Crazy Leo: Maybe Not Crazy After All

Crazy Leo: Maybe Not Crazy After All

14 November 2010 in Rally 4 Comments

You strapped in? This is all going to be over before you know it. Crazy Leo Urlichich is taking rally to the next stage. We got a hold of Leo as he was ordering lunch Friday afternoon for a quick chat about how he’s trying to make a difference in the local community.   At press time, there are two auctions running on Ebay.ca for rides in Leo’s fully prepared Subaru STI rally car at Rally of the Tall Pines next weekend in Bancroft, Ontario, Canada. Proceeds from these auctions are going to the Bancroft Sled Dog Races. Why sled dog racing, you ask? Leo wants to give something back to the local community and help promote a healthy, active lifestyle for kids. Time Travel Last year, Leo was at his favorite rally in the world, Rallye Baie-Des-Chaleurs for the third time, when he found himself sharing a stage he calls “Time Warp Tunnel” with his team in the recce car. Perhaps the longest straight section of rally stage road in North America, tall pine trees line a section of road with no corners for 1.8km (1.1mi). Initially, the section is wide and clear, but the trees continually move in closer, until they close in overhead, turning the road into something of a tunnel. Add high powered rally headlamps to the mix in the night and you might begin to understand why Leo calls this one of the craziest experiences of his life. When a guy they call “Crazy Leo” tells you something is “the craziest,” it kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Do you have what it takes to handle something like that? What if we forgot to mention one of the biggest jumps in the Canadian Rally Championship is located along this road? Still up for it? Leo tells us this section of road has even shaken the steely nerves of Chrissy Beavis when run in the dark. This experience so excited the team at BDC, they decided to look into offering these rides at Rally of the Tall Pines. A truly grand prize. When we spoke with Leo, both auctions were at or near $400 bids. This might seem like a decent bit of coin to spend on a few minutes in a rally car, but it pales in the costs associated with building a car to this level of performance,  and we can all but guarantee you’re not going to experience anything like this anywhere else. Leo’s team will be filming the entire event and winners will receive copies of in-car footage, both of what they saw from the co-driver seat (if they weren’t crying the whole time) as well as their expressions from the silly seat. Making a difference (and more of the same) When you volunteer to work at a rally, you make motorsport possible. When you volunteer to help a rally do good in its hometown, you make a difference. Leo tells us he will be doing more of this in the future, so you’ll want to keep an eye on his website to details, but for right now, check out Auction #1 and Auction #2 on Ebay and make it happen. The winners will be announced on CrazyLeo.net on this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. These folks will be going on the ride of their lives Friday at Rally of the Tall Pines and directly benefitting the local community. We’ll be getting in touch with Leo afterward to see how things turned out. This idea is so crazy it just might work. Lucky for us, we’ve got the right man for the job.

In the glovebox:

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