Photo by Guy Sappington

After a sloppy first run, we managed to hang onto 2nd place in the CRS rallycross over the weekend. In order to maintain, you need every inch of the course, or in this case millimeter. Great photo!
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The desert is not my climate. There is no dry wastelands in Sweden. No Death Valley in Ireland. I don’t know of any sandy Polish beaches, or dry English weather. Never the less - here I am in sunny California.

When Christine and I worked The Tree Line Rally, we noticed a number of drivers sporting ‘cool suits’ - or ‘cool shirts’. Basically a T-shirt with 50′ of capillary tubing sewn to it. This shirt is hooked into a cooler with ice water packed into it. A 12v pump circulates the water through the shirt - or shirts in our case. It’s high and low tech at the same time.

Shortly before The Gorman Ridge Rally, we picked up a kit. We wanted a two person unit. We wanted the ability to run the ice water through my shirt first and then into Christine’s, and we wanted it to not cost a fortune. This took a little legwork, but we managed to save some cash on it. There are ‘Rally’ systems out there for deep into $900.
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I downloaded all the video off the camera.
Here’s a misc video of day into night stages: Gorman-misc-night.wmv 36MB
Here’s the SS1 video if you didn’t catch it: Gorman-SS1-1st-rally.wmv 50MB
Final short video of us rolling into our awesome service: Gorman-into-service.wmv 7MB

I have some more pictures up, including screen grabs, from the event: Motorsports Gallery / Gorman Ridge 2005

I have my rally report up at Special Stage: Gorman - Our first rally.
If you have any pictures or video of us, please let us know!

Finishing their first rally is what the rallynotes.com team came to Gorman to do. They did exactly that with style. Without getting stuck in several potential sandy areas and without any problems forcing them to stop on stage, they finished 20th out of the 25 cars that completed this tough event. “It worked out great. I started to slowly find the ability of the car while Christine and I acclimated to driving at decent pace with notes. You can’t try to push yourself to the max if your car and your co-driver aren’t ready and I wouldn’t want to overdrive the car with the notes if I wasn’t comfortable,” said driver Kristopher Marciniak.

The service crew consisted of friends and volunteers. “The crew was awesome! I felt like a movie star every time we came into service!” said Co-Driver Christine Wittish. Ryan Tilder served as Team Manager and John Black was the Service Crew Chief. Cyndi Stivers and Kaiser Chen dug in to help wherever they could. Over the course of 4 service stops they repaired and checked a laundry list of items ranging from air in the tires to re-attaching a loose battery box. “It’s not just the team inside the car, it’s the whole team ready for you at service that lets you finish the rally,” remarked Kris.

“Gorman served as a great starting point for learning everything you need to do as a co-driver, and for learning notes. I was a little overwhelmed with them at first – there were a lot of tight turns and cautions to highlight – but with the revised rally format there were really only four sets I needed to go through. I had a great time, and I’m excited about our first rally finish,” commented Christine.

The team will have the car back out this weekend for a CRS Rallycross ‘points event’ in San Bernardino. “I still want the rallycross championship, and I’m not going to give that away just because I started to stage rally the car.” It will continue to be a good test of the Rally Neon’s ability on dirt.

We would like to thank the following for their support!
rallydecals.com

This is one tough rally that I’m proud to say we finished as our first. I certainly wasn’t setting any top stage times, but I wanted to drive the car home and that’s what we did. We placed 20th overall (out of 25 finishers).

I want to give a HUGE thanks to the help we got from our volunteer crew. John Black, Ryan Tilder, Kaiser Chen, and Cyndi Stivers made us feel like movie stars.

The full story, more info, press release, and videos: coming soon!
Our service pictures are up here: 2005 rallynotes.com Gorman Ridge Rally pictures
If you have any pictures of us that you’d like to share - please contact us!

Update: Video of SS1 is up. 50MB WMV

Our bags are all packed and the Neon is waititng for us in L.A. We managed to get the spares, tires, stickers, and all the other essentials in time! Look for the report on how we did Sunday - and the full report and PR on Monday. Wish us good luck!

- Kris & Christine

The cage has been stamped and we have a log book. The roll cage was noted as ‘alternate design’, so keep that in mind if you build a cage similar to ours. If we had to do it again I would tie the halo hoop directly into the main hoop. Keep in mind they were in the process of changing all those plate gusset rules a couple years ago when this cage was being built. The door bars are ‘unique’ but fit the requirements of the rules and safety. As a partial daily driver, I wouldn’t change the door bars a bit.

I picked up some Porterfield Pads on the way back from Huntington Beach. W00T!

On Thursday night, Christine convinced me that we should head out to San Bernardino and rallycross ze’Neon. With really not that much left to do with the car, I agreed. My cold and subsequently Christine’s cold moved in on Friday night to make it a close call. My head only started to clear with the sun at 9:30 on Saturday morning.

