Now This Is My Kind Of 240Z!

Modified to take on the Peking to Paris rally for pre 1975 cars.  This 240Z was rotisserie restored before being modified to handle offroad roads.  Not some garage queen, this was put on a boat and off to China for a 10,000 mile race that combines TSD and Special Stage style racing with a reported 50/50 mix of offroad/onroad terrain.

The host in the video is a bit of a goober but if you can make it past him, the owner/driver of the vehicle seems cool and down to earth and knowledgable about the history of offroad 240Zs which includes Baja and the East African Safari.  The R&T article and the team's Facebook page are linked to below.  They are currently in the middle of their race passing into Kazan, Russia yesterday and were busy cleaning off the Mongolian dirt.  You can see their progress, trials and tribulations in their posts...amazing that quality internet access seems to be almost EVERYWHERE now...

240Z Peking to Paris page...

Road & Track Peking to Paris 240Z...

Back Under Power...

This took place a few weekends ago.

For the first time in about a year I actually raced the "race" truck.  It was up at the Team O'Neil Rally School in Dalton, NH where the SCCA put on its first stage rally race in some ten years.  Many of my fellow entrants were racers I've known for years through the SCCA Rallycross program, including a couple of my prior codrivers.

The weather conditions were fantastic...it was dry and warm and my codriver this day was Tim Meunier who also ran as a driver and codriver in my little Mexican adventure last year.  I was admittedly dramatically out of practice and my times showed it.  I was pleased by my constant improvement from stage to stage and by then end of the day I felt like some of my pace had begun to return, though far from where I would want to be.



The mileage run on the day was pretty minor--under 20 miles--but it was a good shakedown for the truck to ensure that everything is still up and running and working properly.  For the day we finished 20th out of 25 and finished every foot of every stage which would place me 16th on the day if the stage DNFs were viewed as true DNFs and not just a time penalty.  Regardless, its a good first step to getting back and used to driving at speed.  We'll see what's next.

Down Weekend for Offroad Motorsports on Network TV...

Well, that's not progress...

Global Rallycross has not generated any appreciable growth over the course of '14 and has actually regressed in terms of ratings over the past two events and LOORRS has continued its regular broadcasts on CBS but its ratings have stayed flat to marginally down over the past two years.

Now I'm not on the inside of the companies paying for these events to be broadcast on Network TV so in truth I really have NO IDEA whether perhaps even at the current ratings levels that their producers are happy.  It is certainly a possibility that NBC and CBS sell their airtime to Lucas and GRC at a low enough level that they can sell their advertising spots at a rate for them to turn a profit...maybe.

What I can tell you is that I've been tracking these ratings on a general basis for a number of years now, dating back to the old CORR days.  While its been great to see offroad motorsports (primarily short course) appear on network TV on a regular basis over the past few years, the ratings generated from it have not moved.  We now regularly see short course, Baja events, rallycross, stage rally, motocross, Best in the Desert and more on Network and near network (see NBCSN, CBS Sports, etc.) sources yet the broadcasts most accessible to the America public (the over the air broadcasts) have stagnated in terms of ratings/viewers.  There is a core audience here and these broadcasts are reaching this audience but they aren't bringing in a growing audience of viewers.  You can debate the reasons but the facts by now are fairly clear.

There is a lot to be said for the inconsistency and "random" nature of these broadcasts.  If you are a NASCAR fan you KNOW that pretty much every weekend there is a race (which is often EVERY weekend) you can sit down around 1PM Eastern and catch the race.  If you are a football fan (college or NFL) you KNOW that every Saturday or Sunday the games will be on during the season.  For offroad motorsports??  Well, there you can look up the schedule on any one of a dozen or more websites for the various series and see if the event is shown on a Saturday or a Sunday, early afternoon, late afternoon or if it will be another month before another broadcast is available (often the case), is it on CBS?  CBS Sports?  MavTV?  Do I get MavTV?.  This is just the nature of the beast with offroad racing at this point.  Its not NASCAR with live events taking place every weekend at the same time on the same channel and thus it has an uphill battle to to fight just in terms of getting casual viewers to watch.

For this past weekend, GRC saw a 0.3 rating on NBC which tied for the weekend's lowest rated sporting event on Network TV with the LOORRS which it faced off directly against in the same time slot over on CBS from 2-3PM Eastern.  Perhaps you could make the argument that either show's ratings would have been higher if they hadn't been facing off against one another and instead were competing for viewers against say...gymnastics or golf or the like.  Certainly I've made a case here before of combining the audiences of offroad motorsports that are shown at the same time, so I'll do so here again for the sake of positivity.  During this time period there was a combined 0.6 rating for offroad motorsports on Network TV equating to some 694,000 households and 763,000 people watching offroad racing of some kind during this period.  Now this doesn't help the advertisers who paid only to be on one broadcast or the other and got their message in front of "only" about 350,000 households and 382,000 people during this time.

