Desert Dingo Racing

Category: South Point 250

  • 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.

  • Crusty’s handiwork

    Crusty preps the show hood.

    Someone once said that an airplane is “a collection of spare parts flying in tight formation.” That’s pretty much how I view the car now. Anything that breaks can be replaced. The body experiences tremendous torque during a race and afterward we see tears in the metal that comprises the core of the car.

    Crusty’s spent the past couple of weeks reinforcing high stress points on the frame and adding plate steel to reinforce the areas around the bumpers. In preparation for the World Diabetes Congress, Shawn recommended painting the body of the car before the South Point 250 race in October, then doing touch up painting after the race and installing the show fenders before we ship the car to Montreal. We’ll also have a “show” trunk lid and engine compartment lid, which we’ll promptly trash at this year’s Baja 1000.

    A small gallery of recent photos of Crusty’s work is here.