Sadly, Jalopnik's Bullrun '06 coverage is grinding to a slow halt. Well, sadly for us at least, as we loved being on the rally, made some great new friends in the process and saw some amazing sights. We'll have a roundup tomorrow with memories from some of our favorite participants in the event. Here then, is a gallery of pics from the final party at Social in WeHo, detailing the awards handed out.

For those of you impatient with our gallery system, Tove Christensen took the biggie in the "Always First" category and our boy Rory Camangian took home a killer Stefan Johansson watch for his trouble creating the Los Matadors personas. Annabelle Frankl was handed a bottle of bubbly — presumably to ensure further arrests — and Chuck Mallett's award was presumably for the amount of amazo-factor his 'Vette added to the rally. One question though — where was the award for Ferretti and Lehman-Haupt? More on that snub tomorrow.

More on the Bullrun [Internal]

The rally was originally supposed to end at The Grove, one of the tonier open-air shopping areas in Los Angeles. However, at the last minute, mall authorities reneged on the deal, as they'd been doing some research on the Internets and decided that the Bullrun wasn't a "family-friendly" event. During the drivers' meeting at Fontana, David Green informed us that our final destination would actually be the Beverly Hilton, our hotel for the evening.

After a few pace-car-led laps of the track (with Danny Coyle getting reamed by the authorities for passing everyone, including the pace car) and a snack at the King Taco truck, (where they don't know the meaning of the words "no meat"), we lined up for take off. Pulling away from the starting line under escort Keri suddenly called out, "My brakes! Something's wrong with my brakes!" When she got the car stopped and threw the Audi into park, the motor immediately began revving. The gas pedal had gotten stuck under the floor mat. Emil later remarked, "I told her she should've ditched that thing at the beginning."

She tossed the offending piece of carpet back toward us and took off. But we'd lost valuable positions, considering that most of this stage would be played out in Los Angeles traffic.

We didn't have our route entirely planned out as we took off, but we knew we were heading toward the 210, as we figured the 10 would be an absolute disaster. A number of cars had similar ideas, including the consistently well-placing Darkcyd support Navigator and the Skiny/Haller A6 Avant (now missing most of its stickers due to scanner reports that police were looking for the silver/gray wagon). While on the road, we mused on possible routes aloud to ourself while studying the road atlas, until Keri told us to be quiet until we had something figured out. We let Jen handle the directions at this point, as she's a 909 resident, and thus knows the roads out there better than us.

Finally, she suggested the 605 down to the 60 and then over to the 10, which we were pretty much going to have to be on at some point. In a moment of kismet, we mentioned that were just thinking that it was the optimum route as well. So it was set, the Nav Bitch was yammering and we were off. We'd never spent so much of a stage staring out the back window. At one point, we were pretty sure we'd seen a white Crown Vic a ways back. But every time he was out of our line of sight, Keri would put a little more distance between us until he ceased to be a worry.

We hopped off at La Cienega, took Cadillac up to Robertson, then cut over on Olympic to Beverly to Wilshire. The sensation was not unlike when you're driving home and you really have to go to the bathroom. And the closer you get, the worse the feeling of having to go is. By the final stoplight, all three of us were ready to pop. We'd heard via the radio that Los Matadors (who'd taken the 10 all the way) were already there. We pulled in 18th (filmed by one of the Car-Parazzi kids), right behind Richard Rawlings' 750il. William Wu had blazed to victory on the stage, just beating Carl Lewis due to his handy-dandy little device that turned any light with an emergency-vehicle sensor green.

Now it was time for donuts.

More on the Bullrun [Internal]

Skiny maneuvers the A6 Avant into proper takeoff position in San Diego.

Generally, when you wake up in the morning at a deluxo hotel in beautiful downtown San Diego and find out that your next destination is in the 909, your first inclination is to break out in hives, go into a seizure, mess yourself, and then put on a straight-brimmed baseball cap, take a hit off the glass dick, climb into a lifted Avalanche, get a slew of tribal tats and crank up any and every Fred Durst-related project you can get your hands on.

Dave Green (left) used to be pretty. Somehow we doubt Richard Rawlings ever was.

Instead, we had eggs that were quite good, drank a fair amount of coffee, and sat down at a table with a group of people, all of whom, except for Jennifer Nicole, had varying models of Motorola RAZRs. Ours was even admired for being "old school," despite the fact that we only bought it last fall. Emil's was gold, Keri's was pink, and Claus had one in some crazy dark finish we'd never seen before which is probably only available to owners of Brabus-tuned cars.