The NBC broadcast of the Red Bull Hare Scramble which followed the GRC broadcast beat out both of the "car" oriented race shows with a 0.4 rating grabbing about 460,000 households and 510,000 viewers.  This holds true to another long term trend that I've noticed--whether its motocross, supercross or various Red Bull motorcycle events, they do usually out-rate the offroad "car" racing.  I would have a tendency to attribute that to the larger fan/participation rate of motorcycle racing.  While an extreme minority of people have ever driven in a SCORE, BITD, or Rally event of any kind you can show up in nearly any geographic region in the country on any weekend and find a number of motocross tracks, hare scrambles, trail rides, etc.  The sheer participation rate of offroad motorcycle riders dwarfs that of any combination of desert/shortcourse/rally drivers by what has to be many magnitudes and thus its a lot easier to find an individual who is familiar with jumping their motorcycle through the woods or over a tabletop, flipping through the channels and staying with one of these shows than it is short course, desert or rally.  That said, these motorcycle event ratings are never MASSIVELY better than these other offroad broadcasts...just marginally better...

TELECAST	DATE	NET	TIME (ET)	RATING
"World of X Games: Women of Action"	7/26	ABC	3:00-4:00pm	0.3
"ESPN Sports Saturday"	7/26	ABC	4:00-6:00pm	0.5
Lucas Oil Off Road Racing	7/26	CBS	2:00-3:00pm	0.3
PGA Tour: RBC Canadian Open: Third Round	7/26	CBS	3:00-6:00pm	0.4
Guinness Int'l Champions Cup: Manchester United-AS Roma	7/26	Fox	4:00-6:00pm	0.5
"UFC on Fox 12": Prelims	7/26	Fox	6:00-8:00pm	0.8
"UFC on Fox 12": Robbie Lawler-Matt Brown	7/26	Fox	8:00-10:00pm	1.6
Global Rallycross	7/26	NBC	2:00-3:00pm	0.3
Red Bull Hare Scramble	7/26	NBC	3:00-4:30pm	0.4
Asics World Series Of Beach Volleyball	7/26	NBC	4:30-6:00pm	0.5
"Road to the PGA Championship"	7/27	CBS	2:00-3:00pm	0.5
PGA Tour: RBC Canadian Open: Final Round	7/27	CBS	3:00-6:00pm	1.8
Tour de France review show	7/27	NBC	2:00-3:30pm	0.4
Asics World Series Of Beach Volleyball	7/27	NBC	3:30-5:00pm	0.6
Breeders' Cup Challenge Series: Haskell Invitational	7/27	NBC	5:00-6:00pm	0.8

Return of Red Bull Frozen Rush!

Remember back earlier this year when I attended and covered for OffRoad.com the Red Bull Frozen Rush event up at Mt. Snow?

Well, looks like Red Bull liked the event enough to put it on again.

This time at a bigger ski area and with EIGHT trucks racing each other rather than just one for demonstration purposes!

The 2014 version will feature both '13 Frozen Rush alum Ricky Johnson plus his Menzies Motorsports teammate Bryce Menzies (he of Baja, short course and Global Rallycross fame) and I guess six other invitees!!  Who will get the invite??  Likely other Menzies and Red Bull drivers such as Travis Pastrana (I'm guessing) who have short course truck experience.

The course will be gated (like a ski race course) and trucks will compete against one other vehicle at a time in a single elimination format.  Relocating the event to Sunday River in Maine gives the event a good deal more real estate to work with, a better chance of good snow conditions and putting it on a Friday in the middle of Sunday River's "College Week" virtually guarantees a good/rowdy crowd of target age consumers--though it does move the event a bit farther geographically.

So Ricky wasn't just blowing smoke when he said that having a full race on the snow with these trucks would be a really cool idea and Red Bull and Menzies look to make it happen.  I'm already looking to book that day off and attend!

Red Bull Frozen Rush 2014!!

More Auto Than Rally Cross...

So only about a week after returning from Rallye Saguenay my weekend schedule opened up and I was able to take my son to his first SCCA Rallycross event.  Rallycross is one of the first places I picked up the competitive motorsports bug.  Its a low risk, low reward style of an event for people to learn basic car control and other skills.

