It is with some (great?) sadness that we said good bye to our Subaru on Friday. Stan and Robert of New York will be running in Northeast rallycross and possibly stage rally events.
While we were interested in competing at Rally TN, editorial deadlines and the need to start on a new project dictated that we send the car off to a new owner.
We just licked the envelope for our entry into Nasa Rally Sport’s Rally TN. and made our hotel reservations.
Now we just need to figure out how to get all of our junk into the rally car for the trip up there.
Here’s a second piece on the Maine Forest Rally that was played on NPR. A little negative on the spectators, but….
Interesting interview on NPR from the Maine Forest Rally….
This weekend, there was also a one hour show on the Ramada Express on HDNet and a one hour show on STPR on ESPN2.
The X-Games must be helping!
Oddly enough, now we’re wondering if Rally Tennessee can happen for us, as the service truck and trailer aren’t available that weekend. Do you think we can drive 10 hours up to TN for the event and then drive back?
Last night, we took the Subaru home for some cleaning and fixing. The exhaust flange was bolted back together, with a new gasket, and we used double nuts on the bolts to keep them from vibrating loose again. The numbers from Rally WV were removed after being liberally doused with Goo-Gone. We followed this up by vacuuming out about four pounds of gravel from West Virginia and then gave the car a bath.
On the way to work this morning, we were on vapors, so we stopped in at the gas station for a full tank of gas. That means, uhh….thats it’s ready for Rally TN, if we choose to go. Frankly, we’re thinking about getting the band back together and making this a reality.
Our Impreza was driven onto the trailer at the conclusion of Rally West Virginia, then driven off and parked behind our office for a month. It cranked a little slowly, but fired up and settled into its super-even idle. The only thing we noticed was that the exhaust was a little louder than normal, even for the free-flowing muffler. We peered under the Impreza and noticed that one of the bolts holding an exhaust flange had gone missing somewhere in the hundreds of miles of rallying that it has done. We’ll drive it home tonight, give it a fresh tank of gas and maybe even wash it after we replace that bolt. It should then be good to go, possibly to Rally Tennessee in a month!
Did we mention that Subarus are tough?
Here’s a cool video courtesy of Josh Wimpey (he’s got the super-fast Silver/Blue Golf on this clip) from Rally West Virginia. It’s about 13 minutes long and the GRM Impreza is on there twice.
The Subaru Impreza project car is essentially done, we’ll be wrapping up a few loose ends with the car (it has two more installments in the magazine on the way) and then we’ll need to kick it loose to start something else. Does anybody want a ready to rally car for less than a typical rental weekend will cost? We’ll be asking $7500, which is darn cheap for a car that is ready to go.
email per@grassrootsmotorsports.com if you’re interested.
Here are some links to other pictures that we’ve found on the ‘net from RallyWV.
Here are some static shots of the event..action to come later.
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