Tag Archives: rally

Ready to learn what you need to get into rally?

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Run consecutively since 1998, the California Rally Series is presenting the CRS Rally School on Saturday, February 21st, 2015 with the Ridgecrest Rallycross event, the following day on Sunday, February 21, 2015.

This is a great opportunity to show a new driver, co-driver, service crew member, or spouse what rally is all about. There is no one involved in the sport that will not benefit from this workshop. The class is packed with information and covers topics including: car prep, timing, stage notes, team management, and rally driving techniques. There is also plenty of seat time for drivers and co-drivers on practice courses designed to give them the “feel” of real competition. Experienced rally competitors will ride along with you and show you how to use the practice areas to develop and hone both driving and co-driving skills.

  • Intense half-day classroom event with activities designed to teach you stage rally.
  • How to get started in Performance Rallying from basic to advanced topics.
  • Understanding controls and timing, the time card, and activities.
  • Split activities for drivers and co-drivers (break out sessions):
    • Drivers get seat time on our practice course with experienced rally drivers.
    • Co-Drivers practice reading notes on a rally stage with experienced co-drivers.
    • One on one in-car instruction from National Championship Competitors.
  • Designed to give you the ‘feel’ of real competition!
  • This is the best ‘bang for you buck’ rally school in the country!

The Ridgecrest Rallycross is a timed event where competitors race both street stock and prepared cars around a closed course in a huge dirt lot. The tight course controls the vehicle’s speed while making driver control and skill a greater factor than raw horsepower. What is rallycross? Learn more here.

The school’s enrollment fee is only $140, or add the Sunday Rallycross for $180. This year your entry includes a FREE 2015 membership to the California Rally Series! Online Entry is available at the CRSRallySchool.com

If you just joined us…

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If you’re a beginner and you just found rallynotes.com, keep reading, your quest starts here.

Rally car jump

Building a rally car is something that is very rewarding, time consuming and expensive. My formula is: Take the cost of ANY car and add about $8000 and you will have a good budget for your first rally car. Did eight grand scare you a little? Good, because used rallycars can be found for $5000. That cost doesn’t include the $2000 each of safety gear you’ll be wearing. ($ in USD)

You’re going to want to prioritize your to-do list and start by gutting the car. Any mechanical issues that the model has will need to be solved. (AWS on VR4, Neon head gasket, Rear beam brake bias on VW’s, etc.) This stuff involves lurking on car forums and doing research on what works and what doesn’t in racing. Talk to people who have actually rallied. Don’t spend 1000 hours re-engineering something from the factory. The manufacturer spent a LOT of money to ensure the gas tank was in a safe place. Why are you spending hours setting up a fuel cell in the spare wheel well? You’d be surprised to see how much factory stuff is just fine working under rally conditions. Don’t run too many rally experiments your first time out.

Find a reputable roll cage fabricator. You could do it yourself, but I don’t recommend it. These guys have rally experience, they know what works and what doesn’t. At least consult with one before you start cutting tubes. A basic cage that will protect you in a crash is going to be around $2300 – $2800.

friendsGet some friends to help. Your mechanic buddy might groan when you ask him for help on a Friday night, but secretly he loves it. He loves knowing everything about your rally car, he talks about it at work, and he’ll love when you finish your first rally and bring it into the winners circle with his help. Compensate these guys by paying for their rally weekend. Cover the hotel and food.

Once the cage is in and seats are installed. Upgrade the suspension, and come up with a clever way to attach some HDPE plastic and 6061 3/16″ aluminum skid plates to the underside. I used angle iron on the side sills and some metal skis off the K-member. Then take it out for testing at a rallycross, dry lake-bed, or closed dirt road. You should have already had a conversation with a sanctioning body rally car inspector. Getting a logbook for your first rally car is a major milestone!

Going to start with a brand new co-driver? Go to a rally school that teaches co-driving skills. Rally volunteers have some patience for noobs, but getting 10 minutes of road points because you don’t understand how a time card works is embarrassing.

Read rules, rulebooks, and car classes. You’ve read them once? Read then again. Now all the little details need to get in place. Your orange triangles, your first aid kit, tow hooks, extinguishers, etc. Only after this is all figured out should you sign up for your first event. Do you have everything you need to pass tech at your first rally? I highly recommend hanging out in tech a few rallies before your first one. I learned a lot just watching the scrutineering process.

Your goal is to finish your first rally. You will learn an amazing amount of stuff about your car and yourself in one event. Now you can go forward and refine your driving, your car, and your rally skills.

Want an idea of what it’s like to build and race a rally car? Check out some of the highlights of the rallynotes.com archive. Goals Achieved at Gorman – The Olympus Story – The Black Canyon Video – The 2008 USRC Production 2WD Champions – Rally car project number 2
Thanks for joining us!
– Kris

The Prescott Rally 2011

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The Prescott Rally in Arizona is a fantastic event. The roads, the volunteers, the organizers, and the stages are awesome. This year the organizers gave us the opportunity to test out our new rally car on the stages by running zero car.

