If nothing else, some people seemed entertained by my previous postings and adventures. If things weren't crazy enough in 2016, 2017 has pushed the pedal through the floorboards :nut:
Recently, my team, ChassisFlex Motorsports, announced we were going to do the whole Canadian Rally Championship national season :D
I'll keep this thread updated somewhat regularily with musings, postings, and general blabbing about my life on the road. 4 of the 7 events are 3500+kms one way tows out east. Needless to say, I might have to cut back on my Beyond posts!
As I mentioned in the PYLP thread, I recently picked up one of the final pieces to get this party started; a 32' + 2.5' vnose enclosed car trailer from Indiana :eek: Thing is friggin huge! Was supposed to be a 4 day trip, ended up taking 5 due to reasons outside my control (one of them being torrential downpour freezing rain from Indiana to Minnesota, only 1000kms :nut: )
Tonight I head to Kamloops to pickup my teammates rally car, Travis Nease, an instructor at DirtFish Rally School in Washington state. He'll be joining us for the season, and we're glad to have him on board :clap:
Spoiler alert, we got a ton of footage aired on TSN of CFM and even an interview with me. We were setting top 3 and 4 fastest stage times. No big deal, the cars in front of us were only worth anywhere from $100k to $250k vs our little $20k junk mobile ;)
A quick clip from Big White 2016 of us launching, more to come when the official stuff gets online :bigpimp:
01-20-2017, 06:42 PM
Darell_n
Rallysafe being used again this year?
01-21-2017, 08:47 AM
HiTempguy1
Nope, eztrack will be used out east. No idea what will be used out west, possibly nothing.
01-21-2017, 12:29 PM
Sugarphreak
...
01-23-2017, 12:15 PM
schocker
Very cool. Have always wanted to try rally at dirt fish. Will check in for updates.
01-24-2017, 01:56 PM
4WARNED
Teach those eastern teams a thing or two Adam and Good luck!
You're living the rally dream.
Oh, and stay in Open Class for my own (selfish) advancements lol
WFR Rally Team
PS - please tell me you have a set of air bags on the rear of that truck.
01-24-2017, 05:49 PM
HiTempguy1
Quote:
Originally posted by 4WARNED Teach those eastern teams a thing or two Adam and Good luck!
You're living the rally dream.
Oh, and stay in Open Class for my own (selfish) advancements lol
That's the plan! Don't worry, we won't be leaving open class. We have a crazy car that should get underway shortly being built. Also have a significant sponsor hopefully coming on board for 2017 and beyond... announcement later this week :D
Quote:
PS - please tell me you have a set of air bags on the rear of that truck.
Truck was loaded with 2200lbs of fuel pretty close to the front of the trailer. That was taken at the gas station, where I was all set to get air in the tires and bags until I pulled the reel out and there was a huge cut in the hose. Drove around for 30 minutes trying to find air :eek:
We're in the home stretch. Getting the trailer setup with the WD hitch, did a whole ton of maintenance to the truck (coolant flush, new hakka LT2 studded winter tires, alignment). Only have to get 18 tires and rims demounted and mounted...
Originally posted by ExtraSlow Very cool man. Kick some ass.
We did and thanks! 8th overall out of 40 entrants :)
Full writeup to come, I've basically been pulling 16 hour days the past 2 weeks straight and I'm exhausted... work will be a nice relaxing break this morning :rofl:
02-22-2017, 03:29 PM
HiTempguy1
It's been over two weeks since Perce, and I am only just getting back to a relatively normal life. Which means a thread update :haplo90:
Everything was crazy all January. Between the 5 day trip to get the trailer, a weekend trip to get our teammates car, and general setup of the new trailer/towing rig, it was mayhem. Up until yesterday, I've basically been 14-16 hour days every day of the week since January 1st :o
January 28th we got to work. Springs were swapped on the rallycar to the soft winter setup:
We didn't mess with the damping at all, left it alone and just went softer springs. In the future I am going to work on developing softer settings, but DMS Australia obviously doesn't have any recommended snow settings :P
Had all the tires mounted, all brand new Revolution Wheels. Was a pretty good feeling to be showing up to an event with the proper tires, all mounted on properly sized, custom fit rims 8)
Due to general "nothing ever goes right when you need it to" we left Red Deer about 5 hours behind schedule to head to Maniwaki. This completely screwed all of our scheduling up, and it ended up being a long, tiring trip with all the days being about 16 hours :'( But we made it on time and with no real issues!
