Desert Dingo Racing

Category: The Team

  • The shocks are in the mail

    I want one.

    I’ve got A.J. looking for one of these on Craigslist. It has nothing to do with us, except I want one.

    Richard pulled the front shocks off on Saturday. Bob pulled the rear shocks off on Sunday and today they were shipped to Bilstein in Southern California for upgrades in advance of next month’s KC Hilites Midnight Special out at Ridgecrest, Calif. Richard has also asked Joel and his team to prep a spare front and rear shock for us as well.

    It’s four months til World Diabetes Day and we’re in full planning mode for our outreach efforts. Designing a new hero card that will have the new WDD messaging in English, Spanish and French printed on the back. We’re locking in plans for the World Diabetes Congress in Montreal in October, where the car will be on display.

    After the KC Hilites race, we get a one month break before the 40th Annual South Point SNORE 250 on Oct. 2-4 outside Las Vegas. Then we have roughly three days to paint and re-decal the car before shipping it to the Montreal Convention Center .

    And we’ve got two big announcements coming up….

  • Preparing for the Playa

    Scott retrieves a dropped bolt. Or nut. Or wrench.

    Actually Scott is bolting in the co-driver’s race seat. We designed it such that it requires a contortionist to get one of the bolts properly torqued.

    1107 is coming back together now that we’ve had time to go through it from stem to stern. The reinforced bumpers went back on. Shawn even painted them to match the car. Shawn and Bob worked to bleed the brakes. Shawn installed the rear skid plate. Crusty and pretty much everyone worked to re-install the fuel cell.

    Crusty and I fueled the car and I managed to get my first “Sunoco facial”.  Actually, considering how much 110 Octane fuel I spilled on myself because I hadn’t tripped the fuel cell flapper valve, it was more a Sunoco full body wash.

    Skid, Seth, Creech and Crusty will be hauling 1107, sans fenders, out to the Black Rock Desert this week for Fourth of Juplaya for a bit of a shakedown run. Our next race, the KC Hilites Midnight Special, isn’t until August, so we’ve got plenty of time to dial the car in.

    I’ve got a 7 a.m. teleconference with the International Diabetes Federation folks to discuss plans for the World Diabetes Congress in Montreal in October and for World Diabetes Day and the Baja 1000 in November.

    Here’s a gallery of photos from today’s work.

  • Sleep deprivation at the Baja 1000

    You think you know a guy…

    So Travis here was a first timer with us at the Baja 1000. Totally unflappable. Can-do attitude. Attacked the dirtiest jobs with gusto. Sometimes he attacked them with verve.

    So most of the team had been up for more than 24 hours when we crashed out of the race after the car hit a tree. And then the transmission failed. And we pulled the engine and tranny to replace it, only to realize the replacement tranny wouldn’t fit. So we pack everything up and make the long drive back to Ensenada.

    Everyone, exhausted, crashes. And Travis, and some wristwatch-wearing accomplice, wanders from trailer to truckbed, from RV to crew cab, photographing sleeping people with our 1102 pit sign, which, I’m assuming, he used for perspective.

    Here now, is his gallery of images.

  • Logistics can be cool. No, really.

    We’re gonna need more laptops.

    Desert Dingo Racing’s Logistics Department held its first planning meeting in preparation for the Baja 1000. We had bbq’d tri-tip, potato salad, salad and lots of beer. And we discussed logistics. Figuring out where to set up shop this year (we had some equipment stolen in 2008), how to move chase trucks and people around, and mainly how to improve communications between the team and the car.

    We’re looking to go with satellite pagers, since mostly what we need to know is where the car is and what it’s doing. We’ve used satellite phones but they’re expensive and the Iridium system gets overwhelmed by everyone making calls. We understand that the pagers keep trying to send their messages even if the satellite network is busy. That’s a tremendous help. More on these later.

    No work on the car this weekend, so here’s a high def video documentary of a trophy truck running the Baja 500:


  • Food, folks and logistics

    An army marches on tri-tip, salmon bruschetta and wine.

    The team gathered at Scott’s place earlier this week (he totally has a custom-built motorcycle displayed in his living room) to celebrate our third place finish in SNORE’s Caliente 250 and to start mapping out logistics for future races and the Baja 1000.

    After a phenomenal dinner prepared by Scott & Carrie, we settled in to talk our way through the car from front bumper to exhaust pipe, mapping out what we need to do to improve the car, what spares we need and map out what we’ll be doing between now and the KC Hilites Midnight Race to up our game. A.J. updated everyone on the progress on AWACS and Francis (more on this later).

    A photo gallery of us eating is here.

    I haven’t mentioned this to Roxanne yet, but I’ll be entering separately to reprise Mouse’s 2003 solo ride on the course. Creech gives me my first lesson.