100AW, the fastest event in the championship. Josh Chang, a very fast driver (5th overall at Ojibwe '07). Open class 2004 Subaru WRX STi, a wicked fast car. Everything was stacking up for a very fast run.

Well, everything but the weather. I arrived down in Salem, MO Wednesday night to weather that was surprisingly colder than home. These freakishly low temperatures combined with rain all day thursday made for a very slick, nasty race.

Josh and I rode with Chris Greenhouse and Matt Nichols on Recce on Thrusday, and we all knew that with the weather we would have a nasty event. As we scouted the roads we found the weather getting worse and worse, and by start on Thursday they were at a point that veterans of the event called "The worst conditions in MO in 30 years."

Josh is a Texan, Texas doesn't have snow, he's never raced on it, and now we were faced with 14 extreamly fast stages covered in it. We decided to just play it safe and build confidence before speed.

Stage 1 and 2 went well. We were far off the pace, but we were on the road. Stage 3 didn't begin well. The opening was a 300 R3, which we took as a 275 L1 lg. After a 4 point turn we were aiming back where we wanted to be aiming, and we shot off, only to spin again at a L2 later in the stage.

Stage 4 was just a stage to finish to get us through the day.

We took to the start on Saturday ready for a new event. Again, the conditions were "Sh*tty", so again we took it slow. The first leg went well, and we arrived at service needing only fuel.

The second loop went well until I decided to follow a Polish team on transit, and got us lost for a moment. After a quick recovery we managed to start our next stage on time, incurring no penalty minutes (The full story includes a 110MPH low water bridge encounter that blew our trunk open and left sparks flying in the air, but that will be told in it's full glory when I'm sure I won't get in trouble for it, say 3 years from now).

The final stage was just going to be an easy loop for us to finish out the event and get back in one piece, but it ended up being our best stage of the event. We passed Jurek Ceinozsa on a very narrow crowned snowy staight at over 100MPH just before the finish, leading to a good finish to a good event.

All in all it wasn't the most exciting, but it was a reliable drive to a good finish.