It was necessary to have all that clearance, I used it all and then some. Lots of air (yes, even on recce) was had, especially on the tighter forest stages. The rally was going to be something else!
I wish I had video, but while we were sitting in Parc Expose (basically a mandatory meeting area for spectators to come and check out the cars and meet the drivers before racing officially gets under way), it was quite cold so we sat in the car idling it. As some of you know, my car's idle is quite aggressive, had a few fans come up and ask to get a video with me revving the car. Not one to disappoint, anti-lag and launch control were activated. The Quebecois gentlemen proceeded to lose their itshay >:D Great way to start the event!
And we were off to the proverbial races. This event had, BY FAR, the deepest, fastest, most talented field an event has seen in North America, possibly EVER (at least, for snow and ice rallies). When Sylvain Erickson (THE snow rallyist of all snow rallyists in North America) starts 14th on the road, you know the competition will be steep.
And it showed; while we held our own, we were running in the mid teens. I wasn't pushing, I didn't want to push on the opening stages as they were relatively short. Doesn't mean we didn't give 'er a good go!
After the first 4 stages. Note that every SINGLE competitor in front of us has been on a national podium (with many having won multiple events over the years). And 3 of those cars are worth over $100kusd each, with the remaining being builds in the $80k-$100k range. Also note that David and Pastrana were only entered in the American portion of Perce Neige. ^-^ http://i.imgur.com/o95nwGn.jpg
While my story mostly focuses on myself and the car, we also were supporting our teammate Travis Nease from Dirtfish Rally School and a Lethbridge competitor Nicholas Spencer. It's a great feeling to be able to help people make events happen and spread the load. Rallying takes a ton of work! Any help we can give other people we know makes their lives easier :)
We really started picking up the pace, as was our plan, once we got out to the forest stages (unfortunately, pictures are few and far between as the forest road is barely a car wide with no turnoffs and a couple feet of snow in the ditches).
As you may have noticed in some of our pictures, our car is awfully high relative to other competitors. This was a setup gamble we made, banking on the fact that the forest stages were ROUGH. And it paid off. Nicholas Spencer who was crewing with us took a minute out of us on the fast, flowing Tortue stage, but we took ~1.5 minutes out of him on each pass of the Calumet and Kitigan Zibi stages. The gamble paid off!
We put the lights on for the final pass of the stages... and everything went to crap :'( We had 1 of our pod lights out, and in the rush to fix it in service, the hood pins didn't get put back on :( So while transiting to the first night stage, the pods came up at 70km/h! We got lucky though in a sense, the wiring pulled free from its connectors. While this gave us no auxiliary lights, it did save the pod and windshield from being completely shattered. Being the quick thinker that I am (and having done all the lights myself), I knew all I needed was a pair of electrical tape and some pliers to be able to twist the wiring together.
This most certainly had an impact on my stage times, and by this point, my co-driver was dying (she had a really bad cold prior to the event which morphed into this wicked-nasty dry cough. She was a champ and powered through, but yelling all day did not do her any favours).
But we soldiered on, our strategy of running A034's plus a higher ride height paying dividends when we hit the final stage of the event, setting a 9th fastest overall time and launching us into 8th overall CRC and 10th overall at the event:
Car took a bit of a beating, but we came out of it fully functioning and mostly ready to go besides minor reprep for Rocky. We've secured some sponsors that we will be announcing this week (WSC knows the company fairly well already ;) ). Top 10 was our goal, to be top 8 in the field we had to deal with is awesome. Right now our biggest holdup is suspension, and we are looking to rectify that as soon as possible.
