And we’re back from the VORRA Yerington 300

Richard chillaxing before the start of the race.

Here’s my recap of this past weekend’s Yerington 300. It’s long, so I added photos to distract those with short attention spans (Jason).

Saturday
We pulled in late Friday night, got a decent night’s sleep and were up by 7 a.m. when someone in the next camp over fired up a Class 1, which is slightly quieter that a Saturn V liftoff. We dealt with a minor oil pressure sensor issue and Richard and Crusty suited up and, along with Bob Messner’s 1177, took off to pre-run the 50 mile course. Two and a half hour later they were back and the only change we decided to make was to switch from our vintage Jeep tires to the BFG 215s.

With that done we drove 1107 into town for tech inspection, after which the cars were impounded in advance of the parade.

Two of the Ultra Four rock crawlers going through tech. These things are fast.

After the parade through downtown Yerington, we headed over to the Pizza Factory. Owner Larry Boyce was our primary sponsor for this race, so we spent a couple of hours with the car in the parking lot autographing hero cards, talking about the race and letting folks get a feel for what it’s like to be belted into the car.

I think we’ve found a new driver for the team.

Sunday
The VORRA organizers wanted to give us (and the single Class 9 car) a head start over the faster classes, so we were up at 6 a.m. to do final prep on the car, which really wasn’t much. Topped off the fuel tank, check the tire pressure and I filled the Camelbaks and duct-taped some energy bars and bags of potato chips to the ceiling.

It looked like we had a convenience store taped to the ceiling of the car.

Our plan was to have Richard drive the first two laps, only stopping for fuel, then have Crusty do the third lap and decide after that whether he was up for the fourth lap. The quads left at 6:30 a.m. and were already coming around when we lined up. 909 started first and we were off the line a minute later. 1107 ran like a champ. During the race we had an issue with a stuck throttle that took about five minutes to fix and one flat tire that we changed in record time. Other than that, the car ran like a little beastie.

The course was perfect for 11s. A 50-mile loop with a little bit of everything. Whoops, silt, rocks, cliffs, miles-long straightaways where we approached 70 mph. I cannot imagine a more fun course to race. We got stuck once in the rocks and it took about 15 minutes to get unstuck between Crusty moving the car back and forth and me heaving boulders out of the way.

We led the majority of the race, getting passed by Bob Messner’s 1177 on lap one when we stopped to fix the throttle issue. We made up a load of time in the pits (they did a driver swap and we just took on fuel) and we caught them just after the Slip-n-Slide of Doom about five miles into lap two. A couple of love taps and some horn honking later we were back in the lead. 1177 caught us in a narrow rocky section about mile 30 but smacked a boulder and had to drop back, eventually blowing a spark plug that took them out of the race.

Shhhhh. I stole this from their website.

Two Larry’s Racing (aka Gary Herrod and Cody Dynes) brought the Green Booger, which won the first VORRA short course race in March. They were plagued with bad luck throughout the race – distributor and carburetor issues – and eventually made two laps before calling it a day.

Crusty took over for lap three and drove hell bent for leather. I told him we could take it easy but there must have been a problem with our comm because he continued to drive like a man possessed. Most of the last lap was spent getting out of the way of the faster cars. Nearly all the other racers were cool. We did get clipped on the passenger front fender but it was likely unintentional. We also got hit on the engine deck lid, but didn’t realize it until the end of the race. The guy who hit us immediately tracked us down after the race to apologize, offer to buy us a replacement deck lid, bought us beers and said he’d help us out in the Reno race. Granted if he’d hit us a bit harder, it could have taken us out of the race, but we do believe it was unintentional and he was genuinely concerned.

We had the awards ceremony that night. Each team got to give a little speech. We collected a check for $300, a plaque, a hat with “1st Place” embroidered on it and we each got finisher pins. Winning, I’ve come to appreciate, has its benefits.

We drove home Monday. Next up, the VORRA Xtreme Outlaws 250 in Reno June 17-20.

Crusty catches some Z’s after the awards ceremony.

Car cam video to come. A gallery of Yerington 300 photos here.