This year marked the second installment of Crawlapalooza hosted by OKRCRC. The event has been held at Hogan's Off-Road Park in Disney, Oklahoma both years (give me Disney OK over Disney FL any day). The rock in Disney is amazing, the comp is head in a river bed below a very large dam. The OKRCRC crew gets things setup early and everyone meets down on the rocks after the drivers meeting at camp.

Course 1:

I decided to get it done right away, I was second in line and had looked over the course pretty intensely. The course looked pretty easy with only one obstacle that made me nervous. The course started with a bridge that us KCRC guys brought down with us and let the OKRCRC guys use to mix it up. The one obstacle on the course that was making me nervous was a large drop that you had to go down. It was all downhill after that so if you rolled off it you could end up 50+ feet down the hill. I decided to back down the obstacle, costing me a point but saving me from who knows what could have happened. I cleaned the rest of the course and finished strong. I ended up with a -9 on the course, very happy. 

Course 2:

Right after course one I went strait to course two because I was feeling pretty confident. The course didn't look bad, just three hard gates. Gates 2 and three were right by each other and you had to hold a tight line while not falling down into the deep V below the gates. I decided to use momentum and wheel speed to clear the gates. Clean through those two gates and on to the rest of the course. The last tricky gate was a drop that had an OB marker just in front of it. You had to carefully negotiate the drop and begin you turn in before you finish dropping off the ledge. This was also a difficult obstacle. I should have cleared it just fine but when I was sliding down the rig slid over and put my right tire next to the gate marker which I hit as soon as I moved. I avoided the OB marker and finished the rest of the course. I finished this course with a 1 so at this point I was sitting at a -8

Course 3:

Where it all fell apart for me. Course 3 had 1 hard gate and that was it! I just screwed myself and have nothing else to blame other than nerves.  The tricky Gate 4 was another drop down, again if you fell off you were screwed. I should have had no problems but I gave it too much throttle and it just went down costing me 10 points. Then I was all nerved up and had another roll that hit me costing me a touch penalty! DAMN IT!

I finished the course with a 23. A tough finish for what would have been a great finish.

Results:

I ended up with a final score of 15 for the day (not including the finals course score) which landed me in 18th place for the weekend. This was a huge improvement over my 2007 performance but I know I could have been in the top ten easily. Looking forward to next year already.