Cory Bartz

As far as the intro's go, I'm 36, married, and have a 16 year old daughter. I work as a product support rep for a large office product firm, (Ricoh) supporting digital color copiers, and related color RIP's (raster image processors, basicly servers running on Unix, Win 95, or NT, that enable you to download color files from a PC or Mac). My territory is the Western U.S., (MT, WA, OR, CA, WY, ID, UT, NV, AL, HW, and AZ,) and I'm based out of Phoenix AZ. I'm usually on the road, (sky?) 3 out of 5. This will probably be changing.

I first got interested in cars in highschool, owning several "muscle" cars. After I got married the cars turned more to the small imports. I found that turning fast was almost as much fun as going fast. I became interested in F-1 in the early 80's, and my first race was the Ceasars Palace Parkinglot GP in 81. When they said the circus was coming to PHX, I was delirious, (still am, if I start rambling on about it, please forgive me), I had a motor home about 50 yards from the track for three glorious years while it was in town. I even delivered equipment to several teams, giving me a pit pass, and was almost trampled by Senna as he was running from Japanese fans! Prost parked his Alfa about 20 feet from the motor home and RAN to and from the track.

My best friend and fellow F-1 fanatic used to own a engine shop that specialized in head and manifold porting. When he got too busy I would flow heads for him, do valve jobs, glass bead parts, degree cams, what ever he needed. We worked on street racers, sprints, off road trucks, and even some race bikes. The highlights being a couple of blower installations, (B & M under hood), and some concealed nitrous port injected systems. We got into some suspension work on street cars, but nothing really professional.

He died several years ago, and his dad dumped everything he had accumulated over 10 years in less than 2 weeks. Definetly one of the lower points in my life. The F-1 BBS on GEnie that this group split off from helped me alot through that nightmare.

I like to ski, snow and water, (I've got a 20foot Cobalt for sale if anyone's interested), mountain bike, and sail, land and water. Several of my relitives own planes, and I have always wanted to get my license, but I fiqure I got too many expensive hobbies as it is, and not enough money or time to enjoy them. I'm also in to flying and driving SIM's.

Since most of the friends I had who were interested in F-1 have either moved or died, this group means alot to me, and even if I don't post for awhile, I read everything that's put up. I've tried to hook up with several people from the group, but my schedule is fairly chaotic, and I never know when I'm going to have free time until the day or night it usually happens. I look forward to all the posts for this season, and the pick 6, even if those pesky kids always do better than I do.

Cory