Speed and snow

At the Sno Drift Rally in Montmorency County, regular people team up to race at high speeds across treacherous terrain.

By Patrick Sullivan | Jan. 14, 2017

The passenger in a rally race might have the tougher of the two jobs. All the driver has to do, after all, is drive.

Sure, it’s challenging to keep control at 90 or 100 mph on straightaways and to lose as little speed as possible on the corners, but it’s the co-driver who takes heavy doses of Dramamine to make sure the car doesn’t fly off the road.

Being the navigator means feeding the driver constant information about the course from a binder that has every turn and crest in the trail mapped and rated. It takes a kind of stamina that’s not required in other sports.

“You’re reading for 300 miles in a car that’s bouncing all over the place. And you’re not in control of it, so your body isn’t anticipating it in the same way,” said Kate Stevens, who will co-drive with her boyfriend, Jimmy Pelizzari, at this year’s Sno Drift Rally in Montmorency County on Jan. 27 and 28. “There was a race recently where I know in the night stages, every one of the co-drivers were really, really ill because it was very turny and dark.”

SPARK PLUG OF LOVE

Pelizzari and Stevens have competed in 10 races together, and last year they finished third in their class at Sno Drift.

Their first race was the October 2014 Lake Superior Performance Rally in Houghton. Pelizzari had bought his race car, a 1988 Mazda 323 GTX, the winter before, and the person he recruited to navigate unexpectedly dropped out.

Stevens, who grew up in a car family, jumped at the chance to be co-driver, but she didn’t exactly know what she was getting into.

“The person who was supposed to co-drive with him bailed out at the last minute, and I said, ‘Well, if you can teach me to read notes in the car on the way there, I’ll do it,” she recalled. “How bad could it be?”

Reality set in as they drove into the Upper Peninsula. Stevens learned that the Houghton race has the reputation of being the most grueling of the Rally America events that take place around the country each year. She’d never sat in the Mazda. The car wasn’t even outfitted with a co-driver seat until they reached the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula. She had to learn fast.

“And off we went,” she said. “And it took basically three stages of me wanting to bury my head and cry before I finally was able to say, ‘OK, I’m finally starting to get the hang of this, and starting to get over the car sickness a little bit.’”

Stevens, a science teacher at Northport Public Schools, said she learned how to dose Dramamine. She said she also got a lot of tips from other drivers and co-drivers, and she couldn’t believe how welcoming everyone was.

A CAR IN ARKANSAS

If you watch a YouTube video of a Rally America race filmed from the cockpit of a car, you see how intense the relationship is between the driver and the co-driver. The co-driver constantly announces the next turn or the next hill and provides a numerical value of the severity of each change. Everything happens in a blur narrated with a staccato stream of numbers and letters. It isn’t one person telling another person to make a turn; it’s the co-driver yelling at the driver about the condition of the road they are going to reach literally in the next second.

What makes Sno Drift special is that it happens on snow-covered roads. Most of the Rally America races happen on dirt roads in warm weather. That means Sno Drift drivers benefit more from smart driving than from horsepower.

Pelizzari, a Traverse City native who works as a freelance event planner, got into racing while he was a student in New York City and got a job with a company that arranged drives in exotic cars. He started hanging out at the track and got hooked.

He’d grown up aware of rally racing. It was something he always thought looked fun. When he moved back to northern Michigan, he decided he needed to make a jump.

“I always wanted to go rallying,” he said. “I met some friends that wanted to do it and, we found a really cheap car.”

He found the Mazda on a rally car website. It represented a cheap entry into the world of rally racing and was sitting in a U-Haul parking lot in Fayetteville, Ark. It was too tempting to pass up.

“The price kept coming down, so during the polar vortex, I drove down in a van and picked it up and drove it back up in a day,” he said.

SO FAST AND SO SLOW

The race happens in four loops that take place over two days. Each loop consists of race segments of 20 or so miles, separated by transit segments to the next starting line. On the race portions, drivers are released every minute based on their ranking and drive their cars as fast as they can go. In transit between segments, drivers are on open public roads and have to obey traffic laws. If they go too fast and arrive at a starting line early, or they drive too slow and arrive late, they get penalized.

