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
Werd, good luck, and awesome to finally see the Rally Neon ready for action!
Things Andrew learned at Maine Forest Rally:
1) Stupid driver.
2) When in doubt, refer to Rule #1.
3) You’ll have to ask him for specifics, but mostly Rule #1 and Rule #2.
Things I learned at Maine Forest Rally:
1) The navigator is always right (stupid driver).
2) When in doubt, refer to Rule #1.
3) When the navigator yells “What the FUCK are you doing?!?! I said DON’T enter the control!”, shrug it off and refer to Rule #1.
4) Rally school becomes reflex. When you’re pointed at the woods at 75 MPH you don’t feel any adrenaline…you just countersteer and continue driving like nothing happened.
5) Mini sledgehammers are a toolkit requirement to fix bent wheels on stage.
6) Carry LOTS of water in the car for hydration at stage start and stage finish between service stops.
7) Driving suits have a bottom zipper to assist in, well, peeing. It took us until SS5 to figure that out.
8) Falken gravel tires have really soft sidewalls compared to Michelins. Start at 30 to 31 PSI and adjust from there (per Nick from Team O’Neil).
9) Running with your lights on is good for safety but bad for photographs; it looks like your brakes are on in all the photos.
10) Dust sucks. A lot. Carry rags in the car to stuff and duct tape into all the little crevices that dust WILL blow in through (particularly Brent’s holes in the firewall).
11) Figure out where you’re going to store helmets during transit BEFORE you get out on stage (we didn’t have time to install our helmet hooks).
12) Conserve brakes; driving blind at Maine with tulips caused me to do a LOT of early and heavy left foot braking and trail braking because I didn’t know the corners. After 15.5 stage miles there was a lot of brake fade even with synthetic DOT5 and Porterfield R-4s.
13) Park your service vehicles in front of your trailer overnight so no one blocks it in.
14) The first night stage you do you won’t even notice the photographer’s flashes going off; it wasn’t until I looked at the in-car that I even realized how many flashes there were.
15) Doing 90 MPH through the giant blowup Red Bull display makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
16) It’s Christine’s job to watch the mirrors for traffic that wants to pass. The first time you look in the mirror at 80 MPH and unexpectedly see nothing but hood it’ll scare the shit out of you.
17) Make sure Christine has a place for spare pens; dust destroys Sharpies.
18) Gaffer tape is your friend.
19) Toilet paper in the toolkit. Just in case.
But yeah, random braindump. Most of the above is a blinding flash of the obvious on paper but stuff you just might not think of. Can’t wait to see pics and video!
Sean –
Please tell me how #7 helps me???
#15 – I can’t wait to go through one of those things!
#12 – Thank goodness we get notes.
#16 – Probably won’t happen, since we’re going to be the last car to start (bummer).
We actually knew most of the other stuff – doing rallycrosses in a desert helps you learn about stuff like dust and need for LOTS of water. And the rallycrosses at night where we were photographed I didn’t notice until the photos came back. Already have the TP in the car – learned that one from working ATC and FTC at Rim and Treeline.
Thanks for the advice!
Other item I picked up –
1. Notes come up a lot faster than you might think. I’ve run plenty of brisk TSDs, plenty of rallycrosses, and followed along with lots of in-car, but the first time you’re on stage looking at a sheet of Jemba notes, they blend together very quickly. The route book alternates between frenzied calls through tough sections to two miles of thumb twiddling.
2. Our dust problem didn’t show up until halfway down SS5… I don’t know what changed, but about mile 8 of the stage, big plumes of dust started coming up just right of my kick plate. Turned out to be a hole behind the mudflap that was getting dust up into the fender, around the door panel, and into the car.
3. Don’t forget your odometer resets and verify that you’re on page one of the stage while waiting for the Finish clock. You’d be amazed how easy it is to forget to do those, and suddenly you’re looking at an overall mileage that doesn’t match the book. You can make do with intervals if you forget, but it’ll get messy if you get lost in the book and have to figure out where you are, particularly with stage notes.
3. As for traffic coming up behind, it just takes one team having a mechanical issue on transit to have them starting behind you at an ATC… if that team is faster than you and the stage is long, they’ll catch you up. We never figured it’d happen, then we had a G2 GTi up behind us on SS3 so close that I couldn’t see their hood pins.
These may all seem really obvious… certainly, working controls, running TSDs, and running rallycrosses put you far ahead of all the other novices out there. The same thing that makes stage rallying so much better than those is the combination of stresses on the mind, body, and car, and you’ll be running on reflex for a huge portion of the event. As much fun, right now, as you think it’s going to be… it’s going to be even better.
The first stage you have where the car, driver, and navvie get every little thing perfect, and you finish five flawless cresty, twisty miles toward the end of your stage, and come romping up on that red flag… the grins will be plastered full across your face.
Good luck, guys!
/Andrew
Thanks for the advice, Andrew!
The odometer reset comment is especially useful – that’s probably something I would forget. They did mention in the CRS Rally School we went to that the notes would go much more quickly than the route book – John Dillion even demonstrated this during the “advanced co-driving section” but showing us an in-car of a stage at Gorman (and one I think we’ll be running, ironically enough), with first just the route book, and the with the notes. I hope I won’t get lost in them!
I’m so excited! Thanks for the well-wishes!
Werd…I see you made it to SpecialStage.com!