Some choice photos:

• Heat. New catalytic converter at the back of the car rather than under our feet.  Better heat shielding.
• Fenders. New fenders were purchased and painted.  We’ll try not to hit anything next time.
• Front Radius Rods / Cross Member. Fabricating a new “rally spec” unit.  Bent/broke the Place Racing unit.

Photos of the new work will be up shortly.

Next rally will be Wild West out in Eastern Washington in September (just have to figure out a way to get some taller gearing, or more RPM, for the long straights).  We may also do Pacific Forest to make up for the Idaho Rally.

I’ll be back-filling all the 2007, 2008 Rally America and NASA Rally events, so stay tuned.

Also is an improved Competitor Database, which is a great way to to a quick lookup on your favorite rallyist.

We’ve tried our best to make sure all the features of the old site work on the new site.  If you notice something is not working as expected, please let me know at kris@fatboyraceworks.com.

A couple of new features to point out:

• New Search Box — The search box at the top of the page will search for albums and photos in the gallery as well as blog posts.
• Lots more photos — We’ve added even more photos to the gallery.
• Rally DB Updates — The Rally DB has been updated and improved.  Is now a competitor listing feature, there are now delta/difference times on the stage analysis, as well as improved overall and class rankings.  We’ve got a whole slew of rally data that will be imported into the tool over the next week or two, so keep watching.
• Gear Ratio Calculator — Updated the UI a bit.  Working on a major update to the Gear Ratio Calculator which we think you’ll really like.
• Project Cars — We now have a list of project cars, which links to articles as well as photos of the various projects.  More to come!
• Calendar — You can now view and subscribe to our calendar
• Comments — Can now add comments to the blog posts, etc.  Feel free to let us know what you think.  If the comments get popular we may add a forum  to discuss gear ratio stuff, project builds, and rally stage times.

Stay tuned for a lot of catch-up posts on the Civic rally car and the vintage Honda’s!

Naturally, if you’d like to see anything improved or a new feature implemented please let us know!

Read on for more details!

2006 Season Recap

2006 season kicked off at the Doo Wop Rally Series in Montesano/Aberdeen, WA on February 25-26th.  The team was quick and consistent over the 2 day, 240 mile (99 miles of special stages) event, picking up solid 2nd place finishing positions on both days and 1st place on the combined Doo Wop Rally Series.

In April, the team headed to Portland & Hillsboro, OR for the 3-day, 375 mile (125 miles of special stages) Oregon Trail Rally (a Rally America national event).  Friday night consisted of several “Super Special Stages” on Portland International Raceway’s road course, motocross track and access roads, which provide rally fans and spectators great access to the action.  Our familiarity with the track and asphalt racing translated in to a win on Friday’s stages. Saturday started off great, with the team building up a 7 minute lead after 4 stages. Unfortunately, on the 5th stage the team stuck a huge rock embedded in the road, instantly breaking the driveshaft and forcing retirement.  The axle was replaced during the overnight service, and the team started off Sunday with a series of stage wins.  On Stage 4 the car struck a dirt embankment with the passenger side and kicking the car up into the air and on to two wheels.  When the car landed back on the ground, the impact knocked the wind out of Kris, bruising his ribs and shoulders, as well as splitting a coolant hose.  The team made finished the stage, made emergency repairs and completed the rally, scoring valuable second place points.

Next stop was the 2 day, 305 mile (135 miles of special stages) Olympus rally in Shelton, WA.  This was the first running of the Olympus rally, a former stop on the Wortld Rally Championship tour, in 14 years.  The day started off poorly, when the throttle cable rattled free on the 1st stage, costing the team a minute.  Then the team then suffered a left-side rear trailing arm failure half-way through the day.  The trailing arm was replaced, but the right-side failed two stages later with no spare available.  A spare was acquired and a repair made overnight, enabling the team to start the next day’s event.  The team set some some solid stage times early, but suffered a cracked wheel on the second to last stage–which wasn’t detected until after the team started the monster 25-mile long penultimate stage.  The deflated tire disintegrated a couple of miles into the stage, forcing an emergency tire change.  The car behaved erratically with the spare tire, which contributing to an “off” in which the car struck several small trees, breaking the front lower control arms, sheering a brake line, and bending the newly replaced rear trailing arm. The team was able to make some makeshift repairs and finish the stage under their own power, but lost over 30 minutes in the process.

