Having closed more than half the distance to his car, he hears the telltale thud of someone else having to give that damn door a solid kick to get it to pop free. Kayside steps into the 100* afternoon and proceeds to light a cigarette. The look on his face reveals that he shares the general disgust for everything, especially that fucking door. Drakes decides to fire up a smoke as well and, as he does so, flatly states, “Fuck that door.” Kayside eagerly replies, “Yeah. Fucking door.”

“I don’t know about you, man, but I didn’t sell shit today.”

“Me either. You know Racer’s Edge did over $80K last month?”

Drakes did not know that Racer’s Edge had moved $80K in product the month before, but despite the obvious fact that neither of them could do anything to change the past, this fact was added to the laundry list of small annoyances which were continuing to distract from what was an otherwise pleasant evening. The two discussed the company’s AP issues and questioned the decision to make the poorest, most ignorant and derelict of wanna be performance car enthusiasts the target demographic. Drakes thought about the hood rat he spoke with earlier in the day who, upon learning there was no aftermarket turbo kit available for his ’87 Mercedes, went right into asking for more information about their “cheapest body kit” for the car, and how that was another product that didn’t exist while Kayside related how a former colleague at Edge had called to tell him all about the custom exhaust system they had installed on a new Aston Martin earlier that week. Kayside said it was “Fucking gangster.” Gangster indeed. Kayside said Rianne was running a little late to pick him up, so he was going back in.

“Have a good evening, man.”

“Thanks. You too.”

Drakes walked back over to the old, black Mitsubishi Galant he’d finally got back on the road just a month prior, after the head gasket failed in spectacular fashion in Phoenix rush hour traffic at the beginning of the summer. The driver’s seat was a weathered testament to the poor maintenance of leather seating surfaces. Dry, taut and splitting in several places, the seat was still decently comfortable, but Drakes considered them eyesores on an otherwise promising project of a car. With a turn of the key in the ignition, the seventeen year old Mitsubishi awoke and the sound thereof reminded Drakes of how all the effort invested over the summer, the hours spent dripping with sweat in a tiny apartment complex garage, were worth it. The engine sounded brilliant and a smirk appeared upon his face. As driver and Mitsubishi pulled into traffic, it seemed Drakes was becoming more aware of those little things.

Minutes later, the wind through the cabin slowed to the gentlest of breezes as the car took its place in line at a red light. A good opportunity to light up another cigarette without having to worry about piloting thirty-five hundred pounds of car down the road whilst focusing on a lighter inches from the face. Depending on traffic, this could be the first of four or five smokes on the way home. Drakes had barely exhaled that first drag up and out the moon roof when the light turned green. The car at the front of the line was off and everyone was starting to ease off the brakes and prepare to pull away from the light when there was a loud noise on the roof of the Mitsubishi.

“Hey buddy! Buddy!”

Drakes looked up to see a street person peering into the car though the fully opened moon roof. He was partially blocking out the sun and his features were hard to make out, but he had a ball cap on and bushy, long hair flowing all around his obscured face.

“Hey buddy! I’m not gonna lie to ya. I need a beer. Hook a brother up with some change for a beer?”

The car that had been a foot off the front bumper of the Mitsubishi was now almost halfway down the block and there were countless cars in line to the rear, certainly growing impatient at not being able to get through the intersection due to this casual introduction. Not one to impede the flow of traffic, Drakes remembered he had a dollar bill folded up in the ash tray (which never actually had any ashes in it for ecologically irresponsible reasons), snatched it up and quickly handed it off to the scruffy pedestrian.

“Hey thanks, man! God bless you man.”

Drakes dismissed the act of generosity and began to pull away.

“Watch out for that guy in the white van back there, man. I think he’s following you.”

In an instant, the new “buddy” who just wanted a drink jumped between moving cars to the side of the road and disappeared through some bushes on the side of the road, leaving Drakes checking his mirrors almost frantically for some sort of confirmation one way or the other as he concerned himself with getting out of the way of all the other commuters who had been delayed by his brief conversation. Was there even a white van back there somewhere? Where did that panhandling booze hound run off too? Didn’t matter, shifting into second gear and applying a generous amount of throttle would see to it that he put it all behind him.