But much in the manner of ninjas during one or another of those Shogunates they had in Japan back in the time, we and our RAZRs would all soon be hurtling toward California Speedway in Fontana. Little did we know, but those of us in the black Audi A8L would also be headed toward our finest hour on the 2006 Bullrun.

The intersection was a madhouse. Danny Coyle was pulling mad donuts and block-long burnouts in the Mallett Corvette. Jen couldn't figure out which way to point the Audi until Emil pointed out to her that she'd be driving out over a curb. Skiny and Bret were about to enter a world of hurt and emerge unscathed, but with their time shattered. Emil was shooting back and forth like a shuttlecock. And Claus? Well, Claus kicked back with his feet up on the open door of his Brabus and made use of his RAZR. Peter Kolb was undoubtedly being more German than anyone else. In fact, we're starting to wonder if he'd actually shrunken the state of Bavaria down to pocket-size when nobody was looking and was carrying it in his pants, simply for added precision. A little extra Weissach never hurt anyone, after all. Except for James Dean.

And then, suddenly, we were off. And miraculously, we were really off. After blowing past Los Matadors on the 163, we didn't see anyone until we got onto the 15, blasting past Skiny and Haller in their A6 Avant. And then the crackle started on the radio. The heavy hitters were quickly moving up behind us. Tove Christensen. the Lehman-Haupt/Ferretti GT with Noah at the wheel. The Team Chris 911. And of course, Danny Coyle wheeling the Chuck Mallett 'Vette.

They blasted past us, with Danny the first to arrive, but not without Jen getting a crack in to Danny over the CB about how it felt to be behind a girl. More chatter, including some worrying news from the well-tuned scanners in the GT regarding Chippies searching for Bullrunners. And sure enough, not long after, the news came over the radio that Team Chris and the GT boys had been snagged. We attempted to get a shot as we drove by, but our imprecise Japanese camera did not allow us such a luxury. We knew we should've bought a Leica. Peter Kolb is no doubt laughing at us as we write this.

Then we flew past Chuck Mallett on the side of the road, refuelling the 'Vette, which only had a 66-mile range. Keri commented, "Watch, in five minutes, he'll come flying past us." Guess what? He did, doing well over a buck on the hard shoulder. Keri put out an APB to all Bullrunners within range, pointing out that in California, the hard shoulders are often filled with tire-and-air-dam-destroying detrius and that we all should be careful.

Meanwhile, just a few miles before we hit I-10, we got stuck in massive traffic. We're not quite sure how we got past Tove, but with the traffic locked in and the GT boys and Team Chris stuck behind us due to their run-in with law enforcement, we knew we had a real shot. Especially if Chuck and Danny ran out of gas again.

On the 10, we made good time, and on the offramp to the Speedway, Jen made use of her looks and got us up in the line. We drove carefully, as the fuzz tend to hang out around the entrance to the speedway, and then hauled ass to the staging area, where we pulled up third behind the Magnaflow RS4 and the Mallett Corvette. The RS4 guys had voluntarily disqualified themselves because they'd left 20 minutes earlier, due to the co-driver not feeling well, putting the nearly bone-stock A8L in behind the 900hp Corvette.

Which just goes to show that on the Bullrun, horsepower is far from everything.

Related:
More on the Bullrun [Internal]

The Jundland Wastes are not to be travelled lightly!

With Miss Nicole back behind the wheel and properly chastised, we cruised through some amazing scenery down 95, as well as an abundance of trailer parks, until we got to Quartzsite, which besides being home to overstuffed 55 gallon drums of quartz, is also home to something called "The Main Event," which apparently involves thousands of people in motorhomes trading rocks. It's also famous as the only place Dan Gurney and Brock Yates were ever pulled over on the Cannonball, a traffic stop that prompted Gurney to stretch the Kirk F. White Ferrari Daytona's legs, eventually hitting 171 mph. Ours only tops out at 130, but for the next few stages, that top speed is primarily useless, and the stealth factor will prove invaluable.

"Leaving Lake Havasu" doesn't quite have the same impact as "Leaving Las Vegas," but we left anyway.

