Desert Dingo Racing

Author: admin

  • Definitely looking like the distributor

    1117 and 1107, united again.

    Scott and Bob came by Friday and spent five hours doing all manner of things with 1107’s electrical system. They eventually took it back to Bob’s place to test it on his cherry ride. Scott was back this morning (I’d trickle-charged the battery overnight) and we (ok, Scott) had the car running in about 10 minute. We couldn’t get the timing right and voted unanimously (2-0) to tell Bob to fix it.

    Since I’m ADD, it took me the rest of the afternoon to pull the fenders. And vacuumed the car. Supervised by a couple of deer.

    Tomorrow, the car gets washed and inventoried. And prepped for painting. Coming up, the SNORE South Point 250 in Las Vegas, the World Diabetes Congress in Montreal and the Baja 1000 in Mexico.

    1107 fenderless.

  • Exposed – the truth about off road racing (there’s a lot of standing around not doing a whole lot)

    Roxanne put together this video of us at the KC Hilites Midnight Special outside Ridgecrest, Calif. this past weekend. A seven hour drive to get there. A day of standing around watching the team prep the car. A night in a hotel. More daytime standing around and then nine hours of sucking dust while flagging a road crossing before packing up at 3 a.m. and driving seven hours home.

    Honestly, life doesn’t get any better.

    Consensus, without tearing the car apart, is that we fried the ignition system, which is a lot cheaper to fix than a blown No. 3 cylinder.

    Next up, the South Point 250 in Vegas in October. But first pretty much everyone takes a break for Burning Man.

  • Things fall apart sometimes

    Scott and Richard take 1107 out for a test drive before the bad stuff happened.

    Update: A lot of people have asked, and I told both of them that the reason I stopped Twittering sometime after the car broke is that I rolled the car seat back at Road Crossing 11 some time after we got word that 1107 out for a quick cat nap and apparently sawed logs for almost two hours.

    The short story is that we were in great shape at the start, got a flat on the first lap but caught up with the other Class 11s quickly, demonstrating all the fine tuning the team has done over the past few months.

    Sometime shortly after the driver change-out, apparently something went South. It could be a fried distributor or something else. Regardless, after the team spent more than an hour working to fix it, we realized we couldn’t continue.

    We’ll pull the engine apart, figure out what caused it, get it fixed and be ready for the SouthPoint 250 in October.

    A photo gallery from the KC Hilites Midnight Special.

  • The course GPS data

    The 44 mile course pulled from the GPS track.

    I think this is the only race we do where we actually get to sleep in. Everyone will start to gather out at the pits in a bit. Scott and Carrie will do prerunning on motorcycles. Sometime this afternoon is the driver’s meeting and then those of us not in the car head out to Road Crossing 11 to control traffic when the cars come through.

    I’ll be updating via Twitter throughtout the day at @desertdingo . Her’s the KML file that you can download and plug into

  • KC Hilites Midnight Special – Day One

    Any racer who loves his or her mom so much that they put it on their car is ok with me.

    Up at 3:15 a.m. On the road an hour later. Arrived in Ridgecrest with a thousand yard stare around noon-ish.

    Found the hotel, then drove out and found the pits. Met up with Jason Mace of Class 11 Coalition and eventually Class 11 driver fame. The plan was to meet up later and he’d take Richard out for a run around the course later in the afternoon.

    Roxanne and I headed back to the hotel to catch up on some much needed sleep. Not sure what Richard and his brother-in-law did. Scott and Carrie were inbound in “The Cube” and eventually Creech and Crusty departed with 1107 in the toy hauler. Seth and Kristy were inbound in Seth’s chase truck and hauling a small sleeping trailer.

    Eventually made it over to Contingency and Tech, where the cars were being inspected. Bought the hat and the shirt, purchased the GPS track from PCI, which I’ll load into the 1107’s GPS unit tomorrow.

    Tomorrow all the drivers and co-drivers will pre-run the course. we’ll get the data loaded in the GPS unit, we’ll get last minute tweaks done then hit the afternoon driver’s meeting where we get last minute updates from race organizers. Drivers and co-drivers will head to the pits and those of us staffing road crossing 11 will load up and head out. Assuming there’s internet connectivity, I’ll be updating via Twitter at @desertdingo .

    Shots from todays activity, courtesy of Roxanne.