How did it go? Great! The chassis feels solid and the steering modifications are amazing at speed. Tossing the car through the end of Witty Tom South (a stage with lots of 4’s and 3’s) had me turning the wheel no more then 90 degrees. A big plus for the quickener experiment. The rallycross suspension setup was decent, but not ready for cattle-guards at 70+ mph. We embarrassingly nosed in a couple of times, and after the third time hopping the rear end through a ditch, I slowed for the remainder of them. This 2.0l n/a motor feels stronger then the one in the Production car and it will be fun to rally on for a couple more events before swapping a turbo SRT4 power-plant in.

As I feared, the stock engine mounts are completely unable to cope with this kind of abuse. The motor mount rubber on the passenger frame side ripped about halfway through stage 2. This added to the noise in the cabin and kept me from really putting down the throttle. It was a mistake not to address this before Prescott. Solid “dog bone” mounts are on order and I’m going to poly fill or weld (haven’t decided) the engine and trans mounts before the Glen Helen rallycross on October 16th.

We have a laundry list of things to fix and change, but overall it was a very successful test!

Wiring Effort

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Wiring Effort Scale
Somewhere between a rats nest of wires doomed to start an electrical fire and military grade wiring found in attack helicopters, you will find what I’m doing with the wiring on the 2GN. Primarily for organization and keeping things neat, I took the “wiring trough” that sits on the dash out and went through the harness. I wrapped everything remaining up with zip-ties and removed a lot of the sticky tape. You certainly don’t want bundles of exposed wires, but if you need to fix an electrical problem, you don’t want to spend an hour on the side of the road identifying and unwrapping wires. Unlike a turbo swap in a GC8 Subaru, I really don’t need to change anything with the harness for the SRT-4 motor. The 2003 SXT plugs right in, and is a major reason why we sought out that particular year and model.

Automotive resettable fusesI’ve had my eye on 12v resettable fuses for a while now and it’s something that I think will really come in handy on a modern rally car. The E-T-A 1620 series are automotive grade circuit breakers that fit in a “mini fuse” space. Around $5 each they beat a zip-lock baggy of replacements in the ash tray. Along with these I ordered a number of switches for the cockpit panel and some some separate 12v circuit breakers for things like lights, rally computer, and transceiver. I also ordered some spare Molex type connectors to better interconnect the harness in the rear of the car. I will be able to change out the melted and cracked connector that goes to the lights and blinker switch. 😮

Rally cars and zip-ties

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Flush Cutters CHP-170Zip-ties, duct tape, and bailing wire are the most common MacGyver items in a rally car. When a rally is in town, we usually have more spare zip-ties then the local Super Walmart. Zip-ties are a rally essential, but you need to pickup an essential tool for installing them: A pair of flush cutters. Plastic knives can be pretty sharp and poorly trimmed zip-ties can be sharper! I’ve seen and had some pretty bad lacerations from the remaining 1/4″ of zip tie that was bevel cut into a sharp spike by standard wire cutters. I now avoid using them on the roll cage and tuck the zip-tie head as far away as possible. Don’t have a flush cutter handy? In a pinch you can use a lighter to soften and melt the end.

High Desert Trails Showcases New Roads for 2011!

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High Desert Trails Rally Organizers Kristopher Marciniak and Christine Marciniak are pleased to announce that they will be using new roads for the April 9th, 2011 event. Announced this week with a Google Earth Rally Road Fly-Over video, the new stages were revealed in a spectacular visual that had viewers asking about the cost of the aviation fuel. The video was created and edited entirely on the computer using Google Earth and some free video capture software. From flowing desert landscapes to up-hill hairpins, the full length video can be seen here on YouTube.

The organizers utilized this medium for a couple of reasons as Kris explains: “These are totally new roads for the rally and we wanted them to speak for themselves. I can describe a stage to someone, but when you see the terrain and the road in three dimensions, it gives you a clear indication of how awesome these roads are. Now that you have a complete picture, I think you’ll definitely want to participate.”

In the spirit of blind rallies of old, the exact roads, route, and stages will not be disclosed to the competitors until the organizer provided stage notes hit co-drivers hands. What we can tell you is this: The roads are a comfortable distance from rally headquarters in Ridgecrest, California. The event will be a Coeffecient 3 (at least 60 stage miles) with a central service location. The organizing team has been working with the county and other local interest groups to secure the use of the roads. To celebrate our history, High Desert Trails will be offering a “Special Invitation Early Entry Fee” for those of you that have run High Desert Trails in the past (1973-2010), we will be offering a discounted early entry fee. All you will need is verifiable documentation that you were on the entry list and started the High Desert Trails Rally anytime in the past thirty seven years. More details will be available on the rally website as we get closer to the event. We hope you can join us!

High Desert Trails was originally run in 1973 by Mike Gibeault & Gary Potts. Continuing off and on for a number of years, the rally made a comeback in 2008 when Ray and Donna Hocker ran it as a shakedown rallysprint. In 2009 seeing an opportunity to keep the rally alive, Kristopher & Christine Marciniak organized their first event. The rally continues to run today!