(Words and photos Doug Gregory) – The plan for this year’s Gravelrama was to cover as much of the uphill drags, flat drags, and the Big Eliminator as we could. As we were to find out there were a few things working to hinder that plan.
First off we couldn’t head to the uphill drags until my son got out of school. Okay, we knew about that one before heading out. We did not know about the I-275W bridge work being done that slowed progress to barely a crawl as we were less than 10 or so miles from the event. So, we showed up a bit late. The good light was fading fast. We’d coordinated with one of the event chairfolk, Nathan Sneed, and planned to meet up with him to get ring-side access to this madness. We finally got together and after a brief run through on what not to do we got busy shooting photos. Before long we were not able to get decent stills so we switched over to video mode and actually captured quite a bit of footage. Before the evening was over Nathan had caught up with us again and gave us a ride in his gator to the ticket shack where he bestowed upon us wrist bands and parking passes for the weekend. Awesome. It was during this time that another obstacle to our weekend would appear. I fell out of the back of the gator. Call me graceful. I ended up twisting my ankle pretty good. That really slowed me down the rest of the weekend. More on that later.
When the side-by-side racing at Gravelrama is heads-up it is VERY easy to see who is late on the tree. The gravel curl behind the vehicle will give it away every time.
Enjoy these scenes we shot while there was still adequate light during the Gravelrama uphill drags.
Click the photos below to blow ’em up and then scroll through –
