Sandblast rally takes place in early March every year in Cheraw, SC and although not the first event on the NASA Rallysport calendar, is the first non winter rally in the US every year. There is always a little extra excitement in the air around this event as everyone gets to shake off the cabin fever of a long cold winter and show off all their shiny new toys! Sandblast will always be special to me as I got my first rally experience at Sandblast 3 years ago and thanks to some amazing people in the rally community have been on one crazy adventure after another ever since! To that point, who am I?
Hello GotCone readers! My name is Brian Katz. I am an engineer out of Chattanooga, TN by day and amature race car driver and mechanic by night. My normal rally gig is crew for River City Rally Team. Our driver and fearless leader Michael Hooper introduced me to rally with a trip to Sandblast and since that first trip 4 years ago that ended with two broken e30’s, we have traveled all over the country, winning a NASA eastern 2WD championship in 2015, and a Rally America central region 2WD championship in 2016! Last season Hooper decided a new weapon was needed to chase national level trophies. Given his experience with Toyota products and our desire to build something unique, we decided to build the first Lexus IS350 rally car! Beverly debuted last season at Black River Stages and won the 2 wheel drive class! Rally in the 100 Acre Wood will be our first event of this season as a team and we are hard at work finishing preparing for another exciting season, join now and start playing online today!
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It was an exciting year for rally. 2017 marked the creation of a new rally sanctioning body, the American Rally Association. It also marked the return of a few events that had been absent for some time and the creation of a few new ones. More…
100 Acre Wood, American Rally Association, David Higgins, featured, LSPR, Ojibwe Forest Rally, Oregon Trail Rally, rally, Rally America, Subaru, Travis Pastrana
Another September, another SCCA Solo National Championship week and more records broken. The turn out at 2017 SCCA TireRack Solo National Championships set yet another record, topping 1300 competitors. I myself set a new record taking over 20,000 photos between the National Championship and the ProSolo Finale. Photos from nearly every heat is available in the photo gallery. I did miss heats 4 and 5 on Thursday and Friday, due to competing in STU which ran heat 5.
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Autocross, featured, ProSolo, SCCA, Solo National Championships
The inaugural American Rally Association season was an exciting one. Subaru Rally Team USA teammates David Higgins and Travis Pastrana had been waging quite the battle all season long and with just one event left, Ojibwe Forests Rally, it all came down to this. Higgins was holding on to a one victory advantage, if he and co-driver Craig Drew could hold off Pastrana and co-driver Robbie Durant and grab the victory in the forests of Minnesota they would be crowned the first ever ARA Champions. However Pastrana and Durant weren’t giving up just yet, with a victory at Ojibwe they could even up the series points and even overtake Higgins and Drew if they somehow slipped and finished worse than 2nd overall. More…
ARA, David Higgins, featured, Ojibwe, rally, Subaru, Travis Pastrana
The Oregon Trail Rally never fails to disappoint with it’s amazing stages and the backdrops to those stages. It’d been 3 years since the last time I had made the journey out for the event and I had been itching to go back, so I decided there’s no time like the present. And boy, it did not disappoint.
David Higgins and Craig Drew had won the event 6 years in a row and would be looking to keep their streak in tact. Challenging them would teammates Travis Pastrana and Robbie Durant, Jeff Seehorn and Karen Jankowski in their brand new Subaru and Barry McKenna and Leon Jordan in a WRC prepared Ford Fiesta. Little did Higgins and Drew know what sort of battle they were in for when their car started to break down. Even after an extensive auto repair, there were a few minor aspects left unfixed that led to the breakdown.
ARA, David Higgins, featured, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trail Rally, rally, Subaru, Travis Pastrana
The 2017 U.S. rally season had been shaping up to be an interesting one with the introduction of the ARA (American Rally Association) and with it the division of events and the splitting of ties between Rally America and the factory Subaru Rally Team. Many of the old Rally America events decided to jump over to the new sanctioning body, but they did retain the first two events on the schedule Sno*Drift and Rally in the 100 Acre Wood, as well as adding some new events that should be exciting. More…
100 Acre Wood, featured, Ford, Mitsubishi, rally, Rally America, Subaru, Toyota
Some interesting news in from the world of rally in the US. Oregon Trail Rally organizers just announced they will be jumping to the newly formed American Rally Association (ARA) for next year’s event. Meanwhile the organizers at Rally in the 100 Acre Wood announced that the event will be the second in the Rally America Championship series and will be held on March 17-18 in 2017. I’m guessing that means Sno*Drift is on board with the Rally America Championship series and will remain the first event of the 2017 season, though no official announcement has been made.
100 Acre Wood, American Rally Association, featured, Ojibwe Forest Rally, Oregon Trail Rally, rally, Rally America
2016 marked a new record for number of entries into the SCCA Tire Rack Solo National Championships, it also was a new record for the number of photos I took! Between the one day of the ProSolo Finale I shot and all four days of Solo Nationals competition I almost topped the 20,000 photo mark. There are almost 12,000 photos in the Solo Nationals gallery and over 4,000 in the ProSolo Finale gallery. The Nationals gallery is separated by classes, but I got a little lazy and the ProSolo gallery is just one big mass of photos.
If you have trouble finding a photo of your car please shoot me an email at photo@gotcone.com, there should be photos of nearly everyone outside of heat 5 from Tuesday and Wednesday as that was the heat I was running in STU.
2016 SCCA Tire Rack Solo National Championship Photo Gallery
Autocross, featured, photos, SCCA, Solo National Championships
My first trip to Minnesota and the Ojibwe Forest Rally was filled with a little bit of everything, except snow for once. It is a challenging rally to cover with narrow fast roads and not a lot of safe places to be on stage, but there is some beauty to capture. Lakes and trees line the roads making for a perfect backdrop as cars rip full speed down them. It was nearly perfect, except for that freak hail storm that delayed the start of stage 10 and caused me to run for cover and the mosquitos, millions of them, everywhere.
David Higgins, featured, Ojibwe, rally, Rally America, SRTUSA, Subaru
