That is racing... there is a reason so many don't do it, its hard, its hot, its expensive and its frustrating. But when thing are going well its the best damn time you can have
I started the race in the co-driver spot for Marc. The car was running fast and fabulous and we were making excellent time, passing broken, rolled, and stuck rigs every few miles. As Sportsmans class we literally started near the end of the ~180 cars so we had plenty of passing to do and very little to worry about in our rear view. We did get nerfed by a fast moving 4400 car that didn't bother to give us some horn or siren action, no sweat... we passed his broken down Jeep a few miles later
Marc took us into Pit #3 at the 99 mile mark, I took the drivers seat and he hopped in as co-driver. We were rocking through the next few pits, car was running great and our recent suspension tuning did the trick. The silt beds were insanely deep for the smaller cars like us but she motored right through the only casualty being the massive amounts of dust blasting though the cockpit, the stuff has the consistency of powdered sugar. Three days later I'm still cleaning it out of my ears. I drove us to mile 192 where pit #5 would be a driver change.
Marc and I handed the car over to Dave and Darren and they were off in a hurry. My next job was to relieve Jason and Olly in Chase# 3 (my Tacoma) and chase up to pit#7, we didn't have a planned driver change there but we did want to have coms with the car and out other chase rigs so we set up not far from the pit in order to read the car as they came through. Olly and I set on a high hill overlooking the race course and were able to reach the car as they were ~10 miles out of the pit. Everything was running smooth and they had no need for a pit so they boogied on through and we sped off to pit 8 where Dave would be taking the wheel and Darren navigating. The swap at pit 8 went smooth, we went over our pit checks, added 10 gallons of fuel and sent them out to the course. We were feeling pretty invincible as our car had been running so well despite the brutal course and the casualties so many other teams had been encountering. Then came mile 288. Dave sends a message over the radio that the engine was making a 'rattle', it was bad enough that we could hear it audibly over the radios. We were the last to pull out of pit 8 so we moved towards their location on the highway and were able to connect with them just a few hundred yards off the race course at a highway intersection.
The motor was sounding horrible, while it had a fresh rebuild before the Mint 400 earlier this year, something had in fact gone terribly wrong inside and pushing it any further would likely result in an un-rebuildable motor. We relayed the message through Chase #1 to our tow rig/trailer (Chase #4) who was positioned at a pit up the course and he was on site within half an hour ready and we were loading the car. It was a major downer but we learned some lessons and we'll rebuild. The motor come out tonight and hopefully will be at the engine builders shop by tomorrow. We've got under two months to have the motor back so we can test and prep for the Baja 1000 in November
A big thanks to all our pit support, we had some fabulous folks down there helping us including Jason (SAMI) and Olly (cruiser) that really helped things run as smoothly as they did. While I obviously wish our motor would have held up, we made the best of the situation and worked as a team to get the car out of there and back to SLC, for the most part with our chins up
Hopefully Goates will add some pics
