Our stories and in-car videos of every stage are posted in the SpecialStage forum:
http://www.specialstage.com/forums/showthread.php?48257
It was a very tough and challenging rally. The roads were crazy icy.
We were still in pretty good shape until this monster 50 km long stage. All sorts of things went wrong for us. It took us 1 hour and 12 minutes to get through this one stage! I cut out huge chunks of the boring stuff from this video, but it's still 31 minutes long.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYgF7HevawI[/video]
About 5:00 into the video we come to the near-impossible icy hill, which most of the 2wd cars couldn't get up. Only one car after us made it up.
At 7:00 into the video, on the rocky downhill portion we punctured a tire causing us to lose 16 minutes.
At 16:30 our transmission, which had been making bad bearing sounds throughout the event, finally blew up with awful crunching and clanking noises leaving us with only 4th gear and sometimes 2nd. We managed to coax it to the finish of this long stage, then all the way on the highway transit back to Maniwaki, where we still had another short stage to run before the finish.
We were astounded to discover that we had finished 2nd of the remaining 2wd cars, meaning we got to spray Champagne on the National 2wd Podium.
