Our rock crawling team at 4Wheel Drive Hardware headed out to Dayton, Tennessee this past June 25th and 26th, 2010 for the second WeRock rock crawling competition. We arrived on Friday all set for the comp at 5pm on Friday night but they ended up postponing it until 7pm due to the heat – thank goodness! Not only was it over 90 degrees outside, but all drivers are required to wear a fire suit consisting of long pants and a jacket – not exactly conducive to the heat. I was pretty relieved.

C1 Course

When we drew numbers to determine driving order we came up with lucky number 4, which meant we had the advantage of watching some of our competitors take on the course before us. Eventually it was our turn and we started by rock crawling up and over a 4-foot tall rock. We really didn’t want to lose points for backing up here so I took the rear Atlas lever out, which allowed us to burn the front end around. Gate 2 was within our sights; we had to tackle a side hill climb on top of rocks with a ledge next to us in order to make it through. Our strategy was to avoid hitting any cones by keeping the rig as high as possible. Unfortunately, this didn’t work quite as planned; the loose rocks caused one of our back tires to slide us into a cone.

But that was suddenly the least of our worries when my spotter, Aaron, told me that we were leaking a whole bunch of fluid. He barely had the words out of his mouth before I knew what the problem was: our steering box. We must have hit it on a rock. The steering shaft was slowly working its way out and it took everything I had just to steer. Of course like any true driver in a rock crawling competition, we stuck it through for the rest of the course and ended up with a score of 18 for this run. We headed straight to the pit area so we could change out our now broken steering box with some spare parts and fluid graciously provided by Larry from AGR and Patrick from Royal Purple. In record time we had a brand new steering box ready to take on the next course.

C2 Course

We made our way to the first gate on the C2 course by climbing up a moderate hill. Once you got up the hill, we saw that the gate was situated right on the precipice of a 5-foot drop so we made an abrupt right turn to get us on the way to gate 2. The challenge here was a particularly large rock, but we didn’t have any problems with it once I made sure that my control arms weren’t getting stuck on it. The final obstacle on the way to the third and final gate was a 5-foot climb that had a breach in the middle. Thankfully, we had some awesome G/2 5.13 gears that made this hill look like child’s play. We had no trouble maintaining our grip and we were through the gate with a final score of 5.

WeRock Competition

C3 Course

We had a little bit of trouble on the first hill climb that took us through gate 1, but with the help of the skinny pedal we were through without any major catastrophe. We had to side hill pretty much the whole way through gates 2 and 3, and boy did my heart start racing when we started to get a little tippy. But no worries here either – I just gassed it up and we sailed through without a tip over. We even completed the bonus line on the C3 course for an extra -5 points. Then it was time to head back up the hill and through gate 4. Unfortunately, we spent so much time on gate 1 that we were cutting it close towards the end. We made it through gate 4 with only 30 seconds to spare so I just gunned it to finish out the course on time, and we made it! Final score on C3 was 17.

C4 Course

We were the first to go on this final course Friday night. We began by rock climbing over a series of rocks. Gate 1 was fixed on the rear side of a huge boulder, so I knew I was going to have to gas the rig enough to clear the boulder without letting the skid plate turtle us. We did nick a cone on the passenger side but we made it through. Checking out gate 2, we saw a lot of loose stone at the bottom of a rock ledge hill climb. I talked with my spotter and told him to get out of my way as soon as I had traction, because I knew I’d have to keep up momentum in order to clear it. It worked perfectly. From the top of the hill, we lined ourselves up and took the descent slowly so we didn’t get stuck on any of the rock ledges and roll ourselves over. Then it was through another section of rocks and out the final gates. Final score on C4 was 2.

Check back in my next post to see how Saturday went and where we ended up placing in the rock crawling competition.

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