A couple weeks back I posted on the Class 11 Coalition forum a question – “What breaks, what do you carry?” One of the greatest challenges for racing any desert class is what tools and spare parts you carry in the car and what you carry in the chase vehicles.
Dave Hendrickson – aka DaveCo11 – answered with an epic list, built over his decades of racing and helping other Class 11 teams. With his permission, I’m reposting it here.
“Being I run a 1967 with a 5 lug swing axle, I carry a spare rear drum, breaker bar with axle socket, axle nut, rear wheel bearing and 4 axle seal kits, inner and outer front wheel bearings greased in plastic bags, with washers and left and right deals to hold the front drum on.
I also carry 5 lug nuts, assorted nuts and bolts, 1 spare tire, bumper jack, 10 fan belts, spare tie rods, alternator pulley with the little key, spare ignition, including cap and rotor, fuel pump and line with 2 filters, spare front shock, spare rear shock that are custom made with attached reservoirs, welded brake line in case I blow a wheel cylinder, flat blade screw driver, crescent wrench, pickle fork, hammer, 13mm wrench, 9/16-1/2-3/4, 15-17mm sockets with extension, vise grips, push rod, 3 spare push rod tubes and extra seals, lash caps, rocker stud, rocker screws, complete rocker assembly, valve cover with gasket, duct tape, wire, rear cotter key, clutch cable, 3 throttle cables with 4 barrel nuts, clutch hook for the pedals, extra shock bolts, starter switch, alternator shims and pulley nut including the piece that goes against the pulley, distributer clamp, extra coil, and coil wire, set of plug wires, 2 spark plugs, JB quick weld in case I blow a spark plug out I can weld it back into the hole (YES, IT WORKS), upper and lower ball joints with a tool to change them, bulb for alternator light (won’t charge with out it) and 3 shift coupler bolts.
For the Baja 1000 I carry an extra distributor timed to drop right in and a shifter.
Sounds like a whole bunch of stuff, but most all of it fits into a bag I carry behind the seat, the shocks and tie rods have their mounts on the cage as well as the jack and lug wrench. Everything I have mentioned has failed me in the past. People wonder why I carry 10 fan belts. In the ’06 Baja 1000 I used 9 in 36 miles in the silt beds, shit for sure happens.
I am able to fix dang near anything to keep going, but the list of things I carry, you are not going far if you don’t have them and they don’t weigh much at all. The trick is to run trouble free, but in a Baja 1000 it is not easy to do. In my 9 Baja 1000 wins, the 5 I won in class 11, 3 were nearly trouble free, mainly gas and go affairs. The main problems were brakes, bending brake shoes, blown wheel cylinders, fan belts, or rocker arm related. I smashed 3 push rods and tubes, resulting in major oil loss (I carry 5 quarts of oil). Shock bolts breaking.
One win we stripped the splines in both rear drums – one in the morning right after the start – the other about 600 miles in. Later I bent a tie rod. In one I broke the shifter off right at the base. Later the hook on the pedals for the clutch cable broke. I was able to change the shaft on the pedals in about 20 minutes or so in the middle of nowhere and continue.
I also had the alternator pulley break all the way around inside. Had I not had one we would have been finished, up above Mike’s Sky Ranch, and when I slid the piece off the little key fell out and could not be found. Lucky for me I had one.
Expect the least expected. Came into one of the pits, gassed and was ready to go, went to start the car, it would hardly turn over. Noticed the alternator light was not working, found the bulb was bad, changed it with no trouble the rest of the race. Without it we were screwed.
In my friend’s ’68 going into La Paz, the right rear wheel bearing broke, 35 miles from the finish. We were able to replace it because we had it and win.
I have broken front wheel bearings at the real Mint 400 in 1977, we did not have one, it took a long time to get one from downtown Vegas. The 1980 Baja 1000 I led the entire race trouble free, the super diff in the transmission broke in half less than 4 miles from the finish coming into Ensenada. That has to go down as my worst race. We were in the city when it broke, and there were thousands of people willing to push us to the finish, so we got pushed up to the street leading to the finish line. Back then you could not push your car across the finish line, so we changed the tranny about 300 yards from the finish line, and I almost threw up when the second car drove across the line while we were hooking up the fuel line. Minus skid plates I drove it across the line for 2nd, less than 20 seconds out of the win. So if you can, carry a spare tranny in your chase truck, you never know what may happen.
If my dad had not put that junker tranny in the truck we would have been a DNF within sight of the finish line.
These are things that work for me. It is everybody else’s choice of what to carry, just know what you have in your car at all times. I have had friends DNF races that had the stuff with them to fix their car, but forgot they had it ’til they got home. I have DNFed races for not having what I needed in the car. You can’t carry everything, and sometimes having things in your chase truck is no help at all if you broke something out in the wilds of Baja.”
Photo of Dave’s VW from Trackside Photo.