Another detail that makes Sno Drift interesting: The cars must be street legal. That means racers can’t use studs on their tires. They have to buy their snow tires at the store, just like everyone else.

It’s also very noisy inside these cars.

The driver and co-driver communicate over an intercom set up in their helmets. Pelizzari said his car came with an old, halfway broken intercom, and they’ve since upgraded so that they can hear each other.

“The car is totally stripped down, so there’s no sound deadening or anything. We run a catalytic converter, but otherwise there’s no muffler,” Pelizzari said.

The engines aren’t that big or loud. Most of the noise comes from the road. That makes Sno Drift relatively quiet, on account of the snow. Still, rally cars are completely stripped of almost everything that’s not in service of safety or going fast. The dashboard binnacle? Gone. Air conditioner or stereo and speakers? Forget it. The cars do feature some accessories ordinary cars don’t have, like roll cages and six-point harness belts. There are fire extinguishers and first aid kits.

Pelizzari said the roll cages on a rally car are stronger than they are on other race cars that run on tracks and are unlikely to crash into anything head-on.

“In a rally car, you’re going a hundred and you hit that tree and you come to an immediate stop,” he said. “The tree usually doesn’t move, so the cages need to be much more significant.”

ANOTHER LEVEL

Not all Sno Drift racers are as scrappy as Pelizzari and Stevens, who are their own mechanics and depend on help from friends.

Ryan Thompson, owner of Thompson Racing Fabrication of Maple City, will be the crew chief for four or five cars at this year’s Sno Drift.

His niche in the rally business is taking care of cars for owners who don’t have the time or the skills to take care of them themselves.

“They’ve got enough on their plate that they would just as soon pay me to handle that for them,” he said.

Thompson used to work in construction management, but when work slowed in 2008, he started to tinker with race cars. His business just kind of grew up around him. He was working downstate when, three years ago, he realized he could locate his business anywhere he wanted, so he moved to Leelanau County.

“People just more and more kept asking, ‘Hey can you do this? Hey, can you do that?’” he said. “I didn’t set out to build this business. It more or less built itself.”

Today, he builds roll cages and other boutique items for racers. He also services performance cars.

When he was younger, he drove in rally and drag races. Today, the 38-year-old still competes in races, but he’s not driving.

He helps some clients get their cars into race-ready condition and runs a crew of mechanics during the race weekend to keep them going. He’s got one client who keeps his car with Thompson and doesn’t touch it until race day, someone he calls an “arrive-and-drive” client.

“We deliver the car to the race, he shows up, he jumps in the car, he races for the weekend, and he goes home,” Thompson said. “He pays me to take care of everything.”

BONFIRE PUT ON ICE

This is Sno Drift’s 20th year in Montmorency County. One tradition that’s grown up over those years has been put on hold for 2017.

Saturday’s final stage has run through an area that over the years has come to be known as “Bonfire Alley.”

“Once the rally started getting bigger, (people who live on that route) would throw parties at their house,” said Alex Berger, Sno Drift spokesman. People started to build fires to keep warm, and over time there were more and more and larger and larger fires. “As you’re driving down the stage, you see bonfire after bonfire after bonfire, for miles at a time.”

It was an amazing spectacle, but the fun got out of hand.

In recent years, the fires and parties were getting too big, and some spectators were throwing snowballs, rocks and bottles at cars. Sno Drift doesn’t have enough volunteers to ensure the safety of that stretch, Berger said, so the route has been changed so that Bonfire Alley won’t happen this year.

“These drivers are driving at the best of their abilities, but one thing hitting their windshield could cause a big incident,” Berger said.

He said the viability of Bonfire Alley will be revisited again next year.

Enthusiasm is a good problem for an event like Sno Drift to have, as long as volunteers can keep spectators from throwing things at cars. While rally racing is a niche sport, Berger said it attracts 8,000 drivers, volunteers, crew and spectators to the remote county each year. 

Montmorency County Sheriff Chad Brown said the race brings a great crowd and few problems. He didn’t think it was a bad idea to take a year off Bonfire Alley, though. That segment had been getting harder and harder to patrol.

