesterday….Dave Reeder, Great Race winner in 2006 is from Fort Smith, Arkansas . Last night at the hosted dinner I met a passle of Reeders.
Car Number 98 is the 1928 Ford Speedster built by Greg Cunningham and this year his co pilot (navigator) is our son Cameron. Cameron and I did the GR for five years before he went off to college. Greg and Cameron have had a great time together and are continuing to work on perfecting their scores. They got an Ace today and got somewhere a little under 20 seconds with a small time delay for an obnoxious truck who would not get out of the way. Amanda and Taylor (Greg’s little 13 month old son) were at the Finish line to meet him along with Greg’s two sisters and their kids.
I think I told you earlier that Greg and his friend Sam won the event in 2005. They had a bunch of performance numbers. (That means the speed a car takes to reach a speed or stop or time lost for a turn or something) Numbers for sunny days, and obviously cloudy ones…rainy ones, cold days, hot days, full moon days, leap year days and days in the midwest, southwest, hilly country or flat country. Sounds to me like he’s serious about it!
We had a morning pit stop in Stillwell OK on the courthouse square. Lunch was in Muskogee. (I was singing Merle Haggard’s trademark song all afternoon). We had an afternoon pit in Henyretta OK. Theresa and I felt like we were rallying well and working well together. We did get fooled by a speed limit 35 sign in the afternoon that caused a delay for us and apparently Grand Champion Wayne Bell too. Burdick n Bell were one car in front of us. But he corrected and won the day! We corrected too, but…
On the last leg of the day, we missed a sign but immediately saw it….slammed the brakes, backed up n made up all but 06 seconds.
There was a very ominous cloud over Norman when we were approaching town at the end of the day. It busted loose on our transit into town. We pulled under the awning of a liquor store to put our rain suits on and cruised on into Norman.
We get our time sheet just before “Motormouth” announces us to the crowd. We got a 15 second for the day for 10th place overall. We moved up several more spots in the rankings today so we were happy with that.
Our Shafer 8 is running great despite having to change plugs on the two front cylinders a couple of times per day. She’s a good girl and looks good too!
From the road,
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July 6th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Hello Team Coker, We have just checked in and reviewed all your blogger and video updates. We notice that you are moving up in the standings. We hope you continue to have good runs. See ya, Mark, Frieda, Vonda, Dominic, and Amber
July 9th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Glad you guys are doing well. George and I will be in Pomona on Friday night. Want to hook up to do some videos for the sites?