Alcan 5000 – Race Update From The Alcan MINI Team

Day 3:

Long drive from Grimshaw, Alberta to Yellowknife, NT. About 1000km of mostly dry roads. A few kms of snow. Crossed the McKenzie river which was mostly frozen just before our last fuel stop.

Got into Yellowknife around 7pm. Our hotel did not have outlets for us to plug the car into…and it is cold.

Day 4:

Went out to fire up the Mini around 7:30am. Air temp was -36F and the Mini was a little slow to start but fired up and didn’t get turned off for another 7 hours.

We drove out to Vee Lake about 10km from Yellowknife. The local sport car club maintains an ice course out there and generously let us use it. The lake had about 18″ of snow on it that the club plowed off of the ice leaving a bit of a rough hard packed surface over the ice. The edges of the course had snow walls build up that were pretty solid. A few competitors tangled with the snow banks and lost their bumper or at least parts of their bumpers. Every driver got 2 runs. Bobby went first and had a good first run then dropped another second off on his second run. I managed to squeak out a couple of decent runs and we won our class for the day. Overall we are in 15th place right now. Afterwards we did a few more fun runs on the course and headed further up the lake networks to explore a bit. Driving on the ice roads is really neat. In places the ice is clear and you can see it’s 3-4 feet thick. It’s a little unnerving driving on the clear ice. Left the mini running tonight instead of hoping to pull off another cold start. Hopefully it’s there in the morning so we can make the transit to Muskwa, BC!

– Joshua Murray

Special thanks to the Alcan MINI sponsors:

www.arcflashllc.com
www.facebook.com/alcanmini
www.facebook.com/hoonmotorsports
www.achtuning.com
www.braidwheels.com
www.tracksiderally.com
www.425motorsports.com
www.alcan5000.com