I am now an officially licensed rally driver. In a boyhood fantasy way – “This is sooo cool!!” It really doesn’t entitle me to much, but it says to the laymen – “See that guy? That guy knows how to drive.” If I’m ever in a panic situation where there is a pregnant woman requiring a ride to the hospital and several gentlemen are quibbling over such matters, I can trump their arguments with the use of this card. To which the fine men reply: “I say dear boy – why don’t YOU have a go. My years of driving cannot match the skills that you possess on principle alone!” “Yes, yes – I must say! Get that girl in the car. He’ll have her back in time for tea! We haven’t the gall for such treachery!”

Of course this isn’t 1952 and I don’t live in the English countryside… but it could totally happen.

I always refer to cars as female. I guess it’s an old sailors tradition. I’ve never given a car a name – I think that goes a little too far. But this has become the nickname of our rally car. It involves talk-ing like ze Germans. Sadly it’s not mein Porsche. But ve were going way too fast in ze’Neon.

I just started calling her that.
And then I needed to register the car and wanted a creative plate like ‘SiDeWAYZ’ or ‘WRC555.’
Andrew, my roomate at the time, gave me the idea by simply saying “How about ze’Neon?”
“Yes! Perfect! Daimler Chrysler! It’s German you know…”

Meine neuen Kalifornien Lizenzplatten!

On Saturday morning we grabbed Ze’Neon from the shop in LA. We were tired and decided to sharpen the Kumhos by driving the 40 or so miles to Corona on rally tires. We left the muffler at the shop too. Not having to do a tire change when we got there was quite relaxing.

Timing and scoring went down after our first runs, so I didn’t see any times. I was just going for it. On the first and second runs I knew I had a few places for improvement. For the third run, everything came together and I had an outstanding run. “That’s as fast as I can go on this one.” I said to Christine with the adrenaline still pumping hard. I can’t wait to see the official times.

We placed second in class behind George Doganis in his very fast Sentra. The competition in this class is tough and we’re always battling for tenths of a second.

Pictures:
Dave’s pictures – Part of the AZ2GNT.net crew.
Brian’s pictures – Service crew chief.
Our pictures – Includes the press pictures and various other submissions.

Video:
Perkinsville ‘save’ – SS10, the longest and fastest stage on the rally done to music.
Witty Tom – SS2 in the dark with no dust. (Christine pushes hard and I sound like grandpa; ‘No I can’t dear’)
Limestone – SS9 after the turn around I get some more speed down it.
Super Special – SS5, fourty five seconds of roundy mayhem!
Dave’s Video – The super special and some service stuff.

First off – We’d like to thank the volunteers and organizers! We had a blast and the roads are awesome. Even Limestone was not as tough as some had predicted.

SS1 – First View. Good thing I couldn’t see anything.
Dust was the story of the night. We caught up with Dr. Clark and it wasn’t safe for us to try to chase him down. I can’t see anything… They let us get ahead.
SS2 – We set a pretty fast time with a fresh 4 minute dust window. 3rd place in production
SS3 – Another mid-pack time. 4th in production.
SS4 – As this was our second rally, we’ve been lucky not having to get out of the car and do the triangle run. 1/4 mile from the finish, the ass end steps out and I get ‘stupid sideways’ nose into the mountain. Re-start the car – stall… The car now won’t start. I don’t hear the fuel pump. Christine hops out and starts running the triangle down. She slips and wails her knee. I figure out the fuse is gone. We jam a new one in – throw everything into the trunk, clip some belts on, and head off again.
Turns out that Tine left her route book (the OK sign) on the back window. The workers at the end of SS4 were awesome! They found, and returned it to us back at the hotel.

Next morning
Continue reading →

Perkinsville East 1 SS10
Prescott Rally 2005 – Perkinsville ‘Save’ 69MB .wmv
I added some music – enjoy!

We made it home. The Blazer has a brand new (in tank) fuel pump and float that we changed on the side of the road yesterday. I’ll tell the whole story later – but a HUGE thanks to Jeff Rados & Guido Hamacher for making it happen. Big thanks to Marco Pasten, Jennifer Imai, and their crew that stopped to see that we were all right and helped with the repairs.

We had an absolute blast at this event. The roads are fantastic and better then expected. I topped out the Neon and spent the whole weekend with my right foot to the floor and my left lightly touching the brakes to control the car in corners. I want to thank Michael Taylor and his crew for putting on such a fantastic event.

Our volunteer service crew was awesome! Brian, Nicole, Dave, and Kim from the AZ2GNT.net club – did an outstanding job helping to keep the Neon running. We had some fuel pump issues with the car and they jumped in quickly to get things sorted. (Yep – the fuel pump in the Blazer died, and the fuel pump in Ze’Neon ‘almost’ died in the same event. ‘When it rains – it pours’)

We lost a lot of time on Friday night due to dust and the fuel issues, but we finished. We went on to do pretty well on Saturday with a 4th in class! We set a top time in the Super Special – keeping up with cars way beyond our class. That got me pumped for the rest of the day.

I have some wicked video to get off the DV cam.
I have our pictures here.
Brian posted his service pictures here.
Dave created an awesome video of us!

The Neon a trailer queen? I thought this day would come. Actually – it’s nice to keep the street tires at the shop along with the muffler. Just load it up, ready to rally! We’d like to thank Pete Morris for letting us borrow his trailer for the trip. He had some Treeline trophies to deliver to people running Prescott and I said ‘no problem’ before he even finished asking.

The Neon is not a tiny car… It’s small, but I think its size is sometimes underestimated. On Sunday I drove up the ramps and had Christine tell me to stop. “Okay – that’s good!” she shouts. “Am I on the blocks?” I ask. “ahh… umm… No. Not even close.” “Can I pull forward more?” “No – you’re two inches from the front bumper.” I ‘dukes-of-hazard’ out the side window and step off the trailer. “Oh my.” I am about three inches away from not getting the Neon on the trailer. We pulled the front plate off just in case the bumper were to touch down.

The ride home from L.A. was a good 1st test of the Blazer / Neon combo. We had all the tools and spares from the shop and we’ll only be adding about 150 more pounds of tires and clothing on Thursday when we leave for Prescott. It ran smoothly. The Blazer has gobs of torque and had no issues getting up to a 65MPH cruise. We’ll be caravan-ing with some other rally friends from SoCal. It will be good to stick together, in case anyone has issues.

An interesting ‘last minute’ thing cropped up… Both of our ‘Gorman’ Silverstone tires went flat. One I found was flat at the shop, so I took it over to the tire place and left the other one on the car. I checked the remaining tire and it had also gone flat. I had to pull this one off the car while on the trailer (not as hard as you would imagine) and I’ll be dropping it off tomorrow morning for a re-mount. Apparently the bead was leaking? They slobbed gobs of ‘rim seal’ on this time. I hope they are all right. I have had no issues like this with the Kumhos after countless rallycross events. (and I ran them in the rear for Gorman) The only issue with the Kumhos has been not being able to get any in the country…

This is the reason you have the car sitting on the trailer, ready to go, the weekend before the event. None of this under your car the night before stuff… Right Jeff?

For about an hour today I looked for a good picture of the Michael Park memorial sticker that the Subaru WRC team had in Japan. I think it’s subtle and appropriate. I decided it would be faster to make my own and share it. Created in Flash, then exported as a .PNG – please feel free to share this with everyone who knew Beef. We’ll be running them on our car in Prescott.

Update: Added an Adobe Illustrator exported version. Vector based for vinyl.