By Steve Hedke, who is representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race, going on now through July 2. Follow along on their adventure here. 

The big day has finally arrived: time to be introduced to the crowd by Corky Coker and take the green flag waved by ‘Big Daddy’ Don Garlits. Jacksonville turned out a great crowd to see us off: we were on display in starting order for about 2 hours. The start includes a color guard, the Star Spangled Banner, a prayer for safety, then each car is flagged off individually. Continue reading “The Great Race: Day 1” →

By Steve Hedke, who is representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race, going on now through July 2. Follow along on their adventure here. 

First thing this morning was the mandatory meeting. Introductions, welcomes, thank-you’s and scheduling items were covered. After a short break, the rallymaster covered rules and regulations, followed by a “˜how to rally’ session for the rookies. The route instructions for today covered a half day run after lunch. Today the route instructions were carefully explained page by page: this will not happen again. Continue reading “The Great Race: Trophy Run” →

By Steve Hedke, who is representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. Follow along on their adventure here. 

This will be one of the easiest days of the race. Our check-in time was 3:06 pm, which gave us time for a leisurely Cracker Barrel breakfast, to do some shopping for supplies and run the “˜measured mile’ to calibrate the electronic speedometer before doing the remaining paperwork.

The speedo calibration run is a set of instructions that take you out to a section of Interstate that has relatively light traffic. The timed portion will start abeam of a specifically chosen roadside sign, and you stabilize your speed to exactly 50 mph. Holding 50, you check off several more signs and using the stopwatch the navigator records the times as we cross by the designated signs. The instruction sheet tells you how much time each set of signs should take, plus the elapsed time from the first to the last. You compare your times to the ones on the sheet, and that’s your error. The speedometer has 4 “˜wheels’ on the back to adjust it for running fast or slow. As it turned out this time we were within 0.18 of a second of the ideal time, which is really just about perfect for over 13 miles. We do this every morning on each day of the race. Continue reading “The Great Race: Check-in and Tech Inspection” →

By Steve Hedke, who is representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. Follow along on their adventure here. 

The Great Race is like a big clock. It starts ticking when you send in your application, which you need to do early because it sells out fast these days. At first time is measured in months; hotel reservations, forms, car preparation, airline reservations, booking the car transporter, a hundred logistical details that you don’t want to put off until the last moment. Continue reading “The Great Race: Arrival in Florida” →

By Steve Hedke, who will be representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. They are posting regular updates on their adventure here. 

Choosing the right vintage rally car is all part of the fun.

The Great Race is a Time-Speed-Distance competition where you are given the time and speed, but not the distance. Rally computers are not permitted, and GPS lags behind the car and is virtually useless. You get a pencil, the route instructions, a time of day clock and a stopwatch. That’s it. The lowest error on a timed section wins, and it’s calculated to the hundredth of a second. Best score possible is a 0, called an Ace. Many Aces are scored in each race: the competition is that close! There is a prize for the most Aces, and you’re going to need 10 or 12 to win. Continue reading “The Great Race: Choosing a Rally Car” →

[PHOTO] This is a typical rally road during a timed leg: it is paved, but rural enough not to encounter a lot of traffic while you’re holding exactly 40 mph, or whatever the assigned speed is. We will both be looking for the next maneuver, which might be a ‘hard right 25’ sign to go down to 20 MPH: if so, it will be a while before we see it. The navigator can enjoy the scenery while the driver sees nothing but the speedometer.

By Steve Hedke, who will be representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. They are posting regular updates on their adventure here. 

Picking up where we left off, we brought our 1964 Studebaker Daytona hardtop home from the VCRA rally in Joplin Missouri with stuff wrong with it. After two Great Race events and thousands of miles of driving we’ve only experienced minor issues. But it is an old car, and stuff happens, especially when pushing it hard. That’s why you tow it there and back.

The first problem was a hard one to chase down. The car started to plow around corners, causing uneven wear on the front tires and a chattering in the steering wheel. Having checked all the suspension components, we found a lower A arm bolt that was loose. We tightened that in the field between rainstorms, hoping it would solve it. The next day’s rally was in wet conditions, and when I hit the brakes we did a 180! Fortunately we didn’t hit anything or anyone, so we gingerly completed the loop and rallied on. The next time we hit the brakes we snuck up on it, and it was squirrely but under control. The rally ended soon after due to flooded roads, and we were happy to cut it short and head home. Continue reading “The Great Race: Fixing Stuff” →

By Steve Hedke, who will be representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. They are posting regular updates on their adventure here. 

Perhaps you’ve been interested in Great Race but didn’t know if you’d like it. After all, it’s a pretty big commitment in both time and money without really knowing what’s involved. It’s one thing to explain to someone that it’s a “Time-Speed-Distance Road Rally where you are given the time and the speed but not the distance.” That might make sense to you if you’ve run SCCA TSD (Time-Speed-Distance) rallies before, but many people enter Great Race with no previous rally experience at all.

[PHOTO] This is the official start of a timed ‘leg’, and there are usually 4 to 6 legs per day. We are lined up in our official ‘order of start’, determined by a random drawing the day before. We are behind Peter LaMountain’s beautiful ’64 Impala SS today: on the trunk it says ‘Caution: Rally Car-Quick Stops and Turns’. Ahead you can just make out the speed limit sign, which is the starting point, and a car pulling away on their exact minute less the time it takes to accelerate to the assigned speed. Each car leaves one minute apart. If everything goes correctly, you won’t see them again for a while. In Peter’s case, we saw him a few times, as he passed us to get back into his ‘minute’ after making a wrong turn or two. Note that there are no race officials to ‘flag’ us off: we must calculate our own start time. The leg ends when we pass the checkpoint at an unknown location an hour or more away. Continue reading “The Great Race: Practice is a Good Thing” →

By Steve Hedke, who will be representing ACM with his wife Janet and their daughter Allison in The Great Race June 24 – July 2. They will be posting regular updates on their adventure here. 

Hello, fellow old car enthusiasts! My name is Steve Hedke, and along with my wife Janet and our special needs daughter Allison, you’re about to share in a once-in-a-lifetime driving adventure – The Great Race. You’ll “blog-ride” along with us as we rally from Jacksonville, Florida to Traverse City, Michigan, this summer, proudly representing America’s Car Museum. Oh, and we’ll also be gunning for the $50,000 grand prize! Continue reading “Join the Adventure! Introducing The Great Race with Steve Hedke” →