Two more videos are now available for your enjoyment. The first is Witty Tom. It’s in the dark – faster and clearer then last year. The bullet-cam setup works well behind the front windshield and it takes a pretty good night shot. The rain this year kept the dust down and we could keep up a fast pace the whole way. The second video is Limestone Canyon South. It’s a fast but rough stage that we nick one of the rear rims on.

Prescott Rally 2006 – SS4 Witty Tom ‘See the Light’ – 59.6MB WMV
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Prescott Rally 2006 – SS11 Limestone Canyon South – 37.9MB WMV
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UPDATED: 10/17/2006 – With this years Limestone Canyon…

Prescott Rally 2006 – Bang On! – 43.5MB WMV
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Prescott this year was a rough event with lots of embedded rocks and loose boulders. We carried two spares most of the day on Saturday and we needed them! I whipped up a little compilation of the ‘hits’ and some silliness. Enjoy! Some pictures are up in the gallery. A lot more to follow!

Please note for the little ones: This one has some strong language in it. After destroying the fourth rim on stage, I utter a few choice words.

Just a short little update. We finished and had a fantastic time! This was another USRC win for us! We got third in the ultra competitive P-Stock and set some pretty fast times all weekend for a bone stock Dodge Neon!

We had lots of fun out there – esp. on Limestone Canyon.

We’ll have tons and tons of pictures, updates, and videos to follow!

Thanks to everyone that made this weekend special! Our parents, our awesome crew, the competitors, the workers, the organizers, and all our rally family!

Over the weekend we moved into our new shop in San Clemente. It’s off of Ave Pico which is easy to remember as we used to be off Pico St. in Los Angeles. Pico, pico! *ahem. I have a proper workshop now, so I can begin some bigger projects. Carbon fiber, small metal fabrication, skidplates, electronics, etc. San Clemente is about 20 minutes away and it’s close enough that I can go to the shop from work and get home at a decent hour. On Sunday I buttoned up a number of things that needed to be fixed. New mudflaps, new ‘Hall Effect’ sensor for the Brantz tripmeter, new hood pins, etc. We’re waititng for some struts and I have a hood to paint, but we’re ready for Prescott and in great shape.

Speaking of new projects: I’m really excited to announce there will be a new Dodge Neon Rallycar in the extended family. Kevin and Jake who have seen the crew in action a number of times and helped us service at Gorman have decided to start building their very own Dodge Rally Neon with our help. We’re going to be giving them guidence on the project and it will be a building block for my new venture called RumbleSoft Racing.

The owners of the car were sad to see it go, but it’s in awesome shape and ready to be stripped and prepped for rally. The complete buildup of that car is going to be availabe at RumbleSoft Racing’s website – look for that soon .

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.

The four fuel injectors, the two O2 sensors, the auto shutdown relay, the alternator, the coil pack, the intake air temp / manifold pressure sensor, and an electrical noise suppressor all sitting on the same circuit as the fuel pump, the fuel level sender and the ECU. (or PCM, a.k.a. the computer! ) Any thing on this list shorts out and we roll to a stop.

The dark green wire (with orange stripe) splits off to all of these things one after the other without increasing the gauge. So you have an 18 gauge wire split off into eight additional 18 gauge wires split off into 2 long 18 gauge wires, etc. It’s like plugging everything in your house into 3 power strips hung off an extension cord. If you’re not racing your Neon you may never notice how fragile this setup is.

For those of you planning to keep with the Neon you may want to spend a weekend with the engine wiring harness out of the car. Get a big wooden board, pin everything down and start running separate wires to everything ‘plugged in’ to the green and orange power strip. I think I’m going to go so far as to separate the O2 sensors off with in-line fuses. Last time I tried to fix this problem by building an in-car override for the circuit when it popped. I see now that all I was doing is plugging the Christmas Tree into a different outlet to fix the shorted out bulbs.

Update: I added 4 more things that the sneaky green and orange go to…