Desert Dingo Racing

Tag: South Point 250

  • Buttoning up 1107 for the SNORE 250

    As a matter of fact I do know which end of an impact wrench to hold.

    The SNORE South Point 250 is a week away and we’re buttoning up 1107. Crusty and Scott fiddled with the fuel pump pressure regulator. Carrie spray painted all the tools (so we can keep track of them) and packed the tool kits based on our laminated lists. Scott also installed the lights (we won’t need the night lights for Saturday’s race as it’s only two 60 mile loops.)

    Crusty’s been welding 3/8s inch diameter rod into the rims and Richard will take them to Dixon Tires to get all the tires put back on. Oh, and I pulled the tires, installed the fenders and then put the tires back on, you haterz.

    Car and equipment get loaded into Creech’s toy hauler Thursday night and we’re all wheels up gawdawful early Friday morning for the drive out to Vegas. This race is also the Stock Bug Challenge II, and we’ve got 13 Class 11s entered. Should be a good race. This race will have Richard and Crusty and Scott ‘n Carrie in the car. Roxanne and I will staff a checkpoint or road crossing for the bonus 25 team points.

    Some shots from today’s work day.

  • Resurrecting 1117

    Don’t call it a comeback…

    There is a growing chance that we’ll race a revitalized 1117 at SNORE’s KARTEK Western Desert Challenge on November 14. The situation is that we’ll use 1107 for the South Point SNORE 250 on October 3-4, then haul it back, spruce it up and put it on a truck trailer for the trip to Montreal for the World Diabetes Congress October 18-22.

    It will return sometime the first week of November, but by then we’ll be focused on prepping it for the Baja 1000, for which we leave on November 16 or 17 (the actual race starts on Saturday, November 21). Naturally we don’t want to risk trashing 1107 a few days before the 1000, so we are looking at trailering 1117 out to Las Vegas, crossing the start/finish line at the Kartek race and going as far as we can to collect season points.

    Then we trailer 1117 back, load up 1107 and head for points south.

    Today I enlisted the help of our next door neighbors, Jim and Sylvia, and Jo, who had to evacuate from the Lockheed Fire, to help me move 1117 and 1107 around so I can do a little work on them before turning them over to the team.


  • 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.