Scotts Valley (holla!) native Shelby Lynn Reeves shows off our completely refurbished Comp 4 racing seats from MasterCraft Safety.
Thursday was driving day for Bob Russell and me with Bob headed to MetalCraft Motorsports and Transmissions in Sanger to have master transmission guy Scott Sebastian rebuild our race transmission and me hitting Santee and Poway to have MasterCraft Safety refurbish our racing seats and confab with the team at Bilstein, who take good care of us in the shock absorber department.
Me first. I departed Desert Dingo Racing HQ around 7 p.m. Wednesday southbound, pausing for sleep breaks at a truck stop, residential cul-de-sac and an oceanside rest area, arriving in Santee in time for an 8:30 a.m. Thursday meeting with Shelby Lynn Reeves, Safety Apparel Product Manager and Marketing Assistant with MasterCraft Safety.
Because I’m an idiot, I gave her the wrong model name for our seats. Being the professionals that they are, Shelby said, “Give us an hour and a half.” With that I was on the road to Poway to meet with Joel Ward and his team at Bilstein.
Joel and Juan giving me a shop tour at Bilstein off road HQ in Poway.
Joel and his team have been helping us out since we started our race effort back in 2007. We were constantly blowing out shocks because we were idiots (you’re seeing a pattern here) until we got our suspension dialed in and now 1107 rides like butter. Despite all the aggravation we’ve put them through, Joel’s team added us to their hall of fame.
What the?! Someone else’s car photo is bigger than ours? This aggression will not stand, man.
In appreciation for all the work they’ve done for us, we’ll be flying a Bilstein flag from our radio mast at our races, starting with Yerington in a week.
Bidding Bilstein a fond farewell, I raced back to Santee to meet again with Shelby and our too-pretty-to-install-in-the-car race seats. It was like that softball-sized hole we sort of burned into the driver’s seat at the Mint 400 never existed. I also grabbed MasterCraft logos to run on 1107 for the season. Thank you Shelby and MasterCraft.
With that I was out the door and northbound to home, dropping off the seats with Crusty around 9 p.m. and actually back at Desert Dingo HQ at 9:30. Total elapsed time, 30 hours. Total mileage, 1,030. Average speed, including sleeping, sitting in line at fast food drive-throughs and taking meetings, 34 mph.
While I was being wined and dined like a big shot, Bob Russell loaded five VW transmissions into Scott Anderson’s Honda Element and drove them to Sanger to have Scott Sebastian of MetalCraft Motorsports and Transmissions work his magic on them.
It took us a while to learn that one thing you don’t want to skimp on is transmissions and since we started using Scott Sebastian and Metalcraft, we’ve never had an issue.
Smart Class 11 racers, like Robert Johnson, who was also at Metalcraft, rebuild their trannys after every other race. Not us. We went seven races, which Scott wasn’t all that keen about. Anyway, Scott rebuilt our primary race transmission (it showed remarkably little wear and tear), he will build a second race transmission out of three additional transmissions Bob delivered, and he’ll do some work on Bob’s bus transmission. So Bob departed with five trannys and returned with one. Here’s what it looks like:
A whirlwind of work planned for this weekend. More photos to come.