And there we are, one down, 6 more events to go! We want to continue our top 10 ways, and are really pushing towards top 6. Not only is it important for us to give 'er (we have nothing to lose and everything to gain), the amount of contingency we receive from Subaru's awesome support program gets cranked up at that point and will help us in our goals for the 2018 season :)
02-22-2017, 04:11 PM
ExtraSlow
This is super awesome. :thumbsup:
02-22-2017, 04:52 PM
s dime
Awesome, nice work!
03-17-2017, 11:11 AM
HiTempguy1
Quote:
Originally posted by s dime Awesome, nice work!
Thanks :D
Not much of an update on the open class car this week, but my life the past three weeks has revolved around this sorry excuse for a rally car ;) :
The rental civic! It lives! And it passed tech, which makes me very happy. Due to all the snow recently out near Cochrane, we lifted the car almost two inches by installing springs from a 1996 Honda Civic EX sedan. The springs were brand new as used ones were impossible to find, and came out to only $200 for the 4, not bad!
It's a very fun car to drive in its current setup, very neutral, very stable, and it actually has a ton of getup and go with the close ratio jdm box.
The team that rented the car were having a great start as a first time driver, sitting around 12th or 13th out of 19 entrants after the first two stages :)
So we got some work to do before the car is ready for rent again. Generated a lot of interest, apparently there is demand for a $1k rental rally car :D
In other news, we've been working on some sponsors as well as decaling for our trailer. We're getting pretty close to "the big announcement"!
Well, it has been a while since this thread has seen an update. Life has been pretty busy, but this is where CFM currently stands!
We made it home in one piece, basking in a solid finish to open the season with. There is never rest for the wicked however, and while we had a nice break from February until mid May, there was tons to do, not the least of which was dealing with the rental rally civic.
Started looking over the WRX, overall, not bad shape. Needed a couple of repairs though:
CV Boot was torn, decided to go for a brand new axle rather than continuing to rely on the 100k +km JDM axle. Good spare if needed, and with Subarus both sides use the same axle.
The car developed an awful clunk on launch and shift, thought the rear diff bushings were completely shot. Nope! Turns out we completely lost a transmission crossmember bolt :eek: Were quite lucky we didn't have a catastrophic failure out east, this could have seriously ruined my day. All of the tranny crossmember bolts now have lock washers on them!
The brakes have required a little bit of an initial pump every once in a while to get solid brake feel which was becoming very frustrating, as those who race know, consistent brakes is paramount to not going off the road! We found the reason though, the caliper had gotten whacked by a rock hard enough it was actually leaking from the bolts that hold both halves of the caliper together:
So after the minor tweeks and fixes, the car was basically good to go. While all this was happening, I bought a (new to me) truck. At only 300k kms, it's a young pup compared to the other duramax that I sold with 520k kms on it :rofl:
Unfortunately, not everything was all sunshine and rainbows leading up into our next event, the Rocky Mountain Rally which happened at the end of May. I'll be posting about that in the next couple of days, and showing where we are going forward...
07-17-2017, 12:06 PM
rage2
Do you have in-car footage? That's something that I'd like to see.
07-17-2017, 06:31 PM
HiTempguy1
Unfortunately nothing much. It might seem like something that is easy, but its one more thing to add to the list that ends up being a huge pain to deal with when you are a small team like us :( I have three gopros , but managing all of them is quite the hassle it seems. I'd like to upgrade to all current stuff (gopro3 or newer) so it all can be dealt with on our incar tablet, just haven't been able to make the time or spend that money.
Another big issue is white balance. Gopro2 and original Hero's suck balls at adjusting for white balance and afaik you can't lock them down. Since the light outside varies all the time, you typically can see in the car but nothing out of the window.
We were supposed to have a ton from Big White, but the CRC TV crew deleted it all before I had a chance to grab it. Was quite upset!
07-18-2017, 07:15 AM
killramos
Beyond gofundme to get Temp a gopro setup!
I would love to see the footage too!
07-18-2017, 10:00 AM
gretz
Does that civic happen to have teal on the inside? Looks strikingly close to one of the weapons of mass destruction i used to daily lol...
That carbon hood and pins looks close, glad to see the old pig farm special didnt go to waste