Monday January 09, 2006 Alan Perry's Blog
Monday January 09, 2006 Yeah, I know, I should be posting something about Firewire. I have a nice dcam1394 piece in the works, but customers might to try to use the info presented in it to do something useful, so I want to make sure that it is correct. This rally stuff, on the other hand, is less critical to get right.
So, what does it cost to run a rally?
Well, first you need to have a rally car. You can build, buy or rent one. My rally car cost me $4000, which is about as inexpensive as you can get a sorted out rally car for. The bare minimum to build and equip a rally car (if you can't weld up a roll cage yourself) is around $8k. A quick scan of Ben's Rally Classifieds shows that you can get a very fast Group 2 Golf for around $11k. You can get the car that won the Rally America national championship for around $50k. You can rent an Evo VII (with service) for a weekend for around $20k.
Please note that the rally car needs to have liability insurance because it is driven on public roads between the stages.
OK, so you have the car. Now you have to get it to the rally. You need a tow rig and trailer. Single car, open trailers are preferred because you might have to drive it up some gravel road to retrieve your broken rally car. As with the rally car, the options here vary too much to try and put a general price on it. Budget a few thousand more for this (or find a friend that you can borrow a truck and trailer from).
After you have your rally car on the trailer and the trailer attached to the truck, you have to fuel up the truck. A truck hauling a loaded trailer gets less than 10 miles per gallon. Also, if your tow rig is also your service rig, the truck needs to be driven to all of the service areas during the rally. The costs will depend on how far you have to tow to get to the rally.
You get to the rally and now you need to pay the event entry fee. Those fees run between $300 and $1200. You also need to have a competition license. Those costs are described in my previous blog.
You also need to find somewhere to stay. Rally registration and technical inspection of the rally car (called scrutineering) usually happen the day before the running of the rally. For a two-day rally, you need two nights at a motel. The Ramada Express Rally has 2 days of recce and 3 days of rally. That is 5 nights of motel for the driver, co-driver and service crew.
Service crew? Yes, you should have one or two guys to help work on the car during the service breaks while running the rally. Luckily, you usually just need to feed them and pay for their accomodations. And don't forget to stock the service rig with food and drinks for the whole gang during the rally. You don't want your co-driver wigging out on stage because he hasn't had anything to drink all day.
So, you have your rally car. You have gotten it and your co-driver and you service crew to the rally and found them a place to stay. You have gotten through rally registration and scrutineering. You are now ready to run the event.
If you keep the car on the road, the only costs that you have are wear-and-tear and consumables. The consumables in a rally car are primarily fuel and tires. In a low horsepower rally car, these costs will be low. A set of tires might last all season and a tank of regular unleaded might last the entire rally. However, in a high power, all wheel drive rally car, you could go through a 55 gallon drum of race fuel (at $6/gallon) in a weekend and a set of tires (at $600/set) in less than that. Also, as tough as rally tires are, they can get punctures and have to be replaced.
I don't even want to start getting into what the costs could be if you make a mistake and crash your car.
Is it becoming clear why I became a co-driver and why I sold my rally car ...
( Jan 09 2006, 10:00:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]
