Well, we made it. I picked the car up Thursday and got it home about 8pm. With no real dirt testing on the car we headed to Henderson for tech and registration.
The car looked great and we spared nothing in the conversion so we were confident that it would do ok.
We started in the first row on Sat AM next to the new Coastal/HOLTZ XP900. I have a lot of radiator in the car and apparently the thermostat was not working well as I had difficulty getting the motor to warm up. The start was well watered and the AWD coastal jumped ahead off the line. I got the motor going and caught them in about 150 yards. I followed for a while and they did not want to let me by so I gave them the first BUMP of the race. Even with a good love tap they kept pulling in front of me when I tried to pass. Knowing the first section gets pretty rocky I decided to back off and get past the rocky section. At the first pit we were behind a bike and doing 30mph in the 25mph pit when the PARKS car blew past us. With a championship on the line they were not obeying any speed limits. I don't blame them. As we started adding miles to the car and getting the feel of how it handled we began speeding up. We got to the paved section (about 2 miles) and decided to see what it would do. Parks had pulled ahead in the rough but there lights were visable in the distance. AS we entered the paved section we were quickly in sixth gear and I asked my co driver how fast we were going. He called back "slow down, we are going 105mph and I don't want to get in a wreck as we pass" I slowed a bit and we passed PARKS and several quads as we entered the dirt. WOW did that feel good! Our rear shocks were not dialed up enough on compression so we decided to take it easy in the rough sections and go fast when we could. A couple miles later we saw the headlights of PARKS in our mirrors so I quickly pulled over to let them pass without slowing them up. Within a couple more miles (around 15) the course was smoothing out and we were seeing less rocks and more dirt/small whoops. We started cruising at 80-85mph in the dirt sections witout rock and soon passed PARKS and several more quads bikes. We found ourselves looking at the spare tire of the COASTAL XP again and trying to pass. Once again, no moving over so I gave them a love tap. To our dismay, they would still not pull over. I backed up about 10 feet and floored it. We hit pretty hard and apparenty they felt it as they decided to pull over before I punted them into the bush. Let me make a point that not letting other cars pass and making them hit HARD before pulling over is very dangerous. It can result in them our us ending up in a rollover situation. Pleas be courteous on the race course!! Once past their lights fell away fast as we continued in the 80-90 mph charge to the main pit. About 5 miles later we were passing a couple quads in a large wash. We were on the left and we hit a washed out section of the dirt/wash. Because we were passing the washed out section was still steep and our drivers front tire hit a 1.5-2 foot vertical dirt wall. It broke our HCR spindle. We did not know what was wrong and thought we had a flat. We kept driving at about 10mph as we debated continuing to the second pit or stoppong to change it. We were about 1.5 miles from the second spectator area and farther from the pit so we decided to stop. After we got out and found the problem we got back in the car and realized that we did not have any radio communication with our team. At that point the COASTAL and PARKS cars caught us. We started the drive to the spectator area where we met our team and tried to get our spindle to hold up enough to make it back to the start/finish. We had to do all the work but our team was able to meet us with the race trailer.
It was a great race and we really had fun. Driving this car was REALLY fun. Tomorrow we start our production chassis based on this prototype car. If anyone wants one, it will be 100in wheelbase and and a totally fabricated chassis with all Rhino suspension pick up points. It will NOT have HCR spindles!!
See everyone in Parker.
P.S. Look at the pics of the COASTAL car and you will see our 3 love taps on the rear bumper.
This is the spindle AFTER we bent it back enough to limp to the finish line.
...Ohhh..and Doug is right...we have a cure for your spindle woes