Access to the logging roads during the dry summer months is limited due to extreme fire danger, so smaller, single-day Rally Sprints are held.  Kris competed at the ORV (Off Road Vehicle) Park sprints, finishing first in class.  The team also racked up another win at the Rally Worker Sprints in August.

In October it was off to the Mt. Hood Rally in Hood River, OR.  The competition was extremely tight, with several production class cars competing for class and outright two-wheel drive honors.  The team had to settle for 2nd in class, 2nd 2WD car and 6th car overall after being edged out by Mark Tabor and Kathryn Hansen in an Acura RSX Type S in the production class and 2WD standings.  An outstanding performance by both teams.

September’s Wild West Rally was postponed to December due to extremely high fire danger caused by unseasonably dry weather.  In December, however, weather also played a role.  Record rainfall, followed by snow, and then more rain, combined with federal regulations meant that the road permits for the final Rally America national event had to be pulled.  Scrambling for alternatives, the organizers implemented a contingency plan which featured racing at the Straddleline ORV park and at Pacific Raceways in Kent, WA.  The team ended up taking top honors in class as well as overall 2wd at the ORV park.  The team was capitalizing on extensive road course experience at Pacific Raceways and was leading their class when the motor failed on the second stage, forcing retirement.

The 2006 season was a great success, which included several autocross and rallycross wins in addition to the Rally America West championship!  Job well done!  Results of the 2007 Regional Cup championships will be decided in January–wish us luck!

Downloadble DiVX Video (45mb)

Bit Torrent coming soon

Pacific Forest is a two day event featuring 27+ miles of nighttime special stages on Friday and 75 miles of special stages on Saturday. The event is primarily gravel, with patches of asphalt, and will take place between 2000 and 5000 feet above sea level with a likelyhood of snow at the higher elevations. Total rally length, including transits and special stages will be approximately 250 miles.

Unlike most North American rallies, teams participate in a Recce (which is short/French for reconnaissance) in which they drive the rally stages at vastly reduced speeds, taking detailed notes of the corners, terrain that they will then use as stage notes during the rally.

We’re just finishing up our rally light system which features two 7″ Hella FF1000 HID, two 7″ Hella FF1000 Halogin off road lights as well as Hella Micro DE foul-weather/fog lamps as well as Toshiba Halogen Infrared headlamps. We tend to excel at nightime driving stages, and the addition of the new lighting system should help us do even better.

Spectators are encouraged. The stages are all very close to the town of Merrit, BC where the service areas and rally headquarters are. It is even possible to see the cars racing in the hills from service park.

If your’e interested in getting involved as a volunteer, the organizers could probably still use some additional help. Let me know and I’ll get you in contact with them. Futhermore, we are looking for one or two service crew members that are familiar with Honda/Acura vehicles. If you’d like to help us out, please PM or email me.

Read on for more details!

On preparing for the Wild West International Rally in Shelton, WA September 10th and 11th, we decided to keep things simple: check the alignment, timing and get some new tires.  This is a stark contrast to the normal thrash that we do getting prepared for a rally, which often involves replacing suspension components, body panels and re-engineering things that didn’t work out all that well at the last rally.  Its nice to finally have a car that is more-or-less “finished”.
Because we didn’t have a lot of stuff to fix after the last rally, I wanted to take advantage and spend some time driving the car on gravel, re-familiarizing myself.  Traditionally our first stage is always our worst because it takes Dad and I at least one stage to warm up and get comfortable to what we’re doing.

Unfortunately during this shakedown/practice before the rally, I proceeded to grenade the passenger-side half-shaft which cut the session short.  Easy enough fix.  After fixing it I noticed some CV noise, figured it was just the new axle breaking in.  Later I realized that it was coming from the other side and that axle would also need to be replaced.  We picked one up from the Shucks in Marysville on the way down to Shelton because there were none in stock in Bellingham.

We arrived at Rally Headquarters at the Little Creek Casino Friday afternoon, registered and got the car inspected.  Piloti Shoes was sponsoring the rally and was giving the first 30 competitors a pair of shoes each for the driver and co-driver.  For some reason they didn’t have our shoes so we went away empty-handed… Hopefully we’ll get them sometime soon.

