1. I stand by my previous comments regarding rally car prep. If you want to get into rally, you ***DO NOT*** need an Evo or WRX and $30K in performance parts. All you need is a reliable shitbox you won’t lose any sleep over when you stuff it.

You need a solid engine and transmission.
You need comprehensive safety equipment to save your ass.
You need to comply with the rules for the sanctioning body running your series.

You can buy a turn-key rally car for $5000-$10,000, often with a metric shitton of spares. Or you can build your own car for under $10k including the price of the car. Again, it’s all a matter of knowing your goals. Reliability, room to grow (more power), carrying speed through the stages, driving clean, and maintaining the car are your biggest priorities.

2. Bill Bacon is a helluva guy. He’s a firefighter. He has a second job. His parents are helping him out. He’s leveraged himself six ways from Sunday to make this all possible. Here’s a guy who has busted his ass for years to make his rally dream a reality, and he did it. He ran with the big dogs, beat some of them, and showed the world that you don’t have to be a corporate shill with sponsorships stuck to your shoes like truckstop toilet paper to be a contender.

As a would-be Mitsubishi rallyista, I consider Bill something of a hero. Where other people might have grand plans for what they would do if they had major sponsorship (usually consisting of ordering the most expensive of everything from the ad in the latest issue of Super Street), Bill doubled down, rolled up his sleeves, rallied the troops, the neighbors, and the family to do it himself. On the stages, Bill was not only a force to be reckoned with, but also a first rate sportsman, even going so far as to help the guy who ended up beating him in the end game stay in the game.

I hope there will come a time when I have this level of dedication myself and wish BMS the absolute best in whatever endeavors they decide to pursue in 2011. My only disappointment with BMS is that they didn’t make it to Prescott this year.

As someone who doesn’t have an $80,000 budget to build an open class car over the summer (which is probably a full 99% of the people who currently rally or want to get into rally), I’d offer that you only mentioned 2 items here which you actually *need* as part of your prep.

1. If you are going to build an all wheel drive turbocharged car, you’re going to be saddled with the buzzkill turbine inlet restrictor. 34mm for open class, 32mm for PGT. The powers that be seem to think that FWD/RWD cars can’t possibly go fast enough to get into trouble, so there are no restrictions on turbochargers for those cars.

2. The roll cage is pretty much the only thing you NEED in order to go rally mentioned in this article. Build it per the more strict Rally Amerika rulebook and rest assured that you’ll be legal for NASA competition as well.

You don’t need a $7000 dogbox transmission. You need a healthy trans with a good clutch.
You don’t need $5000 worth of uber-rare Ralliart LSDs. LSDs are nice, but not required.
You don’t need carbon kevlar skidplates. Heavy duty plastics or aluminum sheeting is more common.
You don’t need a $10,000 Ohilins suspension set up. You can do suspension for under $3000 easily.
And you *damn* sure don’t need to buy a brand new, $30,000 Evo or WRX to rally today.

That’s the biggest misconception about rally today. People think you need to buy a brand new Evo or WRX and drop fifty grand into it if you want to rally. Tell that to the guys with the beat-ass, 20 year old Volkswagens who give the deep pockets open class teams a run for their money from Group 2. Tell that to the couple with the 130hp, bone stock Dodge Neon who took Production Stock class three years in a row. Tell that to the guys in the old Ford Ranger pickup trucks, the late-80s Camaros, and the probably tens of thousands of Swedes running old Volvos and Saabs.

Plain and simple, what you really NEED when it comes to rally is a clear-cut understanding of your goals. If you’ve paid your dues, busted your ass, and find yourself sitting flush with funds to go balls deep on a no-expenses-spared build like this so you can spend the year towing the car, spares, tools, and crew all over the country to seriously campaign for open class national glory, then this is a damn good way to do it.

But if you want to get into rally beyond watching it on Discovery HD or jerking off to some video game, then you need to find a solid platform on the cheap. You need to consult the rules to make sure you get the bare minimum safety requirements in the car for a log book – cage, seats, harnesses. You need to budget to get the bare minimum safety equipment for your own ass – suit, helmet, HANS (rent it). You need to do the bare minimums to make sure you finish that first rally, even if you come in dead last – skid plates, brakes, tires. And you need to make sure you’ve got the $2000 or so it’s going to take to enter that first event, get the car to MTC, and home.

Always love a bit of rally coverage, but just be careful with the wording. This looks like one hell of a nice build and I don’t begrudge anyone who has the means to live the dream like this, but to suggest that this is what rally is all about is doing a great disservice to the many, many people out there who will run an entire season (including prepping a car) for what these guys have spent in just this article.

Looking forward to the next installment.