We have been really busy lately, so I am a bit behind on posting an update for our last rock crawling competition of the year. The Grand nationals is the last rock crawling event of the year, and is a stand alone event, meaning the points for the eastern and western series have already been calculated. If you are not in the points series, you can still win nationals. For us it is still just a learning experience. We are trying to get better at the strategy behind Competition rock crawling.

Grand nationals is a two day event, we are in a class called sportsman A. Basically there are two levels of classes, Pro level, or Sportsman, each of the levels have 4 courses to complete. On the sportsman courses, you have 10 minutes to complete each course. Each course typically has 4 sets of cones, that can have a couple added cones known as bonus gates. The bonus gates are harder than the normal cones, and can get you an extra 10 points subtracted from your score. In sportsman A, you can use your rear steer, however you get 10 points added for the course if you do use your rear steer. In these competitions, you want to end with the lowest score possible, so you get a ten point penalty for each course you use rear steer on, after you get the penalty once on a course, you can use it as much as you want on that course. Also, if you hit a cone, you get an added 10 point penalty as well, so you want to avoid hitting any cones.

Here is Emily working through a bonus line.

Our first day went really well, we made it through all the courses with out hitting a single cone, we made most of the bonus gates as well. There were a couple bonus gates that we were not comfortable with. After day 1, we were sitting in 5th place out of 10 teams in our class. The competition level at this event was higher than the last one we attended, we were competing against the teams that won the western and eastern series. The top three teams, were going to be really tough to compete against, after all, we are still very new at this.

Here is an over view of our first day,

Day 2 went pretty good overall as well, however we really needed to make up some ground to catch up with the to the other teams. Which would be hard to do, as they would have to make some mistakes for that to happen. The good news is, we have really improved overall from our first time out there, and we still did not hit any cones. What we really need to focus on, is driving these course with out using rear steer, that would really improve our overall score.

You can see Emily here, on the last course of Day 2

Here is Emily working though a bonus line on a course, the yellow cones are the bonus cones.

The sportsman courses are a great way to learn about competition rock crawling, so people don’t have to make such a jump to the pro courses. The pro courses have a higher level of difficulty and risk.

Here is driver Dave Wong backing down a gate on one of the pro courses. On our videos, we also cover action from the pro courses as well. Overall, we were able to finish 5th place out of 10 teams at nationals, I know what we need to work on in the off season, so we are looking forward to next year.

Here is our video overview of day 2.