It’s been a long time in the making a natural progression of sorts, For as long as I can remember I’ve been spending every penny I could spare to buy my dream cars and driving them to their limits to the best of my ability and either learning from my mistakes along the way or having professional instructors show me how to properly drive the undrivable from my first domestic super car a 1998 Dodge Viper blueprinted to 750 naturally aspirated horsepower racing from the streets to Atlanta Motor Speedway at the age of 19 entirely self taught to my most recent endeavor into Rally. I’ve been asked why I chose rally a few times now and the answer to that question is pretty easy just go watch a few videos of every style of racing you can think of and tell me if you see anything that looks more fun or entertaining than attempting to drive 115mph around a slight bend on gravel and dirt in a front wheel drive car with trees only a few feet from each side of the vehicle all while preparing for the next turn by by your co-driver who is talking into your helmet by a directly connected intercom system telling you when and how hard the next turn is coming up so that you can be done turning and focused on the next turn before ever hitting the apex of the first turn. I can’t think of any other motorsport this challenging or extreme in terms of the constantly changing surrounding conditions and their uncontrollable nature. My friend Nar Kimmel and myself had been running autocrosses and PDX’s at Mid-Ohio locally the entire year of 2011 in my 1998 mercedes benz SLK (which is now a purpose built track car) and my street super car a 2008 Ferrari F430 F1 Spider (a seriously amazing vehicle that at times feels like it drives itself) so when the tarmac racing season came to an end in October 2011 we were left wanting to race with nowhere to go, Why? Because you can’t race on tarmac in the snow or on frozen ground the cars slicks soft or hard just won’t heat up and stick so we found ourselves at a shifter kart track playing with our shifter kart for the first time with our friend Jimmy Hendricks and decided we couldn’t stop racing all fall and winter just because everyone else we knew decided they had to quit due to weather so by the time we were leaving the kart track we had already made up our minds to build a rally car that winter. It’s now February 11th 2012 and over the winter we’ve built a WRX Super Production rally car from the ground up with the help and dedication of our teammate Brian Huntsbarger and we’ve recently purchased an E450 service truck, a trailer and most recently we’ve purchased a pre-built 1989 Dodge Shadow (shelby / arrow built) production rally car which is actually being loaded onto our trailer in PA with extra motor, glass/panels and tranny in tow as I write this post and I’m realizing as I look at 100aw.org that I’ve already registered for my first national professional rally event which starts in exactly 13 days 4 hours 24 minutes and 50 seconds (it’s listed on the front page of their website counting down lol) and while I should be nervous because all of my experience in rally racing thus far comes down to a few days with Tim O’ Neil at his training camp in new england with amazing coaches such as Chris Duplessis and Travis Hanson (both national champions) and a month straight of playing Dirt 3 in a simulator lol I’m really just excited as I’m sitting in Ohio waiting on my new rally car that I’ve never even seen much less driven to arrive and I’m thinking to myself how am I going to pull this off but the truth is I’m just in it to have fun and that’s just what I’m going to do I’m going to pack up and travel to Missouri on February 24th and I’m going to do my best to do two things one is have fun and the second is simply to finish the race because one third of cars that start a rally never finish so just to finish my first rally with the car rubber side down will be a great achievement in my mind and I can tell you that I’m up for the challenge.