Desert Dingo Racing

Category: KC Hilites

  • The first glow in the dark team

    Paul with TrailGlow made this pit sign for us. I’m pretty sure it will be visible from other planets.

    I first saw Paul’s work at the KC Hilite’s Midnight Special race when some race truck tore past us at Road Crossing 11 (RX11) and all its numbers were lit up like neon. I turned to Roxanne, pointed, and said “As God is my witness, I’ll own a set of those.”

    It’s been a few weeks and Paul was kind enough to come on as a sponsor of the team and has treated us like royalty. Not only is he providing us with lit number panels for the SNORE races and the Baja 1000, but he’s sending illuminated pit vests, an illuminated pit sigh (above), a set of illuminated sponsor and contingency logos and the pièce de résistance:

    Oh yes, a set of HID lights with the Desert Dingo Racing logo laser-etched in the glass. Batman, eat your heart out.

  • We’re still in 3rd and up to 25th overall. Also, sanding

    Shawn did this for about five minutes before I declared it “too hot” and we went in and played Baja on the xBox.

    It’s bad enough racing in the heat, but when it’s 100 on the front porch and we (ok, Shawn) is sanding on a white car in the glaring sun. Well, there are limits. We declared the body work “good enough for rock and roll” and headed inside, where it wasn’t much cooler.

    It’s too hot to write a blog post even. So I’ll just post this photo. We’re in third place in class and 25th overall out of 193 vehicles that have raced SNORE this season. Not shabby.

  • Bilstein and the Ensenada package

    We love our Bilstein shocks.

    We’ve been with Bilstein since we started building the car and Joel and his team with the Off Road Motorsports group have been tremendously supportive of our efforts. They just upgraded us to their “Ensenada Package” for the KC Hilites race and the results were great.

    So when Joel asked us if he could use an image for a flyer for the shocks, we naturally said yes. You can check out the results here.

  • 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.