Cutting across on I-10 from Quartzsite to Blythe and having switched drivers, we loaded up on bonus cups at a drive-thru Starbucks, cut across town and caught CA 78 south, which turned out to be one of the most incredible drives of the trip. Rory Camagian of Los Matadors took the same route with a camera guy on board their Gallardo SE while Emil relaxed on the Bullrun bus and watched Beverly Hills Cop and drank beer. When we convened that evening, you could see the awe in his face. We went from farmland to straight-up Tatooine-style desert, and then once we took a quick run down the 111 to I-8 east of El Centro, we passed through mountainous, rocky terrain, the likes of which we'd never seen. It was like a micron-sized being's view of piles of sand.

Keri was really giving the long-wheelbase Audi's throttle the business on this leg, and the Valentine One didn't start chirping with any regularity until we got into the San Diego metro area. We were craning our neck and straining our eyes, staring out the back window through the tint, trying to make out telltale Crown Vic grille-and-headlight combos.

We pulled into the parking lot across the street from the W Hotel, not having placed well due to the morning's Garmin goof (we really can't thank you enough, Noah!), but we were proud of ourselves, having shaved an hour and a half off the time predicted by the Audi's Nav Bitch, and somehow, even though the only moments of real levity were laughing about random signs and business in Quartzsite and Blythe, we were friends. There's something about spending more than the better part of a day trying to beat the clock, other drivers and the po-po while doing it safely and taking only reasonable chances that really bonds you to people. We know it sounds somewhat cornball, but it's a trial by fire, and by the end of the day, we were working really well as a team, with the right-seater running the Nav Bitch, the driver doing her driving thing, and Los Jalopnik studying the road atlas, watching for cops, and disembarking in an attempt to figure out why a train hadn't kept a-rollin'.

The next morning, when we ran into Keri in the parking lot while shooting cars, we gave each other a big hug and she asked, "Do you want to ride along with us again today?" While we had other options, we immediately said yes.

More on the Bullrun [Internal]

On an absolutely sweltering, uncharacteristically humid Nevada morning, after a blast to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway with Noah Lehman-Haupt in the SuperSpeeders/Gotham Dream Cars Ford GT, we hopped in the back seat of the Rensing/Nicole Audi A8L, did a quick lap of the Shelby proving ground, and shot off for lunch in Lake Havasu. Click through for the tale.

As one of the first cars to leave the speedway, we knew it would only be a matter of time until characters like Lehman-Haupt/Ferretti, Tove Christensen, the Collins Brothers and Peter "I drive Porsche" Kolb would come hammering past us on I-15. We kept in radio contact with Noah, whose Garmin GPS had rendered the team nearly unstoppable on the eastern half of the rally. It had failed us plotting the route to the Speedway, however, and it was about to fail us again.

Noah had decided he and Rob were going to take 93 over to I-40 at Kingman, AZ. Which, of course, took us right over the Hoover Dam. Now, we've wanted to see the Hoover Dam since we were a wee Jalopnik, but today wasn't the right time to be sightseeing and moving slowly. But, slowly we were moving, so we made the best of it and took in the sights. We'd thought about counselling Keri and Jen against the route, but seeing as we'd met Keri roughly five minutes before we got in her car and Jen when we got in the car, we figured that it'd be prudent to let it lie.

We did have a piece of advice from Alex Roy to share, however; proceed slowly through Kingman, as it's a hornets' nest of speedtraps. The best part was when Lehman-Haupt got addled and radioed us later saying, "We're coming into Kingman. We've heard that Alex Roy says there are a lot of speed traps here." Thanks again, Noah.

We caught AZ 95 down to Lake Havasu City, and then something ridiculous happened. Lake Havasu's most famous attraction is London Bridge, which was disassembled in the late 1960s and put back together in Havasu, opening in '71. Yet off the city's main artery, there are no directions to the Bridge, which we were supposed to cross to find the checkpoint. Find it we did, with help from a local girl in a Jeep. Every Bullrunner without prior experience in the town had the same problem. In fact, many said that this checkpoint was the biggest goatfuck of the entire rally.

While we were refuelling, Jen stopped to talk to some folks who wanted to know know if we were making a movie or something, prompting a frustrated discussion between us and Keri, who finally hopped out of the car and yelled, "JEN!"

