Bob Gett // Bob Gett and Bob Paltrow are racing in the 2009 La Carrera Panamericana. We did it last year and it was one of the most amazing experiences of our lives. It was not only a race against the clock, but also a test of our stamina, resilience, and occasionally, our friendship. Our goal last year was to finish, which we did, despite a disastrous final day. Of course we want to finish again this year, but hope to take last year's lessons and improve our performance. Our KTR Racing crew of Andrew Funk and Ruben Olivas will be with us again this year. They worked very hard last year keeping us going, including changing the transmission, driveshaft and clutch on the side of the road the final day. We finished because of them.
We have set up this blog on Posterous so we can share our experience, as it is happening. I plan to send photos and updates from my iPhone throughout the event, whenever we have cell service. I will also upload photos and videos to the Phanfare site that I used last year. Go to http://bobgett.phanfare.com.
Wish us luck.
Bob and Bob
We’ve been home from Mexico about a week now. We are already talking about how we can do better next year.
We’ve uploaded a bunch of photos and in-car videos on our photo website. Go to www.bobgett.phanfare.com.
We enjoyed sharing our great adventure with our friends and family. Thanks to all of you that visited us on this blog and especially those that posted comments.
See you next year.
We had an in car video system consisting of a digital video recorder and two cameras. The system is from Race Optics (www.raceoptics.com) and I highly recommend it. We have used it two years in a row and it has been pretty reliable. The video in this post is a short segment to give you an idea of what it is like during a speed stage.
Bob Gett drove the 1st half of the stages each day and Bob Paltrow drove the 2nd half. The role of the navigator (the guy not driving) is to read the pace notes. These are notations that describe the direction and severity of each bend (0 – slight bend to 4 – hairpin) in the road plus other noteworthy features such as crests, dips, cliffs with no guard rails and bad pavement. The driver should drive the next turn based on the pace note. Of course, this takes some confidence in the notes and the navigator. You don’t want the navigator to say Left 1 with cliff and it is really a left 4. Sometimes the navigator will lose his place and the driver then has to drive on his own, slowing him down a bit.
We are communicating with each other through an intercomm system, which is interfaced to the video system.
We will post more videos and photos on our photo site by the end of the week. http://www.bobgett.phanfare.com/
Before LCP this year, we thought we could finish in the mid 30s. Well, in spite of 3 blown days out of 7, we managed to finish 34th for the entire race. Not bad for only our 2nd year and a pretty stock, low power car. Even though we hit our goal, we are somewhat disappointed in that we discovered in the early part of the week that we had the pace to finish in the 20s. The lesson is that it takes not only good driving, but also a reliable car and perfect navigation.
Here are our daily finishing positions:
Day 1 – 24th
Day 2 – 30th
Day 3 – 70th
Day 4 – 29th
Day 5 – 34th
Day 6 – 63rd
Day 7 – 54th
I plan to post more photos and comments in the next few days. Keep checking back.
In our last post, we were riding in the back of a pickup that was hauling our car to Nuevo Laredo, the final stop. Well we made it. Not happy about how things ended, but that’s the way it goes. Andy looked at the car and determined that we didn’t blow the motor, but just burned a valve. That happens a lot here because of bad gas, or not using the proper jetting for the altitude. We started at sea level, climbed to 10,000’ and ending at 500’.
We cleaned up and went to the final drivers meeting and awards ceremony. We won 2nd place in our class. Even though we had 3 difficult days, we did drive well and our times were close to the 1st place team. We were really surprised however when we the an award for the most beautiful car in our class. Not sure how we finished overall, but will find out later.
We’ll be saying good bye to Mexico tomorrow.
