Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Rally Time!

Hey, in the past weekend, I've been helping out for 3 days at the New Zealand World Rally! No, it's not some giant protest...It's a race that takes place over 3 days, with 16 stages of dirt roads all over the north island! I helped out at the Mystery Creek Events Centre, where 3 of the stages took place, one per day. Most of the time I was BORED OUT OF MY MIND because I was working with the RATS (Rally and Track Services), by... standing at a crosswalk with Cameron for a total of 10 freaking hours!!! But I did get to look at the various things around the rally area. The Mystery Creek Events Centre had a giant room filled with the main WRC (World Rally Championship) teams such as Ford Abu Dhabi, Citroen, and Suzuki. Next is the merchandise area, carrying various types of racing jackets, two small cafes, a bunch of cars, and the area where people were filming live for the media. However, there were a few good things at the rally, two in particular:
The Takiyama University is a team that isn't part of the WRC and usually doesn't do very well, but they have something that many people like to see. It's called the Ghost Service. I only took around 2 minutes of video since the entire thing would be a half an hour, and we were also called back to our posts soon after.

The link to the video since it won't seem to upload is here.

The next good thing that I saw at the rally site were the remote controlled cars. While it may seem like something that wouldn't be very interesting, these things ran on internal combustion engines using gasoline! This allowed them to get some pretty good jumps, like in the video I took...

Yeah, it was rainy, so it wasn't perfect... but still. The main other thing that was good about the rally was seeing the final stage of the rally at Mystery Creek, where I got to see...



Yeah, I've never seen a car jump before, so, yeah. I thought it was pretty awesome. Anyway, after I finally finish this school week, I'll post about that too.

7 comments:

Bogdaddy said...

Sounds like a great time to me! I always wanted to have an RC car, but never could quite make the investment! The scale miles per hours are huge.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post, Andy -- good to hear from you! No bumps along the way from the quake, huh? Looking forward to hearing more when you have time.
Love,
Mom

Anonymous said...

hello there andy, glad you are having fun, but its not the same without you around... I miss you bunches Keep a smile and learn some cool things...

xoxoxo

Anonymous said...

Wills Comment Click To See (all mine are this way)

Anonymous said...

For lack of a better place To leave It here is a link to my blog!

Will Nichols said...

Post Click Here

Andy Scherch said...

Everyone, click on the title of the post to see the ghost service picture. Something seems to be a little glitchy....or you guys might be able to see it already.