Desert Dingo Racing

Category: 2009 Baja 1000

  • Bondo heals all wounds

    I am of the opinion that bondo is right up there with gravity, magnetism, subatomic attraction and duct tape when it comes to sticking to stuff.

    Shawn came by today and worked his magic on 1107’s dents, including the rather large gouge I’m pretty sure I made trying to kick the jack off the car during my ill-fated seat time at the Mint 400. While he worked on smoothing out the body in advance of painting, I pulled fenders off 1117. The goal will be to paint them at the same time.

    Richard came by. We called a quick meeting, mostly as an excuse to play Baja: Edge of Control on the xBox. They were both good, but no match for my mad skillz.

    Big announcement tomorrow. Photos from today’s work here.

  • Stripping for Montreal

    Last photo of the old decals before being stripped off for painting.

    We’ve got a really tight schedule between the SNORE 250 Oct. 2-4 and shipping the car to Montreal for the World Diabetes Congress Oct. 18-22 and then heading south for the Baja 1000 the second week in November. As a result, we’re giving the car its annual paint job now, touching it up and adding decals before shipping to Montreal.

    I got the decals stripped today and sanded down most of the body. Shawn’s coming by tomorrow to do more bondo and paint prep and at some point before the 250 we’ll do final painting.

    Got a cool announcement planned for Monday.

    Stripped for body work. 1117 is in back.

  • Resurrecting 1117

    Don’t call it a comeback…

    There is a growing chance that we’ll race a revitalized 1117 at SNORE’s KARTEK Western Desert Challenge on November 14. The situation is that we’ll use 1107 for the South Point SNORE 250 on October 3-4, then haul it back, spruce it up and put it on a truck trailer for the trip to Montreal for the World Diabetes Congress October 18-22.

    It will return sometime the first week of November, but by then we’ll be focused on prepping it for the Baja 1000, for which we leave on November 16 or 17 (the actual race starts on Saturday, November 21). Naturally we don’t want to risk trashing 1107 a few days before the 1000, so we are looking at trailering 1117 out to Las Vegas, crossing the start/finish line at the Kartek race and going as far as we can to collect season points.

    Then we trailer 1117 back, load up 1107 and head for points south.

    Today I enlisted the help of our next door neighbors, Jim and Sylvia, and Jo, who had to evacuate from the Lockheed Fire, to help me move 1117 and 1107 around so I can do a little work on them before turning them over to the team.


  • 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.

  • Sneak peek – the 2009 hero card

    First draft of the new Desert Dingo Racing hero card.

    Roxanne put together a first draft of the hero card we’ll likely use this year. The front has a picture of the car and the back has info on the team and the warning signs of diabetes. We print them in English and Spanish and this year we’ll be doing a run of them in French that we’ll distribute at the World Diabetes Congress in Montreal in October.

    Update: A.J. has a slightly different take on the hero card.