After a five-year break from the fun stages down in Oregon, it was time to return. I guess they were mad at me, though.

Recce was pretty good since we bought the organizer-provided notes and only had to do one pass. This was an attempt to get more consistent on certain things and it probably would have worked out. However...

The first night of OTR is at Portland International Raceway and is almost always a lot of fun. Except for the times when the car breaks on these couple of stages. It has happened on two different occasions to one of my teams, but I've never DNF'ed at PIR until 2024. We made it through the first stage without any issue other than a spin in the grass and finished mid-pack on an otherwise relatively safe run. No problems! Then stage 2...

It wasn't our fault! Well, maybe it kind of was. I think we probably should have noticed that the rear end of the car was getting noisier at Olympus but it is very loud in rally cars and noises happen all the time. Well, the noises turned angry during stage one and right at the start of stage two they got a lot quieter which is always bad. We lost the vroom ability somewhere just after launching and had to limp through the stage to get back to service. Surprisingly, we didn't get the last place time on the stage, but in service, we cracked open the rear diff and the part that has all the teeth had a couple less teeth. This was a particularly disappointing result given that Pat had just graduated from Novice and got to unleash the full power of the turbo on this one.

However, without a spare setup or the folly of youth enough to stay up all night attempting to get things all sorted, we headed out to the Eastern Oregon stages to do some spectating. A bummer, but lessons were learned and the car will be rebuilt stronger for the next rally, I'm sure!