Category: Prairie City

There were prettier cars on the track this weekend.

It wasn’t our greatest victory, but the saying goes “Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.” We had a tired engine and, at least for the first moto, we probably weighed a good 30 pounds more than the other cars. That got us third place out of three Class 11s.

The weather was nice, so I slept on a cot in the bed of the rental truck. Slept until some turkey started gobbling around 6 a.m. My view from the cot.

Heston and Toby did the first moto of the weekend, getting the hang of a recently watered track that pretty much felt like ice.

Heston & Crusty with our new mascot, who’s name I think we decided had sometime to do with a character from the Wolverine movie.

A gratuitous photo of the puppy having breakfast Sunday morning.

Crusty installed a new header system and a new spark arrester.

Rosh Edwards and Heston modifying the valence to accommodate the new headers.

All work and no play makes for a boring day in the spotter stands.

Then Dennis and Toby clipped a turkey. They got third place.

We lucked out in the third moto with Toby driving and Rosh co-dogging. Season points leader Dave Meek Jr. rolled on one of the first laps and limped another lap around the track. We got second again and, due to how points are calculated, we got second place for the day behind winner Jeff Lee’s red Petfinder car.

Toby’s winning footwear.

Next stop, the Yerington 300, where it’s snowed the last two years during the race.

Apparently it’s a tradition that we suck the first race of the season.

There’s no way to sugar coat it. We couldn’t catch a break at the first race of the VORRA season at Prairie City last weekend. First, we forgot to install the float in the carburetor and had fuel flooding into the engine.

With the carb fixed, we realized we had an issue with the clutch and decided to pull the engine and replace the clutch plate.

We spent a lot of time staring at the engine compartment this weekend. Heston here is swapping out the clutch.

By Saturday night, we thought we had a good car. No fuel leaks, the clutch felt good, we had the new head and neck restraint systems installed on the helmets.

Things went to heck pretty quickly during Sunday morning practice when driver and co-driver reported a substantial loss of power after taking a jump on the course. For the next half a day we tested every engine system we could think of, replacing our Compufire ignition system with a .009 distributor and then with a borrowed Compufire. I’m pretty sure we swapped carbs. We did compression tests. We swapped out spark plugs and wires. Only thing we could tell for sure was we weren’t getting power out of two cylinders.

Toby and Ralph – Two guys who install HNRs.

We got one or two laps under our belt during the first race, still DNFing. We also did one lap for the second moto. The goal at this point was to pick up enough season points to keep us in contention for the second Prairie City race in April and get back in the running when we head to the desert.

Jenn Frederick, supervising like a BOSS.

Petfinder (the red one) lost a gear or two in their transmission after the second race and speaking with Jeff Lee, we agreed to go out together for the third moto and do some fender to fender racing at 3 mph for one lap.

We gave everyone (including race announcer BJ Butcher and Race Director George Henley) a heads up we’d be doing one slow lap. Between then and the call for Class 11 staging, Toby found the problem. A frayed wire in some part of the ignition system. With seconds to spare he repaired it and driver and co-driver were off the start line.

What happens next is either epic or tragic. Or both.

Dave Meek Jr., figuring we’d be cruising at a snail’s pace, blew past the second place French team on the high side, giving them plenty of room before diving down to line up the next turn. What he didn’t expect was 1107, hell bent for leather, to have also blown past the French team and be making a play for first place. We got clipped and 1107 rolled at least two times. The new HNRs did their job and no one was hurt. A recovery vehicle dragged the car back to the pits. An hour later we’d replaced a destroyed hub, threw on two new rear tires and used a sledge hammer to pound out most of the damage.

Autographed.

We were able to drive 1107 back onto the hauler, we packed it up and headed out. Romy is working on a new engine. Crusty drops the car off Sunday so we can inspect everything. We should be good to go for the next race.

And people wonder why I  don’t want to be in the car.

We’ve had better race weekends, but at least we didn’t catch on fire like Petfinder did. Nor did we blow an oil cooler like CBCFS Racing did and spend all night and most of a morning fixing it. Nor did we lose a tire in the middle of a race like Meeker Motorsports did. Come to think of it, we did lose a tire in the middle of a race.

But Meeker won. And so did Petfinder. And so did CBCFS.  Green Booger didn’t break at all and they beat us, too. We somehow eked out a third place finish in the morning races. We have work to do before the  Yerington 300 Memorial Day weekend. But we’ll get it done.

Ok, so here’s the recap.

We show up at Prairie City SVRA before pretty much anyone else Friday morning. Then it started raining. By Friday afternoon the thunder and lightning set in. Saturday morning was perfect for mud bogging. They brought in the Cat.

VORRA opted to cancel racing for Saturday to get the track groomed for Sunday. Good Day Sacramento came by to interview off road racing legend Rod Hall, who took the reporter for a ride in his race Hummer to demonstrate the dangers of applying lipstick while driving.

Then Melissa Cabral, who is great, conducted an orchestra of off road race vehicles via horns and engine revving, (including 1107) and it actually worked. A big group of folks who saw the live broadcast came out for Sunday’s racing.

With Saturday to kill, a lot of teams focused on race prep. Not us, for the most part. Lynda made hula hoops.

Tebowing before a hula hoop challenge.

Garland gave hit his best, but lost 50 cents to the kid in the red hoodie.

Class 11 needed to represent so Saturday night was a five course meal that included a French wine and cheese tasting, stew and dessert courtesy of CBCFS and Desert Dingo. We kicked off Sunday morning breakfast courtesy of Desert Dingo’s Normal and R-Pod‘s breakfast burritos. That was followed by Lynda singing the National Anthem (video to come) and the racing start.

In the course of six 12-lap races we got black flagged for engine noise (a mis-adjusted valve nut), multiple valve gasket burn throughs, a shattered spindle that sent a right rear tire flying and a host of electrical gremlins. We didn’t finish a single moto and we often joined them in mid race.

I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I’m sure someone got actual shots of us on the race course when we weren’t broken down. I’ll post them if someone sends them. In fact Dennis Hollenbeck has a great photo set from the weekend here.  Here’s a collection of shots from folks on the team.