That’s quite a rear end!

As some of you may have seen at Sandblast, we had slightly different setup for the rear suspension for this really.  Anyone who’s owned a MkIV Golf/Jetta can tell you that the rear axle seems to be made of Swiss cheese.  Except not as stiff.  It seemed as if we were bending the thing pretty badly every other rally.  There isn’t much to be done once it’s bent.  A bit of reinforcement was tried in order to triangulate and strengthen the arms, but to no avail.  Tall Pines was exceptionally rough.  Due to a lack of snow and ice, speeds were considerably higher than normal.  Being as it was my co-driver’s second rally, we weren’t pushing extremely hard, yet still managed to put some serious hurting on the axle.  During the last service, we had to repair a shock that had ripped its top mount out of the chassis.  At the end of the rally, the other shock had done the same thing.

Re-Cap on 2009 and the birth of noSPARK

It’s New Years Eve, and looking back on 2009, it was quite the formative year for noSPARK racing. First, Michael tapped into my love of cars and speed, and introduced me into the world of rally co-driving. Little did I know how quickly I’d be bitten by the bug…

Catching air on "sm jmp/crst" in Canada

NASA’s Black River Stages rally in September was the first race since Mike’s Sandblast attempt the previous February, and a first for me sitting in the “stupid” seat. Hours were spent in the garage preparing the TDI with a new 6-spd transmission, diff, and other repairs.