After an incident at Pikes Peak I really wanted to just get in a car again. I wanted to get in the co-drivers seat and I wanted to do it sooner rather than later. I never really developed a fear after the crash, but I just wanted the opportunity to just get back in the car and do the job again. I was chatting with Dave Kern around the time of Pikes Peak and he mentioned that Allison, his wife and codriver may be out of town during the Lands End Hill Climb. This is a race that is part of the Colorado Hill Climb series put on by the CHCA. So I looked forward to that opportunity.
As time passed Dave realized that Allison didn’t have a conflict after all and I was debating on whether or not I would go to spectate when he and Allison competed. Dave had different plans. He had his ears open and found me a seat after all.
Last year I went up to Bridgestone Winter Driving School with Dave and several others and we had a fun day out on the track. Among the others was Aaron McConnell and Roger Matthews. I had met Aaron several times before but I only met Roger the night before we went to play on the track. At Lands End, Aaron had the opportunity to pilot the Suba Performance Rally car and Roger was debating on whether or not he should bring out his car. Dave described his car to me over the phone as “one pissed off bunny” and mentioned that Roger didn’t have a codriver for the event. I took that opportunity. I knew Rogers demeanor and personality, but not his driving style. I did know a bit of his history, Rally America stage events as well as Pikes Peak were on his resume and I felt pretty comfortable with the person I had met nearly a year before so I loaded up and headed out to Grand Junction to run the event.
Lands End is part of the CHCA series. The format is a two day format. The first day is dedicated to practice. A full day on the mountain with as many runs as everyone can get in from about 8 am till about 4 pm. We ended up with 3 runs of the full course. On day two, it is race day. You get two runs and you need to make them count.
Our class was small. The Kerns were the only other 2wd Rally car in our class. The AWD rally class was a bit more populated but the main classes were the Open wheel, stock car and truck classes. We ran strong for the little rabbit and we pushed it hard. In the end we were second and we had a couple really good, clean runs.
Since I have managed to destroy all of my GoPro’s we didn’t have the best setup for some of our video, however, we did manage to get video from almost all the rally cars as well as Joel Yust in order to throw together a quick compilation video. Enjoy! Thanks also to Joel Yust for that photo on this page!
Side note, check out this last minute camera mount that we threw together with a discarded Iced Tea bottle..
One Reply to “Lands End Hill Climb”