Team Camaro Hits the Road on the 2010 Route 66 Rally!

By Robby DeGraff

RedMaro6

Team Camaro (Robby DegGraff as driver and John Jarzombek as co-driver/navigator) heads down to Joliet, Illinois for the 2010 Route 66 Rally starting line less than 24 hours! This past Saturday night, the weather was perfect to spend a few hours detailing and waxing the car we will be using for the rally: a 2001 Chevrolet Camaro. I went to work on washing, polishing and putting a few good coats of Mequiar’s wax on the bright red paint of my car. I had heard from past participants in road rallies that if your car isn’t caked in wax, and you go ahead and apply decals to it….have fun getting your car repainted (as the decals will eat the paint right off your unwaxed car!). With an old Sony boom-box playing some summertime rock in the background, I spent the next hour or so placing the necessary decals on the Camaro for the upcoming road rally.

Thanks again to both our corporate and individual sponsors: Cardomain, John “Bozo” Lunden, the DeGraff family, Hagerty Collector Car Insurance, Zenith Motorsports, CJ Pony Parts, Summit Racing Equipment, and SpeedBros. With all the decals applied on the bright red Camaro, it was time to set up some of Team Camaro’s special rally equipment. I recently read Alex Roy’s book, The Driver, (I would recommend this adrenaline rush-filled book to any car enthusiast, it was a blast to read, you will learn a ton about the world of road rallying, and a few tips you can use on the way). So after reading through The Driver, I used what inspiration I had gained from Alex Roy’s book and picked up a few tools that would help us on our more than 3,000 mile road rally adventure.

Some of the gadgets we picked up were a Uniden CB radio, Cobra radar detector, a set of emergency vehicle strobe lights, some two-way walkie talkies, a few digital cameras and camera mounts (for a dash video camera), a Tom Tom GPS navigation system, and a few other rally goodies. Unfortunately due to GM’s design of the Fbody (Firebird, Camaro, Trans Am) interior, there wasnt a whole lot of places to mount the equipment. We ended up mounting everything on the dashboard and used a bit of black duck tape to manage all the wires. Overall the Camaro’s cockpit is for sure ready for some open-road rallying. To mention, the Camaro now also looks like a giant remote controlled RC toy car, with a 2-3 foot high magnet CB antenna mounted on the upper passenger party of the hood! Why you may ask? There are very few parts on 1993-2002 GM Fbodies (Camaros, Firebirds, Trans Ams) where the body parts are pure metal and will allow a magnet to stick! Now with less than a day until we start the engine and drive down to the Chicago-land area meet up with the other teams participating in the 2010 Route 66 Rally, there is still much to get done including the packing of clothes, tools, essential car fluids, spare parts, food, and of course, the cowboy hats needed for when we cross over the Texas border on the last leg of the rally! Team Camaro is sure excited to get our kicks on the 2010 Route 66 Rally!