Brown was elected sheriff in November and has been with the department for a dozen years.

“That’s always our most challenging stage to police and keep safe,” he said.

He said he’s never followed auto racing and doesn’t know that much about it, but he thinks Sno Drift is great and a lot of fun.

“It’s amazing to watch, and it’s great for the county,” Brown said. “It’s an international event — we get people from literally all over the world.”

IN MEMORY OF SUBARU LOVER

Rally racing isn’t exactly safe. Crashes are common. It’s rare, but drivers and co-drivers are sometimes killed.

The most recent Rally America participant to die was Elk Rapids native Matthew Marker, who was killed in an event in Washington state.

Marker’s death inspired his friend Dylan Helferich to get more serious about rally racing.

The Williamsburg resident had a Subaru that he liked to tinker with, and Marker’s death moved Helferich into action.

“After he passed away, I decided that I should probably build my own car and do what I want to do — he always told me I could do it,” Helferich said.

Marker died in May 2011 while driving in the Olympus Rally at age 31. He loved Subarus and always dreamed of getting a Subaru sponsorship. His death prompted friends and family to try for a Guinness World Record for the largest Subaru parade in his hometown in 2012.

“Matt was probably one of the most willing-to-help people I’ve ever met or known,” Helferich said. “Racing was a big thing for him, and he decided he wanted his own team and he just built a car by himself.”

Today, Helferich is 26 and works as an auto technician at Dave’s Garage in Traverse City. He is getting ready to race in Sno Drift again this year with his co-driver, Drake Dunigan, in a 2000 Subaru Impreza.

He said rally racing is so thrilling because you hurtle through twisting trails at incredible speeds, and the only thing keeping you on the road is the word of your navigator.

“You don’t know what’s coming up. It’s not like you’ve memorized it,” he said. “It’s almost a hundred percent in their hands, once you trust them. If they give you the wrong number or the wrong letter, you could be in some big trouble.”

‘WOW, THIS IS GORGEOUS’

The race makes for an intense weekend for Stevens and Pelizzari. One that makes it hard for them to return to their day jobs.

“For four or five days, you’re just so intensely either working on the car or making sure everything’s right. Stressing out. Worrying about something or another. Needing to be somewhere at a certain time,” Pelizzari said. “And then once you’re done, it’s kind of awful.”

“Yeah, and I think that on the navigator, co-driver side, there is a tremendous amount of organization involved,” Stevens said. “From where to be when at what time with what materials. And I would say crew and driver maybe aren’t as good with the organizational skills, so it’s kind of gotten to be a joke, like the team mom, keeping the tools together and keeping the trailer organized and keeping the car organized. You know, if I leave our notebook behind somewhere, if I misplace our timecard, that’s the end of our day.”

To endeavor in such a dangerous activity in such a remote environment makes for a tight community.

“The person behind you is your first aid if you slam into a tree. So, people walk up to each other and say, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. We’re the car ahead of you. We’d like to know your names. Because you’re going to be saving us if we crash,’” Stevens said. “The community for me is what sticks, and part of that rally hangover is going back to that real life. It’s tough. You’re amped up for four or five days, and then you have to go back.”

But then again maybe the best part of the sport is that it happens on faraway trails that snake through rugged, pristine woods.

“It’s amazing. I mean, there are times when, I shouldn’t say this, but you’re driving down this road at a hundred miles an hour and you should be totally focused, but I mean, you look around, and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is gorgeous,’” Pelizzari said. “That happens with pretty much every rally.”

WHERE TO WATCH

Schedules and spectator guides that include maps of where to park and where to watch can be found at sno-drift.org. The cafeteria at the Atlanta High School will be open Friday and Saturday for food and hot drinks, said Mary Shiloff, race registrar.

On Saturday afternoon, there will be a “Super Special Run” at the Lewiston gravel pit that’s designed to offer spectators better-than-normal views of the action. Almost all of the race segment should be visible from the viewing area.

PHOTO: Jimmy Pelizzari and Kate Stevens bounce off a snow bank in their Mazda 323 GTX at the Sno Drift Rally last year. Scott Rains photo