Team Unlimited Class Bullrun 2006 – Recap 3

Thanks to Team Unlimited Class:

Kevin, Tim and me piled back into our cars after a light sleep in Dunkirk, NY.

The great thing about having a race Studebaker is the coincidentally anti-theft steering wheel. Put it on the nightstand, and you can sleep easy!

We were in no rush to meet the Bullrunners, as they were still in Canada, so we drove for an hour or so and then found a breakfast place (Beechwood Restaurant) at a golf course in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Tim hopped in the Stude with Kevin and I drove his Porsche for a while. Oddly enough, I have to say that the Stude has seats that are more comfortable than the Porsche. Part of that may have been that the Porsche had low profile tires, and the Stude was running some really comfortable Maxxis road tires.
Before the trip, we were in a panic as no tire manufacture that we could find presently makes a Z rated 255-60-15 tire, which is what the Stude was set up for. We were thinking about changing rims and all of that … but the look of the car is pretty much something we didn’t want to screw with. A few short calls later, and we had the boys at Maxxis on the phone. Kevin has had great luck with Maxxis before, running their rear tire in the Baja 1000 when he won it over all on his motorcycle in 2002 (pro class 30). Lucky for us, when we got the Maxxis tires on the Stude, it became a really comfortable ride. I’m due for a set of tires on my Land Rover, and I think I’ll be buying Maxxis for it if they make them.

After another quick changeover to let Tim back into his Porsche, Kevin and I started down the highway and were again met by the engine gremlins. As soon as we had gotten in the car in Dunkirk, Kevin and I had both been working our phones trying to line up parts for the Studebaker. Kevin had spoken to someone at Crower Cam, and had deduced that the needle bearings on the cam followers were exploding one by one. We now had 4 cylinders and were looking at 2,500 miles or so remaining ahead of us. Having run several hundred miles in this condition we had most likely trashed the cam, and the motor was going to need much more than an “overnight thrash� to get it back on the road.

When the gremlins started up again, the first thing we did is call our new pal Aaron who was in the Gas Monkey Garage hauler. The conversation went something like:

Me: Aaron, we finally killed it, where are you at?
Aaron: The 90, just passing the … lemme look … 280 near Toledo.
Me: Oh damn! We are two miles north of the 90 on the 280!
Aaron: Come on down, I’ll be in the center of the road.

Now, considering how bad things could have gotten … Aaron could have been 100 miles past us, or on another highway completely … we have to say that fate was looking after us pretty well on this day. We boogied down to throw the Stude on the Gas Monkey rig and thanked our lucky stars.

Kevin hopped in the rig with Aaron, and I jumped in the 79 Porsche with Tim to go find the Bullrun as they came over the border. Tim and I grabbed lunch at a hotel near Rossford, thinking that some Bullrunners would peel off to the 24 instead of taking the 90. Once our friends told us they were headed to the 24 we did too. The 24, all full of traffic by this time, got a wave and a U-Turn from us and we high tailed it up to the 90 to find another autograph session in high season.

Emil facing his fans in Ohio:

Tim and I stopped on the side of the road to wait for Skiny and Annabelle Frankl and then joined them in a civilized caravan toward Chicago.

Along the way, we stopped at a taco bell or something like that and had lunch. On the way to the car, a very nice woman, who was visibly shaking pulled into the parking lot and said “you are some of THEM“! Since Skiny was with us and has dread locks, my immediate thought was that she thought were possibly linked to the reggae band that had taken her daughter on a tour bus the night before. Not so.
US: What do you mean, some of THEM?
Her: The car racer people.
US: It is a rally, not a race.
Her: My husband is a state trooper!
US: Is that a good thing or a BAD thing?
Her: He just called me at home and said I had to come down to the freeway to watch all the cars go by!!!
US: So he LIKES us?
Her: HE LOVES YOU!!!!!

Anyway, she couldn’t have been a nicer lady. She took pictures with her son in the Porsche, as did I. We asked her if her husband wanted to give us a police escort. He did! But unfortunately, we were already at the end of his jurisdiction on the highway. We piled back in the cars with some secret police advice on where to slow down, and went back on our merry way.

Nothing much happened on the way to Chicago, but you know you are at the back of the Bullrun pack when you start seeing signs like this: (There were no highways that passed over this one at all.)

If they were a little more concise and used the word PASSING rather than OVERPASS, as there are no OVERPASSES around there, they may have had people looking for Bullrunners rather than construction people creating rogue freeway systems.