Two student docents from the Maine Classic Car Museum are taking part in the 2024 Great Race as part of the X-Cup Challenge. Click here for part ten of their journey.
As we get closer to the finish line, today we left Augusta to traverse Maine, with a stop at the Seal Cove Auto Museum near Acadia National Park, and a stop at the Owls Head Transportation Museum.
With Tim driving, and Max navigating in the front seat, Cotton provided support in the back seat. There was no way for us to know ahead of time that the race master had planned this as the longest day of the race—with 8 different legs (usually there have been 5). This meant we needed to be extra sharp since we’d be on the clock for so long. We had to recalculate our deceleration times as the brake booster on this Cadillac requires more pressure (and time!) to stop.
As we started the first transit, we played rock, paper, scissors with our teammates in the Fiat Jolly (safely at stop signs) and created our own pun-war competition. Who knew there were so many puns that are time related? We decided we needed to watch out with our puns because Bram was getting ready to clock us for being distracting.
After leaving in second position yesterday, we started at position 82, and we ran into some unexpected problems. At our first gas stop, for some reason our only credit card didn’t work, so we missed refueling and had to keep a close eye on the gas gauge.
We then compounded our problems by missing a critical right turn onto Route 176 and suddenly found ourselves going miles off course. As Cotton realized we weren’t seeing the speed changes that the course instruction showed, Cotton “pulled the cord,” a technique we came up with that would allow the driver or the navigator to stop what the team was doing and regroup. By the time we got ourselves back on track, we realized that we were exactly at the spot where we had turned around before.
We eventually got to the amazing Seal Cove Auto Museum with only time for a pit stop and to grab some pizza. We’ll have to see their impressive brass-era collection another time. After that, we also didn’t realize that the course would circumnavigate the island and we had to make an emergency stop while on the clock to refuel. The only problem was that there was a line of cars waiting to use the pumps. Nervously looked at the stopwatch, we were able to make up some time, but not nearly enough.
The good news is that we made a great recovery and finished the day with a 4-second leg, a 5-second leg, and a 7-second leg as our best finishes in this grueling day.