I've always viewed Rallycross as a stepping stone to learning whether or not one might be interested in moving into stage rally.  Now I'll admit, my view may not be the right one and may not be the most popular one...but viewing Rallycross as an event in and unto itself and one to stay "in" long term seems a frustrating and pointless exercise.  Driving around cones at 20 mph might be a good way to get your jollies for a weekend or two but as a recipe for much more than that its not too good.  The SCCA neutered version of Rally is not my cup of tea.

That being said, I have enjoyed participating in RallyX events in the past, both in my old Nissan Xterra and my current Nissan Frontier.  Neither vehicle is well suited to this style of racing but I always enjoy running something odd and unwanted--heck when I first started I had to contact the local group and ask permission to run the SUV and I was very frequently the only SUV in the events.  But I almost always had fun.

The Okemo RallyCross event in Rutland, VT was perhaps the least enjoyable RallyCross event I have attended.  I can see that others may have enjoyed it greatly but it just wasn't for me.  The course was the tightest I've ever seen in the 20 or so events I've run.  My truck is 91 inches wide at its largest and I would estimate that the cones were averaging some 115 or 120 inches apart.  A foot of space on each side isn't much, particularly when you place corner after corner after corner in such rapid succession that you never leave first gear.  I'm sorry, I just don't enjoy rolling around a course at minimal speeds sawing away at the wheel like a madman.  The NER SCCA Rallycross group is going through a bit of a changeover and I wonder if this has bled its way into it course design.  The course doesn't HAVE to look like the Motorweek slalom course...but that's what it ended up as.

SCCA Rallycross is always intended to keep speeds down to safe levels but when I run RallyX courses at Summit Point in WV and see what the RallyCross groups in Quebec do for their events, it appears the antiseptic, overly anal, squids of local New England Autocross have taken over and pulled all the real fun and driving out of these events--at least in this one instance.

Those who have regularly read this blog will note that this is the first time I have EVER had a bad thing to say about an event I have participated in.  I don't bitch when I wreck my vehicle or put it in a pond, I don't bitch when I finish but come in near last (or actually last) amongst those who do finish.  I don't complain about cost or difficulty, conditions or delays.  This is the first time I've ever complained because it was the first time I felt like the "fun" of the event was removed for me.  Maybe its just me, maybe the Okemo rallycross course was like all the others I've run over the years and my vehicle is just now SO unsuited for these events as to make them near worthless...Maybe...

But I've run snow/ice events on 35 inch mud tires in a 170 hp SUV with a 5" lift, bodyrolling from one slow, sliding corner to another, froze my butt off and come in near last and STILL had fun...so maybe its just me...but maybe not.

Okemo Rallycross Results...

Bryce Menzies Coming to GRC...

Saw this in a UNLV article today.  It appears as if Bryce has signed on with Travis Pastrana's racing team to run in the Global RallyCross events in '13.  Its a good fit for both as Bryce is also backed by Red Bull and has been a Dodge driver for some time as well.

It will be interesting to see how the GRC schedule fits with his short-course and desert racing schedule and if there is a conflict, which one gets dropped (I'm betting GRC).  Certainly the Menzies have the financial backing to support his effort and put him near the top of the field in terms of on site resources.  Bryce is no slouch behind the wheel either with time spent at O'Neil's Rallyschool and being declared one of the best drivers to come through that facility by its lead instructor.  It will be interesting to see what a full season (or nearly so) of time behind the wheel of the GRC Dodge Dart at a primarily an asphalt based series (if its in any way similar to the courses set up in '12) will produce for Bryce.

The other interesting part here is Bryce's interest in the Dakar.  Given that the winners (car and bike), on a combined points basis, of the Baja 500 and Reno 500 later this year will receive a free entry to the '14 Dakar for the first time, I'm betting that this is what Bryce is aiming for.  Additionally, I'm sure Red Bull would be a big fan of his entrance into the Dakar as a young, up and coming American racer.  Regardless, it should be a busy year for the Menzies crew trying to support a short course, SCORE, BITD, and now GRC efforts (with Dakar possibly thrown in for S's and giggles).  You certainly can fault them for sitting on their laurels!

UNLV Article...

NJMP Rallycross Video...

This is just a short video summarizing the last event of the NJMP Rallycross series in 2012.  After Rally America dropped out of backing the event a number of the competitors joined together to keep the events going and this is the result.  Hopefully this series will be back in 2013 with continued support from the the grassroots rally community.  The video looks great and is well put together.  Well done by all....


NJMP 2012 Fan Appreciation Day from JOHNNYPICTURES on Vimeo.