We then proceeded to the gas station to spend $180 on gas for the car truck and tanks. We finally got on the road by 7:30 with the sound of pounding pink plastic behind us the whole way down to Toledo...Gigity. We got down to Toledo around 9am to find our pit being the puddled up area of stones and mud near the last real pit. No way. This is not really happening.
We started to set up next to the only other Mk2 VW team. They were funny guys with a mk2 golf. Thankfully the last bit of pavement freed up and we moved over to that location. See that puddle, that's where we almost were.
It might look like we have some sort of decent pit area to some, but we really didn't come with much. Gian brought everything he had down including one of the easy-up tents and we brought a generator and another easy-up tent. That's about it. Other teams had full trailers and parts cars. The team next to us brought TVs. This was Ohio.
So we set up camp and then it was off to wait in the rain for inspection.
My ass was wet, my jeans shot and obviously I chose to wear chucks in the rain, what better shoe in such a climate! I was starting to not see the humor of racing 24 hours in this. We got through inspection with no real problem. We had little to worry about compared to some other entries, and we hadn't done anything to the car other than safety. A car down the line was the supra that eneded up winning the event with a super clean motor and everything. Even at 10:00 in the morning I was saying $500?? Don't think so buddy.
We didn't have to do much for inspection besides put a bungy cord around the battery and we actually did too much compared to the other teams. Alot of people left their lights in or didn't have any taillights at all. Some teams roll cages were pretty pathetic. I felt good that we just went by the rules on the site. Nothing to worry about really. Soon after that they called for the driver's meeting, which was nothing like the driver's meetings I had been to in the past.
Jay starts off by saying, "Who hasn't driven on a race track before?" Half the people raise their hands to an uncomfortable murmur. I was like, hmm...that's settling, hillbilly bumpkin racing here we come! The rest of the meeting lasted about 15 minutes, saying green means go, yellow mean caution don't pass, and black means get off the track. That's it have fun, don't die and it is dangerous, but have fun.
The rain had settled down a bit by now to everyone's surprise. I thought it was a strange coincidence that the rain stopped right before the race in Toledo, but not in Detroit, or west of Toledo or East of Toledo. Call it fate, call it what you may, but one thing was for certain and that was that we we're going to race.
We went back to the car and attempted to understand a race harness. You might have seen this already in the video Curtis posted up today, but if you haven't, "make the jump," and scroll down to the video.
Once I got strapped in I started her off and rolled up behind the other cars getting ready to stage. The puddle in the seat was no longer the rain. I remember them saying to pull the straps down until I couldn't breath, and I really couldn't breath, but that soon went away as I rolled onto the track.
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