The beautiful southwest flowing landscapes, scenery, and sunsets are the backdrop for the team’s most anticipated rally of the year; The Prescott Rally in Prescott, AZ. The roads are wide and fast with a lot more speed than California rallies. An expanded spectator stage has been built at the Yavapai County Fairgrounds and will give fans a close look at the action.

The rally will be held on October 6th & 7th and the team is pumped up and ready to go! “I can’t wait to get out on the roads here. They have combined two of the popular stages to make a twenty mile test called ‘Perkins View.’ It equates to driving flat out for about a half hour. I’ll be saving my adrenaline for that one,” remarked Driver Kristopher Marciniak.

The Dodge Rally Neon is in great shape and ready for the win. A fresh set of Bilstein performance shock absorbers have returned from testing and will compliment a new set of Hankook Rally Tires over the one hundred plus stage miles. The team will be in excellent hands as eight crew members have signed up for the event. Some new faces as well as returning crew from an Arizona based car club (AZ2GNT.net) last year.

Among the fans watching the rally will be Kris and Christine’s parents. They have flown out to see the team in action for the first time. “I’m really excited that our parents are coming from the east coast – I’ve been telling everyone! Neither set has even been to a rally, and I really want them to see what we have been so excited about for the last couple years,” said Co-Driver Christine Wittish.

Over the weekend I connected my OBD2 laptop up to the Neon. All the sensors are operating normally, the car is not retarding timing or doing anything out of the ordinary. Next, I did a compression test while replacing the spark plugs. With the Neon, you pull the auto shut-down fuse or the coil pack and the fuel injectors. This stops fuel and spark from going into the cylinders. Then, one by one, you remove the spark plug and screw in the pressure gauge into each spark plug hole, crank the motor over for a few seconds (until the pressure peaks) then record the result. Wait a minute and see if the pressure drops (this would indicate a leaky valve or piston ring). This test will tell you very quickly if you have a serious engine problem. I was very pleased with the results: 1 = 200psi, 2 = 200psi, 3 = 198psi, 4 = 205psi. This means I still have a strong motor after five rallies and a season of rallycross events. Should these numbers differ more than 10% you have issues to resolve.

Other Stuff:
This weekend is the San Diego Rallycross! Here are all the details.
For Sale: 3 Hankook - Hard compound - 175/60-14″ used rally tires. They are in ‘fair’ condition. (tread blocks are chewed up, about 1/3 the tread left, sidwalls are fine, tire has been grooved) Great for your rallycross beater! Take all three for $50. I can bring these to the rallycross - for other arrangements contact me.

I had the idea for doing this ever since the control workers handed Christine our timecard on special stage one and she announced that we beat our time from last year by over a minute. It’s setup like GT4 ‘one lap magic’, where the slow car starts and is allowed to get ahead before the fast car takes off. Not only am I faster with the car, but Christine is fast and accurate with the note calling. We are working on calling 1.5 - 2 turns ahead now and it’s clear as Christine catches up with her 2005 pace well before I get there with the car. It’s pretty cool to see what progress we’ve made in only a year.

The second video is a coast down one of the mountain roads after our DNF on SS7. As there is no audio, I threw in a little tune to coast down the hill to. It’s not really THAT exciting, just fun to see what I can do with little brakes and no power. It took Chris Wilson in the pirate sweep a while to catch me. At one point after not seeing me they hesitated and thought I went off - as “He can’t possibly be going THAT fast without power?!” Check it out if you’re bored.

The third video is some outside spectator stuff that Dan Lench (neighbor and friend) took. It’s the finish of SS1 and the start of SS2. It’s small too, just a scant 3.6MB.

“The Final Batch”
SS1 2005-2006 Comparison - 48.6MB WMV
The DNF Runaway - 41.7MB WMV
Outside spectator footage - 3.6MB WMV

White is for the front O2 and blue is for the rear sensor. The original dark green and orange is now 3 circuits. Cleaning off, soldering, re-wiring, and re-wrapping took me about 10 hours.