We arrive in LA at 6;15 in the morning on the 14th of June, which is the same time and date we left Sydney. Cool huh! We clear US Border & Immigration and grab the rental car (after what seemed like a very long ride to the rental company we used), then we rounded up the paperwork for the evo and head out to Long Beach to US Customs and Importations, once we found their office we walked in and were met by a young Customs Agent, and proceeded to do the evo clearance. Handing over tons of paperwork: title, rego papers, export docs, etc etc, we take a seat as they start the process of clearing it for us. After a short while we realise what we need is a big shot of red bull and some food, so I go in search and find some fried rice from down the road, bring it back and we shove some carbs down our throats, and suck on some Red Bull caffeine.
After a short while we are waved to the counter, we go there and we hand over the last bit of paperwork, and are met by an older well dressed gentlemen behind the counter who says "so about this car, it's a rally car?", "yes sir!" I reply, his immediate response was " you have a log book?", our answer, "yes sir, two of them!" and hand them over with our Cams and AASA licences. He looks at us and says, thank heavens someone does it right, and proceeds to tell us horror stories about people trying to import cars, ie; rally cars, and they have no Logbooks, or even race licences, etc, he then spends the next 1/2 hour thanking us and congratulating us on being legit racers, and welcomes us as the car is quickly cleared, hand shakes and huge thanks on their behalf for making their job easy and uncomplicated. He then brings out his photo album of the cars he used to rally in the 70's, and it was a old Mitsubishi. This older gent also turned out to had been a master artiste and painted cars for a living on canvass etc, he showed us some of his work and we are in awe of his talents.
With clearance in hand, we then head off to Collect the evo from the dock yards, and despite a bit of running around (to be expected) we are taken to it sitting out on the docks, but then we are slightly delayed when we realise they have locked the keys in the car out in the middle of the dockyard and we wait for the mechanic to show with the slim jim and a few other items to unlock the car. Once these guys find out we are headed to Pikes Peak they can't seem to help us enough, wishing us well with huge smiles. We pull the evo pull it out of the docks, and drive it up to Sant Fe Springs to the great guys at Road race engineering.
Now, we are fortunate to have been in racing and rallying for going on 30 years now, we've raced on three continents and we've met and gotten to know many a great person, as time goes by you realise we are all connected by the passion of motorsports and hard facts. Whether we are dealing with the great guys at MEEK automotive, or Road Race egnineering. And between these two groups, there is nothing that is not acheiveable, or doable with evos.
We deliver the evo up to Mike Welch at Road Race Engineering and he is pure pro. He builds some of the fastest race evos in the US, and tunes 2-3 a week to E85. His yard is full of evos with stories. Such is Mike's work schedule he works on and tunes evos well into the early morning hours most of the week, a car showing up for a tune at 11pm at night is an often occurance. 'Dedicated' comes to mind. As MEEK and RRE work closer to bring the best of development to Australian evos, your going to see some great stuff in Australian Motorpsorts with evos. The top few images are from RRE's activities with evos.
After dropping the evo at RRE, we set off for what had to be one of life simplest nicest pleasures, a HOT SHOWER, which after 45 hours in the same clothes, and a 15 hour flight, and running around half of California, was simply the best thing in the world at that point. Then it was off to the second best thing, a nice juicy incredibly well cooked steak and a bottle of Red Wine, which we got at the Outback Steakhouse near our hotel, and oh man it was juicy and nice.
Visit RRE at www.roadraceengineering.com and check out their site. Also, visit our supporters by clicking their links above.
Tomorrow we share the latest updates with the tune from RRE. - JD
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