Team Balthazar

Team Balthazar is named after its most prominent member, a 4' plastic statue of one of the three wise men. He was rescued from the side of the road and adopted by several students at Clarkson University in 2008. Since then, he's visited 24 states and provinces and traveled over 20,000 miles. He's met a car full of elderly women (who thought he was hilarious), a 5 year old girl (who thought he was her new best friend), a businessman (who thought he was the "coolest black Jesus" he had ever seen), and everyone in between. His list of friends also includes Team Pavo, Tony Hawk, and Eve. Balthy wants to meet the world, and Team Balthazar is how he plans to do it.

Team Balthazar has many team members. Some of the people most involved in our events are Jake, Garth, and Dan. We were roommates and best friends all through college. Jake's now a web designer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Garth is a mechanical engineer in Schenectady, New York, and Dan is an intern at IBM and is currently pursuing his MBA at Clarkson University.

We've gone on 2700-mile road trips at the drop of a hat and spent hundreds of hours and thousands of miles behind the wheel. Ask anyone who knows us, we don't take our weekends easy. With all those experiences behind us we think we've got what it takes to be an awesome driving/adventuring team.

Team Balthazar is primarily a great excuse to explore. Every trip is a story, and every stop is another person or two that we can tell the Balthazar story to. We are always looking for our next road trip no matter when or where it will take us. Some of these road trips are rallies.

A road rally is an event where driver/co-driver teams drive through a series of checkpoints. They are generally endurance events with daily distances sometimes reaching close to 1000 miles. A rally can last from a few days to a week or more.

At the moment, Team Balthazar has four vehicles: a 2008 BMW 328i (wagon), a 2007 Audi A4 (with the s-line and titanium packages), a 2004 Volkswagen Golf TDI (powered by vegetable oil) and a 1996 Toyota Camry. The Camry was our ride through most of college and was the car taken on the Gumball in 2010. The Audi was Team Balthazar’s first rally vehicle, it participated in the 2010 New England Rally. The Golf participated in the 2010 NER Fall Run on vegetable oil. The BMW was purchased over the winter and participated in the NER Spring Run and will be the official Team Balthazar car for the 2011 New England Rally.