After we got settled, we started replacing the driver’s side half-shaft in the Casino parking structure.  Both the inner and outer CV joints were toast, and I’m sure we would not have been able to finish the rally on them.  Normally replacing the axle is a straightforward procedure; the task was complicated considerably by a 1/4” aluminum skidplate attached to the underside of the car, making it extremely difficult to get the leverage required to remove the busted axle.  We were under a deadline to get the car to Parc Expose (essentially a mini car-show for the rally cars) and had to abandon the task.

Luckily our elite service crew in the form of Crescent Kao and Chad Terwisscha showed up shortly thereafter and vowed to repair the part in question the next morning before the rally began.  The part was replaced with some cursing aimed at the direction of said skidplate.

This was our first rally using Stage Notes, which is a highly-detailed description of the roads generated by computer that are available at significant additional cost.  In for a penny in for a pound: if we’re going to invest the time and money to run the event we might as well go all out.  Normally we use a route book which basically outlines only the most critical of instructions.  We hoped that the extra information would enable us to quicken our pace.

We budgeted a fair amount of time before the start of the first stage for Dad to read aloud the new Stage Notes and for me to listen and visualize.  This is a vitally critical step that we’ve never utilized in previous rallies.  By practicing our communication for 15 minutes before the rally we were already up to speed when the rally started.

Because of the vast difference between the route book and the stage notes, it is generally accepted that the team will struggle for the first couple of stages as they get accustomed to the new format.  And we were no exception–we had a hard time reconciling what was in the Stage Notes with what was on the road and got lost a number of times.  Despite our struggles we managed to exhaust the entire 2 minute dust window to the car in front of us (which happened to be my old rally car, the 510) and set the second fastest stage time in our class with a time of 14:29, just 9 seconds off the first place finisher.  If we could figure out the stage notes we’d knew that we’d be in good shape.

Dad asked Kathryn Hansen for some advice on the problem we’re encountering with the notes, and were prepared to take a new approach to Special Stage 2.  I was fully expecting for us to continue struggling with the notes for at least another stage or two, but was pleasantly surprised that Dad had perfected the process after only one stage and was dead-on for SS2.   We again exhausted the 2 minute gap between us and the car ahead of us, which we found was having some hydraulic problems with the clutch, which forced us to fight dust for a mile or two.  Despite low visibility due to dust, we set a time of 9:54, 18 seconds quicker then the next quickest Production class car and took the class lead.
Because of our pace we were bumped up in the running order past the struggling 510, which was great because it meant that hopefully we wouldn’t have to contend with the whiteout conditions caused by the dust.

We did well for the rest of the rally, trading times with Car #297 piloted by Steve and Kelly Greer.  Going into the last stage it was essentially a dead heat for first in class.  I was enthusiastic because it was getting dark, and I tend to do really well on nighttime stages.  We were at a bit of a disadvantage because we had not expected to be competing at night and had not finished building our nighttime light pod for the car.  I knew from previous nighttime experience that although the lights definitely help, but even without them we should be exceptionally quick.

Sure enough at about 8-9 miles into the stage we began to catch the dust of the car ahead of us, which meant we had made up most of the 2 minutes window to the car ahead.

Another mile or two down the road we came cooking into a Left 3 (a fairly acute left-hand corner), saw a bumper cover in the middle of the road and then a car nosed into a massive stump on the side of the road.  Because we had been catching their dust, it must have just happened, which was further evident by the fact that only one safety warning triangle was up only a short distance from the car (ideally there should be 2 or 3 and at least one is to be placed so that it is visible before the corner where the car is off).

Competitors are also required to display either a large OK sign or a Red Cross symbol if stopped on the side of the road for whatever reason.  Unfortunately the team did not have a sign ready and were not prepared for when we came upon them at full rally speed.  This is not altogether an uncommon sight–sometimes it is just not possible to get the sign ready in time for an oncoming car, and in such cases the stranded competitors typically give an enthusiastic thumbs-up or a “GO GO GO” gestures if everything is okay.  When we came upon them the driver was still in the car, the co-driver was standing outside the car, crouching into it.   When he saw our lights, the co-driver popped out and began waiving his stage notes and hands in a criss-cross fashion across his face: an international sign of distress.

