This last April, the Up Two Mountains rally team, debuted a new WRX and a new team in the California Rally Championship at the Desert Storm Rally. The car is tuned with a COBB Tuning AccessPORT. The guys made a great showing at their first event and even scored some coverage on “The Smoking Tire” on youtube. Here is their recap from their first event. You can follow their further exploits on their blog.

Desert Storm was a great rally that took a full five days of towing out to Blythe, CA…then some car work, recce, racing, and towing back to San Francisco. The first issue came about when we were having some tuning issues a week before. It turns the car had a loose coil pack connection (easily fixed) but also an exhaust leak from our GrimmSpeed uppipe. True to their high levels of customer service, GrimmSpeed expedited a replacement part to arrive just before I hit the road for Blythe (Wednesday night).

Picking up my Crew Chief, Zach Dickenson in California City, we arrived at Blythe at 4pm on Thursday which gave us enough time to swap out the uppipe and still pass tech that night.

The following Friday was a full day of recce with Tom Morningstar (co-driver) and Matt Farah, both from TheSmokingTire.com. And here is their newest video:

The Smoking Tire

Racing started early Saturday morning, and with some small technical difficulties on the organizers part, stage one (a long fast stage) was canceled and we quickly moved on to stage two. Tom and I started out slow as we got to know each other over the intercom and slowly picked up speed throughout the day. Unfortunately a small off put us up and over a berm on the last stage and that threw us out of contention for day 1.

Day two started with a bang as we actually won the first two stages, which were quick with some VERY rough spots. This was a nice surprise as we were in the pack leading professional driver Lauchlin O’Sullivan and fellow regional competitor Keith Jackson. The lead was short lived as they caught up on the third stage, both stages are longer and much faster, and their experience at those speeds made the difference.