Settling back down into the normal pace of a commuter who isn’t staring blankly at the tail lights ahead of him, or diverting the majority of his attention to the cell phone pressed to the side of his stupid face, Drakes took a deep breath and tried to relax. Drakes’ philosophy on commuting: There is only so much you can do to reduce your time in traffic. Being smooth behind the wheel is the best thing you can do. The precious seconds saved by constantly carving through multiple lanes and trying to beat red lights simply aren’t worth the added stress, so the trick is to figure out which lanes tend to move the fastest along the various sections of the route and make sure you’re in those lanes when the time is right. If you can pull this off, you’ll have a much less agonizing drive.

While making that first left turn into the middle lane of eastbound traffic, Drakes glanced up at the rearview mirror and noticed there was actually a white van about a block back.

Odds are that you’ve already heard about Twitter. They’re calling it “micro-blogging,” but all that means is, you’re sharing your thoughts, activities, and such 140 characters at a time. This might seem stupid at first, especially if you tend to be a wordy as I do, but the brilliance of this forced brevity is that it levels the playing field between the professionals and amateurs alike. Seriously. It’s pretty hard to one-up someone in 140 characters, short of spelling or grammar, but even with the smallish amount of space, people still manage to use proper spelling.

There’s no need to bookmark another website that you have to go out and update or participate at, either. Sure, it’s a good idea to bookmark your profile page so you can get back to it and update it from time to time, but there are brilliantly unobtrusive plugins for Firefox, 3rd party apps for your desktop, and you can even install a Twitter client on your Blackberry. If you have time for text messaging, then you have time to promote your rally program or event via Twitter.

So now that you know what Twitter is and how simple it is to use, how can you use Twitter to promote rally? One word: Activity. If you create a Twitter account, make a point of posting updates. If you’re going to use Twitter to promote your rally team or event, or just want to keep in touch with other people who are excited about rally, talk about rally stuff. Find other people on Twitter who are interested in rally and follow them. Most of us check out the profiles of people who decide to follow us. If I see someone who’s into rally follow me, I’m going to follow them.

Here’s just a few ideas for things that you can “tweet” that will drive rally conversation on the web:

• Link to the recent video(s) you’ve posted on YouTube
• Link to the post on your website about how you did at the event
• The picture you just took with your phone of something rally-related
• The picture you just took from inside the car at the start of the stage
• Your frustration at just how much effort it’s taking to get that mangled control arm free from the car. I mean, how on Earth did it get that munched? It should just pop right out, but noooooo, it has to fight you all the way and…

Notice the potential for sharing what is going on right now. Here is the beauty of how it can all come together for you (and our beloved sport). As you continue to post your updates over time, other people will find you. You grow a following. When they reply to you, the people who are following them will see what they’ve said to you. Depending on what’s being said between you two, other people that follow them might be inclined to check out your profile. Likewise, if you see someone who you follow say something interesting to someone else, you can see who they said it to and check out that person. It goes on and on.

At first glance, Twitter might sound like the next big craze, the next MySpace or Facebook and, in effect, it is, but despite what you might think about those communities or social media in general, Twitter is simple, effective PR for your rally team or event. The potential for viral marketing through Twitter is unmatched. Good content from people who wish to communicate with others about things will always rise to the top. Treat your Twitter account like a one-way broadcast and nothing will come of it, but if you want to meet other people who are interested in rally cars, building rally cars, working on rally cars, organizing rally events, or just being around fast cars, Twitter is a great way to meet new people and talk about ideas.

This upgrade brings improved functionality and features to the site, so I’m glad I finally got it to work.  Next on my agenda is to migrate a little content over to TAG and develop the focus for this site as we move forward into the future.

