Al Kun and I continued our attack on the Cascadia Cup at Olympus. This has traditionally been an event that I don't finish, so we were going to do our best to get through this one. The rally started well and the team was working great. We were sitting 5th in class, ready to start moving up. The rough roads had some different ideas, though. Underbody started dragging and coming off after the first few stages. Eventually, the skid plate protecting the gas tank was dragging under the car. At the end of a stage, we had to back over it to rip it off. We threw the remnants in the trunk and pressed on, of course! A bit later, perhaps unsurprisingly, sweep told us we were leaking fuel. We drove to the little store on the transit route and pondered our options. Do we continue with a leaky fuel tank? How can we patch it? Al called good volvo friend and spectacular mechanic Sean Medcroft for advice. He told us that rubbing a certain brand of soap on the hole would somehow patch it. The most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. We tried it and, like some kind of magic, it worked. We checked into the next stage a few minutes late, but still on the road. If you can believe it, we continued like this for the remainder of the day, rubbing soap on the tank after every stage. Tried to reattach the skid plate at some point, but ended up dragging it back to the final service. The headlights died after the last stage and we got a tow by a kind subaru owner since the car was completely dying often (lack of fuel?). But we made it through day 1. The mechanical and fuel issues plagued us through the three stages of day 2, but we finished 3rd from last and gained some crucial Cascadia Cup points, bumping us up to 2nd place.

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