2010 KVSP

All the pics:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/Biking/2010-Kittatinny

Good showing and MTBNJ rider Maurice KILLED it out there, taking 1st place in pro by a HUGE gap.

All the pics:

http://gtluke.smugmug.com/Biking/2010-LewisMorrisChallenge

http://gtluke.smugmug.com/Biking/2010-Tymor

Did some more live blogging with the rest of the guys here: http://www.mtbnj.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17121

Good showing today for the season opener at the Waywayanda Spring Cleaning.

I also did some live blogging of the event on MTBNJ, we are going to sort out some details to expand on this so hopefully next race will be even better. http://www.mtbnj.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16771

Finally got a great one of Utah to use for the story

All the pics are here:

http://gtluke.smugmug.com/Biking/2010-Waywayanda-H2H-1

http://gtluke.smugmug.com/Biking/2010-Singlespeed-a-polooza

One again we are back in beautiful Sullivan County NY for another Rally New York event. The spring rally is a completely tarmac event held on two familiar stages and one new stage.

The weekend started for Dave and I on Friday morning with the long trek up to Walton to pick up our press passes. We met up for the weekend at the Days Inn Motel in Liberty NY so we could carpool from there. It was a pleasant and scenic drive except for my Hyundeath had a really bad misfire from bad plug wires, and of course I waited for the last minute to order them so they didn’t come in on time. After reaching Walton picking up our passes we decided to get the breakfast offered at the restaurant who was hosting the Rally HQ (West 38 Restaurant, Walton, NY). My western omelet was awesome and Dave enjoyed his eggs. We had a few hours to kill so we drove back to Liberty and checked into our room. It was very kind of the motel to let us check in about 4 hours early. Dave took a nap, I made fun of Dave snoring.
We then headed over to the Parc Expose at the Sullivan County Government Center, in Monticello to see all the contestants in prime form.

All of the pictures:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-Spring-Rally-NY/Expose/11881882_hjwtR

Highlights:
Bill from Broken Motorsports

Donnelly

RobEVO

Another Donnelly

After the expose Dave and I headed over to our first spot. This was a unique rally for the RallyAddict team as it was just Dave and I attending. At every other rally we have company who isn’t equipped with a press pass so we always have chosen the spectator areas as the start to our shooting locations. This time we headed right to a no-spectator zone at the corner of Chalet and Thomsonville Road and started snapping pictures. We arrived to catch the 3rd stage.

All the pics:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-Spring-Rally-NY/SS3-Concord-Pond/11882643_bbtCK

Highlights:

Erika on 3 wheels

3 series screaming

Mazda love

SS4 was the same stage in the opposite direction
All the pics:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-Spring-Rally-NY/SS4/11884017_9Kpy9

Highlights:

oops!

After this passing of the cars, light was getting dim so we decided to check out the official spectator spot in the amphitheater like setting of the Concord Resort golf course. Strange to see the old Concord Resort completely torn down into a pile which is slowly being removed. The golf course gives some pretty wild views of the rally cars, very interesting. We mainly just enjoyed the rally for this stage and left the cameras alone. Dave did manage to snap a few though:

That was it for the night for us, we headed over to the Liberty Diner by our hotel and grabbed some food. I wish we had made a different choice on locations, but any food is great after a day of rally. We turned in for the night and decided to skip the first stages in the morning since there was a 4 hour gap between pairs of passes, we’d just catch the 2nd pair at noon instead of 7am.

I woke up Dave and made him accompany me to the continental breakfast at our hotel. I had 2 bagels, a bowl of cereal, a jellied English muffin, a pastry, 3 cups of tea, 3 cups of orange juice and a cup of apple juice. Dave had a cup of Tea, I think there is something wrong with him.
After that we hung out for a bit and headed over to the stage. This stage was way back up in Walton NY, John Meredith. We chose the no-spectator area again at the corner of Dunk Hill Spur and Palmer Hill Rd. It’s an almost 180deg turn with a huge elevation change, the Evo’s came through at a staggering pace with some fantastic skill behind the wheel.

All the pics from SS11:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-Spring-Rally-NY/SS11/11885036_XDVfJ

Here’s my view:

And here’s Dave’s view from on the top of the hill:

McCormack coming in a little injured looking, but not injured performing

Billy coming through at breakneck speed

SS12 was the same passing
All the pics:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-Spring-Rally-NY/SS12/11886266_W74ue

Honda doing a sweet burnout

After this stage Dave and I agreed not to wait another 4 hours for the cars to come again. We should have timed ourselves a little better and used this break to go get lunch in Walton and then came back again. But we had our fill of rally and had a great time. It wasn’t pouring rain the entire time which was a break from the usually Rally NY events. Just some snow flurries on Stages 11 and 12.

