I hope most are not disappointed or expecting to much, because the Jimco name is tied to this UTV build. I know this is their first UTV and not typically what you would see come out of the Jimco shop. I could be wrong (correct me if I am) but my understanding is this is going to be a basic UTV race car build with mostly bolt on parts.
I think if Jimco chooses to continue to build UTV's and if the deep pockets come walking threw the door, then you might see a full blown Jimco build. Rumor has it there is a #2 scheduled, but we will have to see how #1 goes.
Wow.... way to take the wind out of my sails. HAHA.....
Yes it is true that we are using bolt on parts, if we weld them on it's harder to get them off the car for service. LOL....
Yes, in all fairness we are going with a lot of bolt on parts. I have been racing at the factory level for over 10 years in the desert. And in my experience, with trick parts you get trick problems.
We are using Lone Star suspension with Fox bypass shocks for our build. They are great parts and readily available, so we can have our pre runners setup with the same stuff and plenty of spars in the chase trucks. Johnny seems to be doing rather well with that setup. And there seems to be very little failures with it, if any. We are also using a lot of the stock drive train with just a little massaging.
As far as the chassis goes. We are stuck using the stock center frame rails and pivot point just like everyone else in the class. After that is were Mike Julson and the Jimco team come in. Everything we are doing is driven off of performance and reliability with overall weight in mind.
I'm not saying that Jimco is going to turn the UTV world on it's head with this build as there is only so much you can do with the rules. But it will be a fresh take on a UTV build and they have a tun of experience at building light weight high performance race cars.
What people forget is that Marc in a slow heavy Maverick was able to run away from people last year. And Johnny in the UTV Inc car is killing it in
(a basic UTV race car build with mostly bolt on parts). It's not always about how trick your equipment is, but more often it's about how does your equipment perform. And I can assure you that our equipment will perform.
And yes this is the first of our cars to be built by Jimco. We are having them build a second car over the summer based on what we learned racing the first one. So we can have a two car team at the 1000 and into next year.