Desert Dingo Racing

Category: Yerington

  • Rollin’ large at Yerington

    Rollin’ large at Yerington

    Video courtesy of Roxanne.

    One of the best parts of the Yerington 300 (besides winning it, which we didn’t), is the parade of race vehicles through town, complete with a police escort.

    Roxanne was kind enough to edit this down to just the interesting cars.

    craigslist

    We have a new member to the Desert Dingo Racing team.

    I’ve been looking for a daily driver for some time and this one surfaced on Craigslist in Bakersfield. Spent about an hour crawling around it, took it for a test drive and bought it on the spot. I’ll be working with Brian Wallentine of Wallentine Motorsports to do some modifications to it and chronicling them on the Tumblr.

    It’s in for an alarm at Lott’s Auto Stereo right now.

    alarm

    Some more shots…

  • Third at Yerington

    Third at Yerington

    nothing

    There’s a whole lot of nothing out there, which is why it’s cool.

    We got third place at VORRA’s 2013 Yerington 300, which technically means we DNF’d slightly later than two other cars, one of which caught fire, so I can’t complain too much.

    morning

    Mornings go better with coffee (and chocolate chip cookies). A dog, also.

    First off, we somehow forgot the hoses that go from our air pumper to our helmets. After striking out at the True Value in town, Jenn and Toby got the bright idea to hit thrift stores and scored a couple of used vacuum cleaners. Toby also popped some tags and scored an ironic T.

    vacuumcleaners

    We used hoses from these vacuum cleaners to fashion replacement helmet pumper hoses. I tested it and reported “It smells like my gramma’s house.”

    We knew we had an issue with the transmission but opted to run it anyway (we didn’t really have a working spare). Crusty and Heston went off the line and the plan was to move the co-dog to the driver seat each lap, so everyone had some familiarity with the course by the time they took the wheel.

    drivers

    Driver / co-dog line-up.

    The plan was to do three long race laps and then three short ones. Crusty and Heston went out first and didn’t report any problems. The mountains next to the start line really limited radio communication so it was radio silence for most of the race.

    opendoor

    All we’re missing is some bondo.

    They came in after a 60 mile lap about 10 minutes behind Petfinder and we spent about 30 minutes tightening a loose swing arm bolt and silicon sealing a leaking valve cover gasket. Heston and Toby headed out on lap two. By this time Meeks had caught fire, TNT (the new guys) blew an engine and the French team had popped an oil line (but were still racing).

    french

    In better times. (Before stuff broke).

    The oil leak resurfaced and Heston and Toby pulled into Checkpoint 4 to have the Pro Pits folks help us out. (I know this because Heston was kind enough to leave me a voicemail). We made it another few miles before the transmission blew and some idiot sideswiped us while we were on the side of the road, taking out a fender and twisting our front bumper into a pretzel.

    The team headed out to see whether anything could be done to get us back in the race, but it was not to be. They loaded it on to Crusty’s hauler and came back to the pits. We were done.

    toothbrush

  • Fly the Yerington 300

    Fly the Yerington 300

    It's gonna be fast.

    It’s just like being in the race car.

    logisticsVORRA has released the GPS file of the 2013 Dudley Tranum Memorial Yerington 300 course. I’ve reformated it to Google KML and am “flying” the course in Google Earth. If you’re interested, here’s how you can, too.

    1. Download and unzip the Yerington 300 KML file.
    2. Load it in Google Earth.
    3. Click on the triangle to the left of Temporary Places.
    4. Click on the triangle to the left of GPS device.
    5. Click on the triangle to the left of Tracks.
    6. Click on the triangle to the left of Trail 1.
    7. Click and highlight Path.
    8. Look down toward the bottom of the left column for a little icon of three diamonds connected by a line. Click the triangle to the right of that icon.

    It’s just that simple. If that’s too much, you can check out the course map here.

  • Ok, still second in season points

    Ok, still second in season points

    Who writes about the beauty of the desert?

    We just got word we actually finished third, not second at the Yerington 300 due to a glitch in VORRA’s transponder system. I don’t like this news, but we won’t take second place in a race due to a technical error, so congrats to Scott Weir and team for their second place finish at the Yerington 300.

    After nine hours of racing, the top the cars were separated by 90 seconds. Amazing. Thankfully, we’re still second in season points. But first place is farther away now.

    Next up, at the Baja 1000 back in 2007, I shot some photos of a little kid whose t-shirt was signed by just about every race team. I remember him because he was shy and I remember autographing his shirt and taking his picture in front of the car.

    Somehow his dad, Carlos Bravo, found that image, emailed me and asked for a hi-res version. I had 10 images and sent them. His son is older now, they have a race car. I’m looking forward to meeting them in Ensenada in November at the Baja 1000.

    Tom Horgan’s photos from the Yerington 300    .

  • We’re in second place after Yerington

    We’re in second place after Yerington

    We’ve begun redeeming ourselves since the fustercluck at Prairie City in March where we found ourselves in the basement. Despite breaking an axle at Yerington, 1107 is in good shape and we’ll spend the next month prepping for VORRA’s USA 500.