2006 Grassroots Motorsports Challenge

Well the 2006 GRM Challenge is in the books! We had a couple minor events during the tow to Florida, but nothing serious. We are all now well over any fears we had about flat towing long distance.

We arrived on Thursday for the kick off party. It was much fun. Its a great event with even cooler people. We were one of only 2 air cooled cars there. (first 2 in event history) the other one was a '69 beetle. It was a very pretty race car.

There was no actual party this year on Thursday night which was at first disappointing, but it gave us all time to walk around the parking lot and meet people and see what they brought. It turned out to be way cooler than a party would have been.

Friday was the Autocross/Show portion of the event:

We Concoursed in the AM and Autocrossed in the afternoon. We hit the concourse tent early to try to get to the judges before they burned out. They were all very receptive of the car. It went much better than we thought it would with our lack of prep.

In the afternoon we autocrossed. It was my first event on r's and only my second in the Ghia. Each team got 5 runs. There are also pro drivers available at the event if you wish to use them, but there runs in your car count toward your 5.

FTD was a 43.925, times ranged from 43.925 sec to 57.313 sec. We ran our 4 runs with a best of 50.993 slow but not last place. After our 4th run we were told we would get a rerun due to a timing problem. I ran the next run hard and picked up time until I hit 2 cones. After returning to grid we decided since we were given a rerun and I seemed to be stuck around a 51 that we would use a pro driver. Alan McCrispin jumped at the chance to drive the ghia for us. He loves to drive the odd cars we were told. He got in the car and ran a 49.5 first time out, but coned giving us a 51.5 making my 50.9 our best. The beetle ran a 53.294, so we beat that. Twisted Evil

Saturday was the drag portion of the event:

So we were dreading the drags. Our goal was not to finish last over all or in any event. If we were going to fall short this would be the event.

We arrived early and did the only thing we could think of to better our chances. We removed everything we could from the car to get it as light as we could. We figured the bug again would be the only car on our level. We are not sure what the weight of the Beetle was, but his was stripped, gutted, and cut up pretty good.

For our first pass of the day (my first drag race ever) we ran the kick off pass of the event against my good friend Andy Nelson (builder of the last 2 events winning drag cars. This year’s car was a missile. It set a new Challenge record of 10.57. We ran a 18.551 to his 10.64.

Our next pass was heads up against the Beetle. We slowed up a bit, , but beat him.

Our next run was again with the Beetle. I cut a .051 R/T, then blew the 1-2 shift, and watched him step 3 car lengths on me, but we ran him down and beat him again.

We ran a couple more passes for fun, but never improved on our 18.551.

By then the CV joints were getting noisy, so we pulled the axles and loaded the car up for the 900 mile pull back home.

The best part of the weekend was the Awards Dinner Saturday night. Each year they give out a Challengers Choice trophy. This is awarded by popular vote of all the entered teams. We were just floored as we listened to the MC talk about this intriguing and inspiring car only to hear our team name read. Placing well in the event would have been cool, but earning the respect of our competitors was just priceless!

In the end, we did not finish last in any event. We placed 63 out of 67, in an un prepaired mostly stock Ghia with r tires. We are sure we can do much better after a year of development. So now we have a base line to start from.

I will post pics and maybe a vid when we get settled in!

Thanks for all the kind words, support, and encouragement you’ve all given us. We look forward to running the event again next year, and being competitive!

Sean