Need to thank my wife (and navvie) Allison for knocking out the post event recap. The formatting isn't carrying over to the forum post terribly well, so if you'd like to see the prettied up version, please feel free to check it out on our website:
http://racekern.com/temple-canyon-2013/ We got some good seat time in with the Colorado Hillclimb Association at Pueblo Motorsports Park a few weeks ago, but this weekend was the first real hillclimb of the season. Temple Canyon, located just outside of Canon City, is a fun and challenging all dirt road. Since we’ve taken a number of years to get the BMW ready for dirt racing, we missed out on this race it was great to be back!
The BMW hanging out in the natural habitat of Canon City Practice went pretty well as we got to know the road again. There were a few cautions for mud pits since we’ve been getting some rain. Those dried out quickly, but sadly that meant so did the tacky road surface as well. The last run of practice day got cancelled because of more rain and hail. Oh well, means beers and hanging out a little earlier plus, our time from our last run had qualified us 1st in Rally 2WD.
A little taste of the twisty & narrow road Upon arriving for Race Day the next morning, folks started noticing they had been tagged with Caswell stickers. Not sure who the culprit is, but no Bill sightings at the race. After noticing ours on the trunk, I was just going to pull it off, but Dave and I made some “enhancements” to the sticker instead.
We put on some fresh tires on (for those of you that know Dave well … aren’t you proud of him?!) and were ready for Run 1. It was already hot and dry. First run went very well – surprisingly. We felt like we got a few corners better than practice, but a few others not as well. We expected a similar if not worse time from qualifying. Instead we went from a 3:42 to a 3:35. That was enough to break the standing 2WD drive record for Temple Canyon. That’s 2 for 2 on breaking records this season!
The Race Day timing board We had been hearing some pretty awful clanging sounds throughout practice. Our exhaust had some issues at Pueblo and we had taken it off. Hangars were reinforced before Temple Canyon and we chalked up the noises to ‘self clearancing’ due to the slightly less hangar sag. It started to sound really bad after our first Race Day run though and Dave got the car up on jack stands to have a look. Turns out our Supra differential was starting to crack its custom mounts! No bueno. Everything was still intact, meaning it was repairable with reinforcement. We didn’t take the risk of a second run given we felt lucky to have noticed it when it was in a relatively easy fixable state. If we took another run and it busted through, like it wanted to, the repair would become much nastier and more expensive. Furthermore, if it did bust mid run, that sort of loss of control of the car could result in a season-ending type crash. Temple Canyon is unforgiving, and there are only so many piles of kittens (picture at the end if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Feeling good about the first run, we saved our car and hoped we could hang on to first place. After our class took their second run without us, we were pleased to see that 3:35 hang on to win the race.
Devon (AfroThunder) Dobson captures a nice action shot! Overall it was another great weekend racing, thanks for reading!
Dave