That’s a fine idea, but this would mean I’d be looking at picking up another domain and building another WP site (not that building a WP site isn’t a lot of fun). It would mean even more work for me and, with two jobs and three cars these days, I’m not exactly rolling in the free time to devote to new projects. Hell. I’m lucky if I’m not too tired to sleep most nights!

I ended up wandering about Home Depot all weekend, helping customers find what they needed, all the while wondering about this new idea. You see, I’ve had another domain, tarmac-and-gravel.com, for more than six months now. It was a project that sort of ended up sidelined and the website has just been hanging out there in limbo. So here I am, with two Galant VR4s; one that I intended to keep clean and daily drive (tarmac) and another that I intend to get dirty and use for my rally car (gravel). Seems like a good match to me, don’t you think?

The hard part is realizing all the effort that’s gone into growing DR1665.com has been based on the Galant(s). I know I’ll be adding fresh content to both sites and that it will often be related in some way, but there’s that feeling of worry that maybe this could be a mistake. Then again, maybe that’s just my feeling anxious to get things in order so that I can devote more time to writing (and I’m going to be quitting the second job before Christmas in order to have the time to do so)!

So Greg, this is all your fault. The Galants are moving to TAG and DR1665 is going to start working on a new focus for this site. I hope your happy. (Just as soon as I get WP up and running how I want it on TAG, I’ll begin migrating content.) If anyone else who’s been checking this site for the last couple years has any thoughts or ideas, I’d love to hear ‘em.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other things to discuss on the site. There’s 195, the “rally car,” and after recently clearing out the stable, if you will, 464 has come into the fold to provide daily driver duty. (I’ve been so impressed by 195 that I felt it would be easier to risk bending it on a rally stage some day in the future if I knew I would still have a nice Galant VR4 to enjoy on a daily basis.) We’ve also got Vanessa’s Amigo, which also thoroughly impresses me every time I drive it. There’s also “the fort,” which is what I call my garage. Some would call it a man cave (and considering its current state, it’s more cave-like than anything else), others might talk about “the lab,” but I like to talk about going back to “the fort.” All told, there’s a number of semi-related subjects that I could be writing about on the site.

The trick is keeping the focus in mind and always trying to tie things in accordingly. If I stick strictly to progress on the rally car, content is going to be slow coming and where’s the fun in that? So I’m decided that I’m going to try to expand things a bit and stretch the limits of focus for a while. (At least until I get that fat raise or otherwise fall face-first into a suitcase full of discretionary goodness.)

We’re going to start this new trend with another plug for Twitter. Do you use it? If not, why not? I was hesitant to adopt this new application at first, but thanks to some plain talk from Dennis Stevenson, who writes about computer and social sciences on Toolbox.com, I finally gave it a shot. I’ve been a Tweep (or Twit, depending on who you’re talking to) for a couple months and it’s been a highly rewarding experience so far. I’ve been exposed to new ideas and websites and met a lot of cool people. Everyone could use a good personal network to keep them in the loop or lend a hand when they need it. Keyboard rallyists are no exception!

The people I follow on Twitter are always talking about new things. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), ditching email at work, blogging resources and more. I’ve even been able to talk to some of the people responsible for one of my favorite television shows, Metalocalypse, through Twitter. I’m in the loop on cool new animation projects like “The Hidden Life of the Burrowing Owl” and I can keep up with what my buddies Greg and Dino are up to. There’s always something just waiting to be discovered and I love it. When I get the time, I’m going to figure out how to implement one of those WordPress plug-ins to have my tweets show up on this site as well. I think it’s just that interesting.

So, the main goal of this website is to share my journey towards the dream of racing my own rally car, but the title of the site isn’t “DR1665rallywebsite.com,” it’s just DR1665.com. That’s me. DR1665. So if I come across something that I think is useful to me as a budding rallyista in some way, I’m going to share it here. There is more to realizing your rally dream than just building the car. You’ve got to build your network and you’ve got to find ways to keep your sanity when you’re saving up those precious funds to take the next steps with the rally program. If you’ve got any questions for me about rally or any of this, please feel free to ask. I love helping out.