Man, Nate I like you, but you suck at telling stories...
Hahaha you asked for it...
This season in my rig we took 1st in sand hollow, 1st in Donner, CA, 2nd in Goldendale and that was enough for a west coast Sportsman points championship.
Farmington was crazy as always, especially with running a rig in Sportsman and another in pro mod. The courses had a good bit of distance between them and literally running back and forth was quite the task. That being said we worked hard on cleaning my courses and established a good little lead in my car on day 1. We’re good at this.
In the promod we charged hard and did well enough to finish the day with 2nd. The car was working great with no problems and we were communicating great. After the new car blues that have cursed it for so long I was pinching myself after every course to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Little things like making a solid, different game plan than everybody else and then having it work perfectly feels really good- especially when the champ Craig Allen later copies your line.
Going into day 2 the lead we had in Sportsman was comforting but not enough to really relax. We figured we just had to be smooth and we’d be fine. That being said we didn’t spend a lot of time planning courses and figured we could fall back on our experience. See aforementioned we are good at this comment.
The pro mod courses had some “interesting” lines for day 2 and we were nervous about keeping Uriel off our backs and hanging onto #2. We didn’t run as clean as possible on the first two courses and he was making up ground on us with each course. Stress! But we cleaned our 3rd course and it felt good. We knew that one would be hard to beat.
I ran over to my courses and Ryan stayed over at the pro courses to see what Uriel would do. I had predicted that he might try a crazy bonus line while trying to chase us down and sure enough, he did just that. Well, he took a nasty roll and 40’d a course and that gave us a chance to take a breath of relief.
We ran another couple of Sportsman courses really clean in the interim and could see our lead growing. That was three courses down, one to go.
We ran back over to the last pro mod course with happy hearts, ready to secure our spot in the shootout. We pull onto the course and about ten seconds in the car sputters and dies. Ryan tries to start it over and over and gets nothing. Our ten minutes is dwindling. He realized the fuel pump wasn’t turning on at all (it’s between and behind the seats) so I hand him a rock to try and “coax” it back to life. Nothing. I take the hood off and look through everything I can see and it all looks good. The wires around the pump look good too. Crap. He feels it and decides it’s hot. He just happened to have a full smart water on the passenger seat- which has never happened before on course. Ever. He slowly pours the whole thing on the pump and bam, it starts. I throw the hood back on and ask the judges how much time is left. 2:30. Not cool. All 4 gates to go. We watched the guy before us take almost all 10 minutes. Crap. I tell Ryan we probably have to clear at least two gates to stay ahead of Uriel. We clear gate 1 quickly and I say “screw it, let’s do the whole course!” We made it through that course, only taking one cone in the process and finished with seconds to spare. That may have been the highlight of my weekend.
I ran over to my course and they weren’t ready for me to run my last course. Ugh. We found out we clinched #2 in the pro mod and would be in the shootout. Yay! We found out the shootout was starting in just a few minutes. No! We quickly walked the shootout course and I ran back up to my course where they still weren’t ready for me. I asked the guy who was in second how he did on that course. He’s awesome so we compared scorecards and saw that I didn’t even need to run my last course. Yay! I ran back down to watch the first two teams run the shootout. First team (4th place) ran it fairly clean and finished. Even that meant we had to run the course no matter what. Second team (3rd place) broke on the first gate. Yikes! It was our turn so we lined up and headed in. This is real now. The first climb was a big one and had cones that were neatly placed in seriously inconvenient spots. The buggy bellied-out a little but I could tell it was going to hook and it did. No cones. I ran alongside the buggy to gate two where we planned on doing the bonus. Ryan said screw it, let’s just 3-tire the regular gate and make sure we finish. No problems there and then he made the same call on gate 3: regular gate. Gate 4 was a gnarly side-hill. Before running the course we were told by the unlimited class national champ’s spotter that a pro mod would not make it around that side-hill. We knew we would 3-tire the gate but that was not a concern and we did it. To say that it is a sketchy line is an understatement. A number of times throughout the process Ryan was preparing to “burn” the rear and down and back down the wall but I kept him cool and we skirted the whole obstacle. It was awesome! He drove down from the obstacle and we still had over two minutes left to just drive out. Ryan proceeded to drive around in circles and spin tires for fun. I stood by the exit gate and fought back tears of joy. Running a shootout course, especially in Farmington has been a dream of mine for some time. We made it.
The champ lined up and ran the course but had issues with gate 1 and then got stuck on the 2 bonus and timed out. We missed first place by 20 points which makes me think of every situation we were in all weekend that could’ve made up those points. Oh well, 2nd place in the NATION, suckers!!!!!!
Trophies, crappy speeches and a drive home.
Congrats Nate. You sure now how to drive that rig. Awesome job.
Thanks Kevin!