Dave and I were trying to figure out if any cars had dropped out and we knew at least 1 focus had, but it’s still fantastic how many cars were still in it after stage 12, good work guys! On the way home, about 100 miles from the rally I spotted the missing Focus on rt280, about 1 mile from my house. Crazy.

Here’s a collection of all the pictures from that day:
Link to my album

Any of you mountain bikers who stumbled across my site here might want to check out my race photos from last season at:
www.notights.com
There are some fun Critical Mass Morristown pictures in there as well

And My favorite:

This would be the first time I went snowboarding since my motorcycle wreck in 05. I have a bunch of blown out discs in my back and I’ve always been really afraid of the compression that comes with snowboarding or skiing. But, I decided to give it a try anyway.
Tim, myself, and my wife Maria went up the night before so we could take our time. It would be the first time my wife did any kind of winter sports.
Here’s all of us on the Skii lift:

We also pigged out at the continental breakfast, or at least I did.

So we get up to the mountain and because of some screwed up way the place is laid out you have to take a truck ride to the ticket booth. No problem though. We got our tickets after waiting for the lady in front of me to pay with food stamps or something, it took her an honest 10 minutes to complete her transaction for her and her 900 children.

By this time we had met up with Utah and Eileen who arrived that morning. I abandoned my wife to ski school and we started our day.
Here’s Eileen enjoying the snow.

And Utah and Eileen as we wait for rusty Tim to remember how to snowboard.

Here’s me and Ei trying to figure out how to take a picture of all of us on the lift.

Then Tim figured it out

And Tim trying his best not to get pissed off at the snow.

Utah decided he could skii and operate the camera at the same time, I figured out that I really couldn’t on the snowboard, I have to use my arms too much because I suck.
As you can see in this video as Eileen looks totally natural and graceful and I look like I’m in some kind of perpetual fall.

2010/02/14 Snowboarding from gtluke on Vimeo.

We then went and found my wife who had been successfully navigating the bunny hill by herself and having a good time, and we took a few more runs and our lift ticket’s were done at 4:30.

I had a really good time snowboarding, but on the very last run i felt a really sharp pain in my back. I had felt a little pain while sitting on the lift but I was ignoring it. I had 2 Motrin in me from the morning and I guess they were wearing off. While walking back to the car I experienced some of the worst pain in my life. I couldn’t even walk, it was intense shooting pain right in my spine. UGH. My wife carried my stuff and I eventually made it to the car. The whole ride home I had back spasms every few minutes. Once we got home we decided to go back out and get dinner as a group again. Tim didn’t want to come, I think he missed his wife too much
During dinner and after my back continued to spasm like crazy. I really thought I was going to have to go to the hospital or something for real pain killers. I had by then taken another 5 Motrin in the last few hours and it wasn’t helping at all. When I got home I used my heating pad to calm down my back, my normal 15 minutes on, 15 off. Eventually my back unclamped from it’s incredibly tense position and I was able to stretch and crack my back. By the next day I was completely fine. I took it easy anyway and didn’t do anything. Now today (Monday) I feel like nothing ever happened. So strange, usually when I have back spasms that mean’s I’m stuck in bed for weeks. hmf.
Maybe I’ll have to get a huge heating stick on thing to wear on my back next time. Something to keep my back from tensing up.
Now I want to go snowboarding again!

All the pictures: http://gtluke.smugmug.com/RallyAddict/2010-WinterRallyNY

The 2010 Winter Rally New York was RallyNewYork’s first winter rally event. Though in traditional Upstate New York fashion we have seen snow (flurries) on stages before this was a full on ice race.  I was really excited this whole month after we got quite a few days of snow, but it let up a few weeks before the event. Luckily it never really warmed up too much upstate and the roads held all their snow and ice, but mostly ice. The roads were an honest 3-4″ of solid ice. The speeds these guys were traveling was purely astonishing.

I arrived around noon on Saturday, as this event was untraditionally set up as a Saturday-Sunday event instead of Friday-Saturday. I stopped by the remote rally HQ at the 10-Mile Scout Camp and picked up my media pass for the weekend and got to check out the cars on display and the ceremonial start. I stayed for the first few cars and left to see SS1, but when I arrived at the entrance to the Camp Kernochan spectator area I was turned away because the parking lot was full. I can usually use my media pass to gain extra access, to that road or to traditionally off limits evacuation roads but I almost always choose not to. I try to participate in rally events like a standard spectator, but I use my media pass to get unobstructed angles for better pictures. Once in a while I’ll take a walk to a better turn or just a different turn if the stage is a repeat. So, with that in mind I headed over to the alternative spectator area at Camp Aquehonga. I’ve been to both spots before in previous rallies and  I knew that Kernochan wasa  better spot, and the cars would pass at EVERY pass instead of every other pass like at Aquehong so I was a bit disappointed.  But I arrived at Aquehonga, informed some other spectators about the full lot at Kernochan who were interested in going there. Here’s an overall map of the rally so you know what I’m talking about: mapoverallnywr2010

