Last Tuesday, Sean and I went up to Brent’s with his 96 Subaru Impreza.
Team car #762. Click here for pictures.
Soon we will both have cages, and be a big leap closer to running in our first SCCA Clubrally event.
Trunkmonkeyracing got a fresh new PHP look a few weeks ago, and I just finished
indexing rallynotes.com so that you could pull articles from both mine and Sean’s adventures. I’ll have links up to the
gallery soon too.




Brent fabricated this amazing light bar for me, and mounted my daylighters on the Neon.



In other news:
Both Sean and I cancelled the order from Morris.

I think I found a co-driver. Andrew has taken James under his wing, and we have run notes together quite smoothly.
He can do math in his head (unlike me), and is really getting into the sport. I want to run a full TSD in May
with James to fully test the driver / co-driver relationship.

My friend Brian from the Subaru club got a chance to upload some
of the pictures from the Covered Bridge rallycross that we did a few months back. He took the series above.
I guess I never even mentioned that I did that TSD – or the rallycross. It was sort of a last minute thing. Maddog (John)
volunteered as co-driver for the weekend. We did okay on the TSD, and came in 5th in class in the
rallycross. The car did so well driving in the TSD, that I decided to run the rallycross. Not the best thing for the
old stock suspension.

I took a second to put all the “rollcage” pictures into ONE folder, and kill some dead links, etc.

As far as the car goes – I’m waiting for money… My career as a Network Engineer has been less then exciting over the
last year. I should have the cage paid off, and the car back sometime in the next few weeks. Then I will be saving the money
for the suspension.

My brother and I took a trip back up to VT to see how Brent was progressing on the cage. Brent
suggested that when I had a day off – I should come up, paint the cage, and test the fit.
I must say this baby looks awesome. The rear doors close without ANY modifications to the door
panels. The front door window rollers work. The side vents are attached and work. The side fuse panel is only
at a slight angle (Instead of being removed, and re-routed to the center console. Which is what I expected we’d
have to do…). It’s pretty easy to get in and out of. Oh, and it’s strong as hell!
The seats finally arrived – so this was a chance to do a “final fit”. We ran into
a few snags with the “shoulder” door bar. The first big snag was the fact the the Corbeau bracket for
the Neon is HUGE! It’s at least 1″ taller then the stock bracket. I assumed that it would lower the
driver position slightly. I was sitting up high in a very uncomfortable spot in the car. The second problem is:
I’m 6′4″ tall, and not designed to fit into a car of this size in the first place. I had about
1″ of headroom, and it was clear that we would have more then two things to do today. 1. Change the shoulder bar. 2.
Fabricate seat brackets. 3. Paint cage.

Once the final checks were made, Brent went to work cutting, grinding, and fabricating new “shoulder bars”. Korey and I
masked and painted the back half of the cage. The bars were moved back about seven inches, and pushed closer to the frame.
The end result is a cage that is not only extra safe – but comfortable to drive in.