Well, after having our (Ross and me) appearance on the coverage being described as a bonehead move by John Allen and Andrew Havas, I figure I should defend our actions. Or, at least, explain what happened.
In the coverage of SS4, OLN was shooting on the inside of an acute left and the run-up to that turn. They showed us pass a car and then screw up the acute left by running into a tree on the exit. We had to back-up and that forced the car that we had passed to stop and wait for us to get going again. The commentary indicated that may be the car should not have let us pass.
Here is the full story:
After we blew a turbo hose on the first stage, we put in a really slow time on that stage (particularly on the 1.5 mile straight). Unfortunately, they did a reseed based on that one stage, so we got put behind a bunch of slower cars. On SS4, a bit under 4 miles into the stage (and after making a big mistake that cost us a lot of time), we caught the car in front of us, the car that we are shown passing in the OLN coverage. Unfortunately, the stage was very narrow, and then the dust got really bad. This made passing difficult. The dust reached the point that we could not see anything and we slowed down. It turned out that, at that same time, the car ahead of us pulled over to let us pass. However, since we had slowed, we didn't pass them as they expected and they pulled back out onto the stage. Unfortunately, they did this just as we came through the dust and we almost collided. So, we ended up running side-by-side heading towards a cut in a stack of logs (that's where the coverage starts). Avoiding the collision, we were off of the road bed and, as we were about to discover, we punctured the right front tire there. So, we completed the pass, but when we got into the braking for the acute left, because of the puncture, the car didn't quite handle the way that it should have and we ended driving into the tree. We had to back out, forcing the guys we had just passed to stop.
So, that's the whole story.
alan