There’s a whole lot of nothing out there, which is why it’s cool.
We got third place at VORRA’s 2013 Yerington 300, which technically means we DNF’d slightly later than two other cars, one of which caught fire, so I can’t complain too much.
Mornings go better with coffee (and chocolate chip cookies). A dog, also.
First off, we somehow forgot the hoses that go from our air pumper to our helmets. After striking out at the True Value in town, Jenn and Toby got the bright idea to hit thrift stores and scored a couple of used vacuum cleaners. Toby also popped some tags and scored an ironic T.
We used hoses from these vacuum cleaners to fashion replacement helmet pumper hoses. I tested it and reported “It smells like my gramma’s house.”
We knew we had an issue with the transmission but opted to run it anyway (we didn’t really have a working spare). Crusty and Heston went off the line and the plan was to move the co-dog to the driver seat each lap, so everyone had some familiarity with the course by the time they took the wheel.
Driver / co-dog line-up.
The plan was to do three long race laps and then three short ones. Crusty and Heston went out first and didn’t report any problems. The mountains next to the start line really limited radio communication so it was radio silence for most of the race.
All we’re missing is some bondo.
They came in after a 60 mile lap about 10 minutes behind Petfinder and we spent about 30 minutes tightening a loose swing arm bolt and silicon sealing a leaking valve cover gasket. Heston and Toby headed out on lap two. By this time Meeks had caught fire, TNT (the new guys) blew an engine and the French team had popped an oil line (but were still racing).
In better times. (Before stuff broke).
The oil leak resurfaced and Heston and Toby pulled into Checkpoint 4 to have the Pro Pits folks help us out. (I know this because Heston was kind enough to leave me a voicemail). We made it another few miles before the transmission blew and some idiot sideswiped us while we were on the side of the road, taking out a fender and twisting our front bumper into a pretzel.
The team headed out to see whether anything could be done to get us back in the race, but it was not to be. They loaded it on to Crusty’s hauler and came back to the pits. We were done.
