Two student docents from the Maine Classic Car Museum are taking part in the 2024 Great Race as part of the X-Cup Challenge. Click here for part three of their journey.
Trophy Run
Max and Cotton here again with our daily blog as we get ready to compete in the 2024 Great Race long distance rally. We’re two high school students from Maine who work as docents at the Maine Classic Car Museum, and we’re reporting on our experience as rookies in this epic 2,300 mile race.
To help kick off the nine-day rally, the Great Race conducts a trial run in the host city the day before the official start. This Trophy Run gives all teams a chance to compete under true race conditions. The run had 5 measured legs, which may cover 10-15 miles and involve 20 different interval steps of turns, speed changes and other directions, where you are measured down to the tenth of a second. The goal for each leg is to score an “ace,” where you come in exactly 0.0 seconds. It’s no easy task but a great goal. Don’t forget, you also need to factor in local traffic conditions since this part is traveling on public roads. For example, getting behind a school bus that’s stopping in the middle of the road can slow you down, so we must recalculate our variable speed to catch up on the fly. We’re doing math all day long!
We received our course instructions and attended Rally Class first thing in the morning. With encouragement and support from all the other teams, we started the first of five legs with excitement and hopes of scoring an elusive “ace.” Alas, for “The Caddy’s” (our team’s nickname), that was not to be. In fact, disaster struck on the very first leg. We got lost heading out of Owensboro and someone missed an important stop sign on Walnut Street. We then compounded our problems by turning the wrong way as we tried to fix our mistake. This meant our time was a dismal 3 minute and 28 second error score for the first leg.
We were at rock bottom, so things could only get better. And boy did they. We shook off our first interval jitters and concentrated on the road. A lunch break at Dairy Queen helped us regain our composure, and by the fourth leg we scored just 4 seconds off the mark.
Congratulations to Car #168, a vintage 1953 Pontiac Chieftain driven by the student team from Stones River AACA (Tennessee), who took first place in the X-Cup division of the Trophy Run. Matt Norman and Jeremy Byrd are the drivers while Annie Holland and Carson Byrd are the navigators. Their X-Cup team finished an impressive 15th overall among all race teams.
When you’re out on the road, you are not “on the clock” all the time, but it’s super important to pay attention to every note in the course book covering each interval step. When we stopped for gas, our chaperone drivers, instituted a special team rule: “old guys rule, young guys fuel.” Which is how we learned that pumping gas in a 1961 Cadillac is not as easy as you’d think, so we had a quick training class in the Marathon gas station parking lot.
During the Great Race group dinner that night, there was a silent auction that raised over $40,000 for future student scholarships. We didn’t get a chance to bid, though, because our homework of revising performance charts and studying the next day’s course was more important.
We line up tomorrow and say goodbye to Owensboro, Kentucky, as we’ll cross the starting line and head towards Indiana for the first official day of the race. We can’t wait.
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