Desert Dingo Racing

Category: Baja 1000

  • 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.

  • Francis arrives at his new home

    Francis rolls out of AWACs.

    A.J. picked up Francis earlier today. Francis, as you recall, is a Vietnam era M-274 mechanical mule. Four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, it can go just about anywhere, just not very quickly. A.J.’s plan is to strip it down and restore it to its original military look in time for the Baja 1000. It will sit inside his 28-foot U-Haul (nickname AWACs) which will be our rolling command post for all the super secret stuff we’ll be doing for the race this year.

    A.J. asked if I would post this shot of him, to demonstrate that he does, in fact, know which end of a plasma torch to hold.