Ed Conrad and Ricky Medrano getting their game faces on.
There are some races where if it weren’t for bad luck, we wouldn’t have any luck at all. The Mint 400 was one of those races. In this case, the engine apparently seized about 24 miles into the the race.
On the plus side, the weather was nice.
The guys went in and retrieved the car Sunday morning.
One of the cool things that came out of the race is that we teamed up with GoPro to film using one of their virtual reality rigs. The finished piece should be ready by summer, but it will look something like what they did with the Last of the Rhinos piece (watch this on your phone and spin around).
While the team was doing the heavy lifting, I was overseeing media operations for the race, which mostly involved taking selfies with people more interesting than me.
Me and Matt Martelli, co-owner of the Mint 400.
Me and Troy Little, who produced the graphic novel version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Me and Bill Caswell of Build Race Party fame (who I had been Facebook stalking for the last three years).
But best of all was finally getting to meet LeRoy Wickham, who, in 1967, with three buddies, drove two buggies from Las Vegas to Lake Tahoe and who were in large part the inspiration for the Mint 400. He, his wife Nadine, and two sons came out to Vegas for the race. The Martellis created a special “Pioneers” award for him – the helmet – for his contribution to making the Mint 400 a reality.
The engine is being rebuilt. We’re skipping the 1000 this year to focus on local VORRA races and will be hitting it hard next year for the Mint and the 1000.