Car Setup

We need to haul our stuff to the trail somehow, so we use our 1993 Subaru Impreza. This is a very trusty car. Its been running strong for 140,000 miles with very little problems. We take this car skiing, biking, and hiking and it always gets up back fine. The setup of the car is basically stock.

The rack is a Yakima rack. We've got 4 towers setup (2 towers per bar). The roof of this car is just barely long enough for the bikes. We have an extension piece which can be used to mount a tower even farther backwards (where there is no roof to grab onto) but it turns out that we didn't need it here.

The car is setup to carry three bikes. Two facing forward and one facing backwards. The front wheel of one of the bikes has to go in the trunk however.

On the front bar, we've got two quick-release clips to hold the front fork of two bikes. We also have two wheel holders which hold the front wheels of two bikes. Lastly, there is a short tray which holds the rear wheel of the third bike (facing backwards)

On the rear bar, we've got two short trays to hold the rear tires of the two forward facing bikes. We also have a single quick-release clip to hold the front fork of the rear facing bike.

As can be seen, this setup works fairly well. The only problem is that the two bars are a little bit too close together. Although this is the farthest apart that they can be spread without the extension, my bike almost doesn't fit. The rear tray needs to be tilted upwards so that it just grabs the rear tire, but doesn't really support the weight of the bike. In fact, the rear tire of my bike is only about 1.5 inches from the roof. To fix this problem, I simply jam a piece of foam between the rear wheel and the roof so that the roof is taking the weight of the bike. This works great and I haven't broken anything yet.