Balazs's rally story
My obsession with rally racing started early on. I was about eleven years old when my dad introduced me to stage rally.
Since we lived apart, we only attended rallies on a handful of occasions. We were there to support his friend Ferenc Csango who at the time was racing in the Hungarian championship in a magnificent Lada 2107
My dad have done administrative work for the team, and I was just tagging along amazed by the whole scene.
Back in the days, video editing was almost exclusive to television stations and film studios. The best thing competitors could do to gain support is to make a VHS tape of them racing and send it out to potential sponsors.
I recall seeing maybe one or two independent cameraman who sold VHS tapes from the stages but with everybody in it as they run the event. On one occasion my dad took on the duties of making a reel for our friend. We were using three connected VHS decks to go trough hours of footage, trying to find our friend in it and cut a sponsor reel for him.
At the time I didn't realize the impact of that afternoon had on me.
(Image AI generated)
In my teenage years I got busy with school, than I had to start working
early on. I was only able to follow the sport on TV, I watched the WRC coverages on Euro Sport as often as I could and I played Colin McRae rally games in an Internet cafe. I worked in restaurants as a waiter but my true interest always laid in tech and automotive culture. I didn't have a car or a drivers license there so I couldn't attend rallies on my own, instead I became an expert rally gamer and a bystander to real life rally. I managed to master every rally games I could get my hands on from Sega Rally to Vrally all the way to Richard Burns Rally, but my favorite will always be the Colin McRae Rally/Dirt series.
After moving to the US at the age of 24 I lost touch with the sport for a while, the best way I could follow the sport was on ESPN or downloading videos over peer to peer networks. It wasn't until 2009 when I find out about the American rally scene and the events they held. A good friend of mine and I decided to check out the closest event to us which was the International Rally New York. By the way, this good friend of mine is Sandor Nagy, he used to work as a mechanic apprentice for Ferenc Csango the friend my dad and I were supporting in Hungary. We went to spectate our first American rally in the fall of 2009. For some reasons it came naturally to bring a camera with me and start recording.
Thanks to the ways of America, I was finally able to afford things. I was working hard as a moving foreman, than later did sales work for the same company. I was the first salesman there to start using a laptop and a portable printer to impress clients as I was doing onsite consulting. I frequently visited CompUSA for hardware, I used SUSE Linux as my main operating system and Cinerella (open source editing suite) to edit my first videos. I never forget the struggles I went trough converting my first DV tapes to digital so I can edit something together, but in the process I learned a lot and ignited my interest in the possibilities of the internet, video editing, and emerging camera technologies.
Around 2010 I took a detour and let my self talked into taking a job in IT. It soon became obvious that office life wasn't for me. During those years I got my hands on a Sony HD camera from work and I got approved to do team media at ESPR rally in upstate New York. After a numbers of attempts at media credentials for Rally America events, finally NASA Rallysport approved me. It felt great getting to be a part of rally for the first time. The emergence of social media made it possible to follow motorsport like never before, I was watching Gymkhana videos, WRC, Rally America event recaps, 0-60videos, X-games videos, Top Gear and later Lunch Control episodes.
Fast forward to 2016, I created my first #rallytrain edit. The thinking behind it was "why don't I make these cars look like they're doing rallycross". So that video vent viral and got tremendous response. Since nobody have done anything like this before, I was the first person to overlay the footage of multiple cars making their racing lines a lot easier to compare to one another. With that short video I also earned an article about my editing skills in the car magazine Jalopnik. For the first time my work stood out! It felt good!
At that time I was using consumer grade action cameras and a hand-me-down camcorder. I used a cheap gaming computer to edit my videos, so the quality wasn't where I want it to be. In 2017 I managed to purchase an entry level professional camcorder that was an improvement over the older HD camera however, it was still only entry level and not a cinema camera. I switched from a hobbyist editing software to a professional software called DaVinci Resolve. You really have to be a camera nerd to understand how much it meant to me to be able to shoot in 1080p at 120fps. Finally I was able to create quality slow motion edits. Till this day, creating slow motion feels are my favorite thing to work on.
In 2020 I posted another #rallytrainedit again it went viral so much so that, amongst others it was shared by the official WRC Instagram page where It racked up over 300k views. Not sure what happened there, I think the covid lockdowns played part in it's popularity. Anyway, I got interviewed over chat and got another article this time in The Drive magazine. It's been a numbers of years since I created the first #rallytrain edit, ever since I've been trying to improve the workflow so I can get edits out faster, sadly even with the development of AI, it is still very time consuming to make these edits look good and realistic. I do dream about one day to have an app developed that with a help of AI I can put this editing style into the hands of rally fans, I think that would be cool.
Aside from rally I am also a fan of Drifting! I have attended Formula Drift events as spectator and I have signed up for media duties at Club Loose events in Englishtown NJ. I was again the first to use a 360 camera in a way that it wasn't meant to but, hey.... got to push the boundaries sometimes to innovate. Years later professional drifters also caught on and started using 360 cameras for theirs content.
Over the years I get to visit other motorsport events as well.
I accompanied a Go-Kart racer friend from Hungary twice when he visited the United States. He got invited to race in the Rotax Max Grand Finale at the NOLA motorsport park in 2013 than he entered one event in The Florida Winter Tour series in 2016. There we were hosted by former Nascar/Indycar/Formula1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya and his team. We met some cool peoples from Penske Racing and I've met the legendary Emerson Fittipaldi. We get to visit the Montoya garage and spent nearly a week with him and his family. I am eternally grateful for my friend Geza Fodor
(Rally navigator and FIA Rotax Max competitor) for having me there.
The last rally event I attended was New England Forest Rally in 2021.
In 2022 I was unable to attend rallies due to personal reasons, than came the tragic year of 2023 where I lost all hopes of getting anywhere with this "hobby" so I stopped planning any future trips. What hasn't stopped though is the flow of ideas I get surrounding rally and motorsport.
That's about to summarize my motorsport involvement up until late.
In the summer of 2025 with my friends we signed up to volunteer at two of the closest events to us, It was nice to get out on the stages again.