We are required to stop and render assistance if it is required.  We stopped as immediately as possible, a hundred yards down the road.  Dad immediately unbuckled, got out of the car and started running back to render assistance.  I unbuckled my belts and was getting out of the car when I heard the stranded team yell “We’re Okay!”  They had meant to gesture to keep going but in the excitement had accidently used an unambiguous hand signal that meant to stop.  I don’t recall exact reaction when I realized what had just transpired but I’m pretty sure that if I repeated it on television I’d be getting a call from the FCC.

I sat back down in the car, re-buckling my helmet and fastened my belts so that we could finish the last mile of the stage.  Dad ran back to the car, and started buckling in.  As soon as he was buckled in, we started rolling–without the reconnecting intercom and without the stage notes as we had lost what page and instruction we were on.  We finished the stage, but the damage was done, we had lost at least a minute to the fiasco.

We filed an official inquiry as soon as we got back to rally headquarters, protesting what had happened to us.  The stewards agreed with us and corrected our time to the next fastest car that finished after us.  Unfortunately they were only 14 seconds quicker then our actual stage time even including the stop, getting out of the car, completing the last mile with no intercom or stage notes.  The 14 seconds were not enough to make up the difference–we ended up loosing the Production Class win by 25 seconds.  We finished 2nd in P class, 3rd in our Driver class (based on experience), and 13th overall out of 29.

It ended up hurting us in more ways than one–we lost the Saturday Sou’Wester Production class win by 25 seconds, but it also meant that we’d carry a 25 second deficit into the second day of the Wild West International Rally.
We put it all behind us for the Simpson Stages (Day 2).  We again started with the mental preparation by spending 10 minutes on a dry run of the notes.  We started off the first stage with a P class win, taking 7 seconds out of the deficit and gave 8 seconds back on SS2.  We knew that everything hinged on the Nawhatzel stages (SS3 and SS5) which is a monster 25.51 mile long stage, one of the longest in the US, where the top cars hit speeds well over 100 mph over bumpy gravel roads.

We drove a nearly flawless stage on Nawhatzel a reaching speeds of over 90 mph, setting very quick time of 30:15,  35 seconds quicker the next fastest P class car and retaking the rally lead.

Throughout the day we had realized that we did not bring enough tires to the event, and the ones that we did bring were soft–more suited for rain, which had been predicted, than the sharp rocky roads that we encountered.  We had tried our best to manage the tires that we had by rotating them carefully, but it was made even more difficult when we noticed a sidewall defect on one of our best tires and were forced to discard it.  We basically were running the tires ragged and would have to take it easy for the rest of the rally.  Now that we had the lead all we needed to do was maintain it.  Easier said than done.

On the next stage were were doing well but the well-worn tires were not as effective and we drifted wide on a left hander, and got stuck.  Our rally was essentially over–we had to wait about 20 minutes for the sweep truck to pull us out.  Even at a reduced pace it was difficult to keep the car stable, and we ended up spinning and getting stuck again.  We finished the rest of the stage at a crawl.  To add insult to injury, the alternator light came on in the car at the midpoint of the stage, which meant we were running on battery power.

After the stage we stopped to investigate the alternator problem and discovered that some debris had gotten into the pulley and had snapped the belt.  We did not think that we could finish the next 25+ mile stage on battery power so decided to replace the belt from a spare that we had.

Was more difficult then we thought, ended up taking about 20 frustrating minutes.  When we showed up at the next stage we were told that we had been time-barred (kicked out of the rally for being too slow), and would not be allowed to complete the rally.

In retrospect we realized we probably could have finished the rally on battery power, and even if we hadn’t we would have at least had additional time to fix the alternator belt and probably would have escaped being time-barred.
That being said I still felt like we had a great weekend.  We had 4 P class stage wins and set the fastest Nawhatzel time for a naturally aspirated, 2 wheel drive car, even though we only got one attempt at it and are in an extremely limiting class.   We improved dramatically and now have the confidence we can get class wins.

Our service crew was fantastic and was probably the single biggest contributing factor to our success at Wild West.  Throughout the weekend they replaced an axle, an upper control arm, a tie rod end, hub/knuckle/spindle, numerous tires–they kept us running and allowed us to focus on the task at hand.  Special thanks to Crescent and Chad for their help.

Next rally for us will be the two-day, 102 mile Pacific Forest Rally, October 14-15 in Merrit, BC.