The rally totals 10 stages in three sections. Four initial stages then a break in town before we head out to a loop of three stages. There are run twice, once during daylight, and then again after dark. The roads are typically fairly smooth and fast, with lots of blind crests and trees tight to the road, there was very little margin for error on most corners.

Saturday saw steady rain; this caused the cancellation of the first planned stage. This stage includes a ford at the finish; the water level was determined to be too deep at around 50cm so the stage was replaced with a short 3.5-mile stage.

The road was very slick and we were just feeling our way, I made a stupid error and turned over two pages in the stage notes. The stage could have gone better and we dropped a few seconds to the car we felt was our main competitor, Doug Shepherd in the Works Dodge. On stage 1 we saw Lovell pulled off on the side of the stage after a mechanical failure.

Stage 2 had a very similar surface and the rain showed no signs of easing off just yet. The stage felt a lot faster in the car, and our times when compared to our competitors shows that we were getting into the groove.

Stages 3 and 4 were very fast stages with a couple of very long straights. We saw Shepherds works Dodge along side the road on SS3, he had hit something solid and knocked off a rear corner and was out of the event. Again we took a few seconds from our class competitors.

After the break we were leading Group-5 (unlimited 2WD) class and reseeded to 16^th on the road. We had about a 30 second lead over Dave Hintz (RX-7 Turbo) and Brian Vinson (second works Dodge Neon Turbo).

Stage 5 was a very fast; extremely narrow 21-mile stage with a lot of places to trip up crews. One section saw a series of very fast corners and swooping crests ending in a hairpin immediately after a crest. We decided to really push and see how the other cars in class reacted. Chris was nothing short of superb; he drove a very clean stage, reacting to the notes and did not leave much behind. We were in an incredible 3 minutes faster than the next 2WD car and set the 6^th fastest time overall!

This was repeated on the next two stages where we put another couple of minutes on the rest of the group 5 front-runners. Into service I got to compare times and we found we had an 8-minute lead over Brian Vinson and almost 9 minutes on Dave Hintz.

With such a large lead the obvious decision was made – back off and ensure we finish the remaining three stages with no problems. Additionally we had to consider the car as the car had to be in Colorado for the Pikes Peak Hillclimb 16 days after this event finished.

About 8 miles into the stage we saw Duncan McGrath, Milner’s co-driver standing on the edge of the road waving the red cross. They had a small off, tore off an oil line, and were afraid of an engine fire. They had their extinguishers out, plus one from another competitor. We saw no fire, as we were not required at the scene transited out of the stage with a number of other cars.