Jill Ciminillo embarks today on the epic off-road navigational challenge for women, the Rebelle Rally. She’ll be competing with fellow journalist Kristin VanderHey Shaw from The Drive, and their rally vehicle of choice is the Hyundai Santa Cruz, which they have lovingly named Sandy. In this video, Jill walks around the Santa Cruz with the Hyundai engineer who helped her team outfit the vehicle specifically for the Rally. Learn what parts they used, why they chose them, and how you can turn your own Hyundai Santa Cruz into an off-road rally rig!
Hey this is jill salmonella with pickup truck plus suv talk and uh behind me is my rebel rally car the hyundai santa cruz and i did a video with the engineer who worked on this vehicle and we talked about all the modifications we made but i have to warn you there’s a little bit of a sound issue because there was a helicopter that decided to go up and then land and
Then go up and then land and then go up and then land throughout the entire video but i really hope that you will stick with us and listen to the video because there are some really cool modifications on this truck including i’m going to point out recovery hooks toyota owners of the world um you may want these so you want to listen to the video and there it is
So let’s start in the front here and talk a little bit about what’s going on here because there’s some stuff underneath that you can’t see there’s this right here that you can see and we’ve got a lot of good stuff here that we’re really excited about it’s a lot of fun putting this together so the first thing is we wanted to make certain that the vehicle could be
Recovered out of a sand dune a snow bank not that you guys can be racing snow uh so we started off by adding these two toe hooks so it could be used to um pull the vehicle out while we were doing it we discovered that we put a bar between it and add the uh the lights on top because what else would you do so actually it really lights it up well at night um so before
We move on because you look at this this is like plasticy and um like this to attach and how much like force can we invited this to get us out and you don’t have a specific answer that’s fine so what john at rally innovations did was he identified the bumper beam as applying this in this chrome right here okay and so by going to the bumper beam and anchoring to
The back side of it then you can put the bumper back on and then carefully with small hands mount these two to the bracket with installed back there and it actually because of the way it spreads out the mode it should be able to blow us out of anything awesome awesome so and we are by an airport with a helicopter pad so if you hear stuff in the background we are
Not actually trying to uh hang this from a helicopter just just so you know we went well not yet so okay so friendly innovations did this but um so we’ve got rally innovations with the tow hooks baja designs we have a little thing going on right here what’s what’s this bar right here this bar extends the accessory genuine accessory skid plate to put a protection
In front of the lower lip of the bumper so that when you come across a rock or brush or something else back the lower edge of the chrome and give the vehicle something to ride up and over the obstacle so it actually is a great enhancement to the factory or the genuine accessory skill okay so is there anything else going on here the wax and that was it waxing
Chrome polish okay so we also have a light bar up on top yeah we took a baja designs uh i think it’s the s8 light and added it below the genuine accessory crossbar and uh wired it up and uh it does a really nice job of lighting up a trail in front of you awesome so we’re going to be doing some 5 a.m starts i i have a feeling this is going to come in very handy um
Way better than the little house helmet or the helmet light that they told us to buy it for this to light up our campsite um all right so if we move around the side of the vehicle um we also have um so the last time we had different wheels and different tires so we’ve changed out the wheels and the tires and um what do we do here we have we are off-road wheels
Wheels were have been used for multiple rallies and off-road vehicles the falcon wild peak at trail hires give them a nice balance of long road and off-road tractions quieter on the roads than alaska fires but still give us a description practice so we’re looking at 17 inch wheels and we did the calculations and it looks like these are like 29.5 inches or okay
So um did we do anything i think you mentioned doing something special here as well one last comment the factory wheels are 18 reporting so these give us the same overall rolling diameter as those but when we air down it’ll allow the tire to get a little bit more information and be a little better in the box so that’s the benefit over the factory side the genuine
Accessory um fender flare kit has the camera mount that can be removed and replaced with a different cover um it accentuates the vehicle in it’s a really nice addition so is this whole piece here an accessory though yes and so would it normally have stopped here and this is just a little bit that’s correct i don’t know you have a large slam okay so this just
Kind of gives us a little bit of extra protection from like box or three that might come up with me and this is genuine accessory so somebody could go to their dealer and say i want this um stuff in the front you have to go to rally innovations and baja design s of tires can be locked from pocket tire and then um road wheels um okay so coming around to the side
Um look this right here so we found the labor on top but we also have a boyfriend yeah we use the uh genuine accessory group brackets um actually mounted a little different location because we wanted the light to be far enough forward and uh give us just the right amount of light on the trail without lighting up the interior of the vehicle because if the lights
Are too far forward they’ll sign back at you we don’t want that we don’t want that um so again the lights are you’d have to go to baja design but the roof rails themselves or the the rack is a genuine accessory to go to your dealership say you want that um all right so now we’re kind of getting into some good stuff back here um because we’ve got um one of our
Spare tires mounted um and we’ve got our max tracks we’ve got our shovel attached um but we’ve got we’ve got so the the base of the rack is a sample from the vendor of the tonneau cover which is not available why do that because you guys are going to be happy to uh because i’m small yeah so you put it on the side where you can actually be up on this on the side
Of the tire or up on here and unbolt it and then pull it off which is kind of the easiest place to get it down without having to never do while we were doing it we needed to place them on flag white and red sandals right and then we decided we needed a place to put the uh max tracks so it’s a strap down on the top pretty simple to do so it can be expanded here
Oh those are those are not available you can’t have those um those are special um but the um the the v-shaped thing is yeah something else is we can cover the bed which is um also that’s a it’s not an accessory it’s an option um so base truck does not have the kind of cover but as you bubble up it comes so the great thing about that um we also have this right
Here which we’re going to be changing this out but this is this is um recovery mode thing that comes down that was added that’s the the whole net and the two side pieces genuine accessory benefits awesome so then um tire back here and basically this just kind of screws the screws that you can take the lag in and out um looking at getting something cool with
Our print spot logo on here um is there anything else that you did that you should know about that we should it’s outside um i think that’s really cool so again we have 200 owners out there who have been complaining and i do mean complaining twining about not having toe hookups on the front innovations tow hooks could be a solution for you so this is really
Cool i don’t know that we have we have mention all right airport s it’s complete by trucks tru xxx super sexy and there you go and it actually levels um so this is really cool here if you’re excited to do some testing um after today could be the introduce our first testing and they expect to believe to get better so again um thanks for watching and i will see you
Transcribed from video
Meet Sandy! Jill's Rebelle Rally Hyundai Santa Cruz Build By Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk