The team’s hard work repairing the car from damage suffered at Rally New York in April payed off this last weekend at the 31st running of the Susquehannock Trail Performance Rally. The 1975 99 was running on a new engine that was freshly rebuilt before the event.
The day started well with fast times on stages 1-3, passing cars seeded ahead of us on nearly every stage. Stage 4 meant that we had to face our fear of deep water in the “Scooba duba roooo! splash” stage (we had ruined an engine in testing just one week prior to Rally New York). This time We had prepared the car with a specially designed water deflector surrounding the intake filter. We pulled up to the arrival control for the 4th stage, confident but nervous nontheless. When our minute came we went to pull into the controk, as I went to release the clutch the car started to die. I quickly put the clutch in and blimped the throttle… Nothing. The engine was idling fine but movement of the gas pedal had no effect on the rpm. We quickly troubleshooted and discovered that the metal slug on the end of the throttle cable had pulled off and left the pedal non functional. With some quick thinking a pair of vice grips was pulled from the tool kit and pinched onto the end of the throttle wire. With a quick cell phone call We alerted Matt who was back at service to source a throttle cable kit asap. We pulled into the control and checked in but soon realized that the weight of the pliers had resulted in an idle of 4000 rpms and that the car would not be drivable as is. We waited for our minute and started the stage, limping out of the control zone area where servicing is not allowed. We spent several minutes on the side of the stage rigging up the vice grips with zip ties so that their weight was not bearing on the throttle so heavily. Thinking all was set we pulled back onto stage, not realizing the steering wheel that had been pulled for better access to the gas pedal was not fully clipped into its hub. The first movement of the wheel resulted in a loose steering wheel in my hands and a rather abrupt meeting with a ditch. Startled but happy that no damaged was apparent we set off on the stage again, this time with the wheel securely locked in place. Still a bit shakey we finished the stage in a brisk transit. After all this the creek crossing turned out to be cakewalk by comparsion. We made it through with a nary a sputter.