Last weekend the Design Craft crew had the chance to work with Chris Duplessis. For those that don't know, he's a rally instructor at O'Neil Rally school as well as this year's 2WD Rally National champion. we had the pleasure of working with Chris and his co driver Kathrine Woods drive our Design Craft fab-built Scion xD in the Rally America series but more importantly, Chris and company hired the Design Craft Crew to help out with their X Games efforts. The car Chris ran is a ex-Prodrive built 2004 Subaru WRX and being a fabricator myself, it gave me the chance to analyze how they prepped cars. The car being a 2004 it was definately seasoned with races but that didn't stop me from checking out all the coolest fab parts Prodrive designed. Most of it was the small details from the power steering resevoir/coolant surge tank to the windshield washer foot rest. I feel like a dumb ass for not taking pics of these things but i was like the fat kid in the Wonka factory. All i wanted to do was touch/play and analyze but needless to say all the little fab tricks they did on the car was so well thought out.
Chris ended up not advancing in his first battle and needless to say his departure had absolutely nothing to do with driving skills but more about a lot of last minute course changes with 5 minutes to kick off. It also doesn't help that Chris was the first one to run so he was the guinea pig. I was disappoint at the result and the way things were ran from X games side and later that night i was thinking that the winning ticket would have been to have Kathrine on the radio talking him through the course. It would have been just like a normal Rally America stage, Chris listening to Kathrine yet she would have been co driving from outside the car in the stands. this was definately a learning expereince and I think this team will be the team to look out for next year as long as X games gets there track figured out a day before rather then five minutes before. Oh well, wooda, couda, shoda.
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