God Damnit, Olympus. It was probably a bad omen when the recce car axle blew up and we had to find an alternate way to see all the stages. Olympus has always been a struggle for me and the teams I'm with. How many have I finished? 1? Jeez. Anyways...

Stage 1 was a fun romp through the super special. But that's where the fun ended. During stage 2, Steven started noticing some issues with how the car was running. We ran stage 2 and 3 with some interesting fuel delivery issues. Turns out the issue was probably a faulty sensor which we did not have a spare for. We disconnected that sensor and the ECU was cool with that.

Stage 4 went slightly better, though a bit tentatively due to worrying about the mechanical issues. On stage 5, however, we bent the co-driver side control arm somewhere along the way. Maybe when we cut a corner near the spectators that had a hidden stump in it. We sort of bounced up over it and thought we got away with it. However, a few corners later something went wrong. It was a left 4 and just before the apex, the BRZ decided it wanted to go right and we hit the co-driver front and spun 180. We got stuck between a stump and some other junk as well as in a ditch and probably the bent control arm didn't help. We waited for sweep to get us out. They were also nice enough to give the control arm a bit of a tug to straighten it enough to head back to service. We drove back under our own power and assessed the situation.

Essentially, the full custom nature of the monster BRZ required the team to have spare custom control arms, but they did not. To get some more made would be an all-night struggle that the team boss was unwilling to put everyone through, so we called it a day. The team is definitely still developing the car and spares package and they learned a valuable lesson at this race, for sure. Onward and upward to the next one!