We took a ton of pictures this time. I took a lot of video - but I want to save it for a little music video to be posted later. Here’s the GCRallyX - Rally Air IV Pictures.

We took home 1st in class. Results aren’t up yet, but I think we did very well overall again. George and Mark are keeping me on my toes with some tough competition in ‘rally 2wd.’

Over the past 3 years, many have followed the building and preparation of the rallynotes.com - Dodge ‘Rally’ Neon. The car is finally ready to race in time for the 2005 Gorman Ridge Rally on August 20th. Held on the roads north of Los Angeles in the Hungry Valley Off-Road Recreational Park and Angeles National Forest, the Gorman Ridge Rally is close to home for the team based in Irvine, CA. It offers a healthy ‘first test’ of the car with 12 special stages.

The rallynotes.com Dodge Neon is driven by Kristopher Marciniak and co-driven by Christine Wittish. Kristopher is originally from New Hampshire and has a background in ice racing, autocross, and rallycross. Christine is originally from New Jersey and has competed in several ‘time speed distance’ rallies. They both completed the California Rally Series Rally School, and are currently 2nd in class in the CRS Rallycross Championship.

“My goal is to finish the rally. I’m going to take a steady pace and drive smooth. I want to finish and get used to the motions,” remarked Kris. Not that they aren’t used to how a rally works. For the past two years they’ve been volunteering to work events and have accumulated a lot of experience at timing controls. Christine said: “I know what to look for and what to have ready for the workers. We shouldn’t get caught handing in the wrong time card, or arriving on the wrong minute.”

Kris speaks about the long term goal of building and racing a Dodge Neon rally car. “There are people that say – buy your first car. And I understand that, but there are a small percentage of us that have the mechanical skills to prepare our own. I look at it as spreading out the payments. It allowed me to learn the car and drive it a lot more then a pre-prepped racer. She’s been on a frozen lake in New Hampshire, to the top of Mount Washington, and on a road trip across the country last December! I’m going to spot any mechanical problems well before we get onto a stage. If something does go wrong I’ll be more equipped to get the car back to service.”

The team is going to get a lot of practice with stage notes, as they are available to all teams running the Gorman Ridge Rally. Normally teams are given a route book, which give less information than stage notes, but stage notes describe the specific types of corners in high detail, and are not always available. The co-driver works with the driver to get a good pace going. Not calling too many corners too soon or too late. “We make notes at rallycross events. I notate the course to Christine and she reads it back when we race it. I only occasionally have to adjust our rhythm. I wanted her to get used to calling notes and spending time in the car. Just like a driver, co-drivers need seat time too,” Kris mentions. “I enjoy having something to do during a rallycross, rather than just balance out the car. I’m really excited that we’ll be able to use notes in our debut rally, and get used to using them from the beginning. I think it will be better than having to make the transition later from just a route book to the greater detail provided with notes,” Christine added.

Kristopher is a computer technician and support analyst working for the Alteer Corporation in Irvine, CA. Christine is a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine in the field of molecular biology and the lab of Dr. Douglas Wallace.

We would like to thank the following for their support!
RallyDecals.com
Mogan Segal Photography

As I may have mentioned - the DV port in My Sony Handycam finally destroyed itself. The camera has a rock chip taken out of the lens from Maine Forest Rally and the zoom controls make a crunchy sand sound when operated. This camera will live out the rest of it’s days strapped to a rollcage. The only way to get the video off the tape is to buy another camcorder…

Lucky for me I spotted a deal right away on ebay. Sony DCR-TRV460, no cables, no battery, no memory stick, no strap, no bag, no nothing. ‘As is’ no warranty - $70. Even if it was totally non-functional there were enough spare parts to repair my old camera and I could part off the rest.

I found it waiting for me when I got home. Whip open the cardboard, slap a battery in it. She fires right up! Video, sound, record, playback, LCD, viewfinder, all fine! Besides the couple of scuff marks it’s fantastic. It helped to brighten up a crappy week.

As + ($380 camera for $70) =

Here we go! I’m not totally sold on the camera angle in these, but I needed to try something different. You can certainly see how much further inside the corners I traveled and just how close I get to them. I didn’t pump the intercom audio in - but you can hear a quieter Christine and tell how much easier it is to read notes with the Peltor intercom. The third video is from all the way in the back seat. It’s fun to watch my hybrid ’shuffle’ / ‘hand over hand’ Massachusetts driving and the handbrake slide at the finish is gratuitous.

RallyAirIII_run1.wmv 12.3MB
RallyAirIII_run2.wmv 12.2MB
RallyAirIII_run3.wmv 15.0MB