So, I did choose to take a walk from the spectator area since it was a complete straight away. I knew there was a beautiful forested area down the hill from the spectator spot and walked down there to find that it just didn’t work well at all in the winter. I headed back up the hill and found a little clearing after a long Right-5 where I could set up. One of the really challenging things about the winter rally is actually finding a safe place to take pictures from. The snow really makes the safe spots few and far between, as the footing is terrible and the cars have a fraction of the normal traction. I found a nice cluster of trees just of the road that I could shoot through.  The only thing worse than getting hit by a flying rally car is being yelled at by the rally organizer Ivan for being unsafe, so safety first!

Here’s my favorite pictures from that spot, SS2:

My favorite from the weekend:

The Mitsubishi showing was pretty incredible, and thumbs up to bringing an E30-M3 to a snow rally!

After that stage it would be a while until the next passing of cars which is SS4 so I took a walk. I found a stunning pine swamp with a fallen tree across the road, but high enough that it wasn’t cut down for the rally. It was fantastic.

Unfortunately I just couldn’t get that spot to work for me. The branches made it really hard to focus on the cars coming, the sun was just about down and I just couldn’t get my act together. I did have a great time and got at least one good shot of the GreaseCar.

After this passing I packed up my stuff and walked back to my car. I had no company with me for this rally so I didn’t bother getting a hotel room and drove home, it’s about 2 hours each way. My Wife’s grad school semester started this week and she had a lot of work to do. My friends have no excuse other than being afraid of the cold… yawn…

I woke up at the glorious hour of 5am and jumped back in my car and headed north. I was one of the first people in the Kernochan spectator lot, I took my time and put on about 900 layers of clothes and packed some chemical foot warmers. For the first passing, SS7 I chose the same spot I used during 2009 Fall Rallysprint which was basically inside a giant pine tree up on a hill on the outside of the turn. I got some good shots from there and got a chance to talk to Neil McDaid aka Lensman. He gave me some pointers on shooting rally cars in the suck when the cars have their headlights on, one of the situations I have a lot of trouble with. Here’s what I got from SS7

A little off course

Best turn of the weekend

After that passing the 3 way intersection seen in the background of the pictures is rearranged so that the cars are coming down the road where the spectators are standing, and back on the road the cars were previously turning on. Basically, the cars are coming by me again, in the same direction but totally straight, no turn. So I walked down the hill a bit to the next turn to try and get some good shots. A bunch of other media people had gathered there as well. The cars starting coming by for SS8

And then…
Broken Motorsports came in a bit hot

Result:

I actually had my helmetcam laying on the ground recording for this stage so I have some video. There will be a lot better video from the video crew that was right next to me, and there was even a camera in the tree that Broken hit! I haven’t seen the video’s online yet so here’s mine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV6dN5fDprg

Chris Meegan (from down in the comments) has an AWESOME video of the crash in HD, Check his out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDPtcpEpmGc

I kinda froze when I saw it happen, but luckily I was surrounded by a bunch of people who knew just what to do. They made sure the team was OK, and they were. They steered them off the road, waved the cars by and found the OK sign from the co-driver’s book to alert the other competitors that they were OK and there was no need to stop and assist.

After hanging out at the crash site I wandered back up the hill for SS9 which was the same format as the first pass of the day. I tried from a different angle and it really didn’t work out well. I got another good shot of the GreaseCar though. Having such a bright color orange, against black highlights, on an older car that has a lot of sharp line makes their car really easy to photograph. My camera can snap into focus on their car considerably faster than say a silver brand new Subaru that has very vague lines and little contrast.

SS10 was a repeat of SS11 and I tried to set up a little differently and get some high speed panning pictures while remaining at the spectators area. Here’s what I got:

After this stage there was an extended service and then another repeat of these 2 stage formats. I decided to call it a day and drive home. I’m pretty glad I left when I did though, as the roads were horrible. Even with 4 snow tires on my horrible hyundai I was still sliding all over the road. I saw a few accidents while driving to rt17 and after I got on, I found people flashing me and noticed that ahead the entire highway was shut down because of an accident. I jumped off the highway and took back roads ALL the way home. Took an extra hour but I kept moving so that kept me from getting frustrated with traffic. There was some seriously sketchy sections of roads where I went sliding down some hill but I managed to keep my paint off of trees.