More on the Bullrun [Internal]

On our first evening on the Bullrun, Murphy was in full effect — at least as far as technology went. The power port on our iBook decided it was no longer going to do its job. So we resigned ourselves to kicking it Colt Seavers-style; watching a documentary on Wayne Newton while smoking cigarettes in our in-room jacuzzi tub at Caesar's Palace. Unfortunately, Heather Thomas and Markie Post weren't there with us to comment on the day's adventure.

The next morning, after approximately two hours of sleep, Emil Rensing, the Los Matadors car owner, hooked us up with Noah Lehman-Haupt for a quick dash in the Gotham Dream Cars Ford GT out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, with us peering at the Garmin GPS, while Noah jockeyed for position with Tove Christensen's Porsche, Richard Rawlings' 750 and the Skiny/Haller A6 Avant. The Garmin took us off the freeway early, and we finished poorly into the track. After a fairly inedible breakfast and a tour of Shelby's rather unremarkable facility, Emil tossed us into the backseat of an Audi A8L 4.2 with a couple of girls: Keri and Jennifer.

At that point, totally disoriented, we were just happy that we had a ride to Lake Havasu, having no idea that we'd hooked up with some of the cream of the Bullrun crop. The co-drivers were Keri and Jennifer Nicole. We were halfway to Havasu before we figured out that Keri was Emil's wife.

Much, much, much more to come.

More on the Bullrun

NEW YORK: So the initial hype is over and the action has begun. We just got off the phone with Alex Roy, who isn't competing in this year's Bullrun, but showed up in the Team Polizei M5 to escort the drivers up to Pocono and document the happenings. And happenings there were. After the jump, a gang of pics and lotsa anecdotes.

According to Alex and his photog pal JF Musial (who shot all of the photos for the story), somewhere on the high side of 60 to 80 cars showed up for the start of the race rally, and Roy reports that this year's start contained more high-end, solidly-prepared cars than in years past, including a trio of Audi RS4s, one of which, of course, was driven by Mario Andretti, as well as a couple of Spykers, one of which was piloted by Olympic hero Carl Lewis. The other Spyker, right off the bat, didn't fare so well. Driven by the company president, it got nailed by the fuzz before it reached the Poconos. In fact, according to the traffic on the Polizei scanner, the po-pos didn't have enough squad cars to respond to all of the reports of Bullrun activity.

On a lighter note, Troy Hanson, affiliated with Hayden Christensen's "Don't Fuck With The Sith, Bitch" team, ran out of gas in the Shelby GT-H Safety Car — replete with roof-mounted lights — short of the Jersey-Penna border. A New Jersey State Trooper pulled over to assist, and upon seeing markings on the Mustang indicating that Hanson was an IRL driver, the Indy Racing League-fan peace officer got Hanson topped up and then gave him a 120mph escort to the Pennsylvania state line. Whoever you are, inverse-of-Buford T. Justice, we salute you.

Meanwhile, the non-participant Polizeis were offering an escort to a peleton that included our boy Skiny in an Audi A6 4.2.

The first car out, a Saleen S7 that Alex predicted would break down, failed fifteen minutes after its departure and showed up last to the jambalaya lunch and lap of the track at Pocono.

Speaking of the lap, the Ward/Haller '54 Studebaker apparently dominated the on-track proceedings, and according to Roy, is the coolest car of the event, hands-down. We'll be blasting along in the Stude soon enough, wearing a cool shirt (and we don't mean fashionable — the thing's essentially a Cup car with a Studebaker body; needless to say, there's no air conditioning compressor hooked up to the 305-inch, 650hp small block.)

As for the favorites? The two most experienced teams on the rally are the Rawlings and Collins teams, with Rawlings in the 750il that he finished last year's rally in after his crazy-ass hot rod took a dirt nap, and Collins in a Ferrari 550. The main contender against the veterans is the Ford GT driven by Rob Ferretti and Noah Lehman-Haupt, who apparently have pretty much duplicated Team Polizei's law-enforcement-avoidance setup. Worryingly, their car — a vehicle that Noah rents out from his Gotham Dream Cars business, already has bald tires, and the GTs are legendary for blowing clutches during such events. But if they can keep it together, Roy thinks they've got a shot. The kids hit Toronto tonight.

As our date with the last few stages draws nearer, we'll keep you posted on the happenings. [Thanks to Alex and JF for the reportage and photos.]

Related:
Bullrun Madness!; Scotto On the Bullrun! [Internal]