TORCHMATE AND SHAFFERS-MOTORSPORT to race IN BAJA

Oakland, CA – Three time SCORE Class 7200 Baja 1000 champion, Mike Shaffer and his teammates Shawn Twitchell and Daniel Aeberli are headed to Baja Mexico with the TORCHMATE class 4 buggy to compete in next week’s 44th Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 Off Road race. They are part of an elite group of racers in the oldest and most well known of all desert races The TECATE BAJA 1000. Read more »

We’re looking forward to joining our friends at this years TLCA Rubithon Event July 13-17.
Hope to see you there!!

Best In The Desert’s Biltek Silver State 300 will be held this Saturday, April 30th. The start and finish lines are close to Alamo, Nevada, a tiny town on Hwy 93 about 95 miles north of Las Vegas. With terrain varying from mountains, canyons and stream crossings to wide open desert sections this will prove to be a fast, yet challenging race. The Aliante Casino & Resort in Las Vegas is host for this race including tech inspection and contingency to be held on Friday April 29th. Read more »

The 2010 Mint400 Torchmate/SOR Jeepspeed Race, from the Passenger’s seat.

After having the fire alarm go off in the hotel from 11:30 until just past midnight, the night before the race, We were all a little tired and irritated about the disruption in what was all planned out to be a good night’s sleep before the race. The 4:30am alarm came as a hit, like the what felt to be 2 million cross grain G-Outs we’d experience in the race.

Lance Clifford and I were going to race the first 2 lap’s, handing the car over to Owner, and Driver of Record Mike Shaffer. As we staged we learned then, it was side by side starts. We were lined up next to Chris Nissley, who for some reason stayed about 10ft back from the starting line, and as the starter began the 5, 4, 3, 2 count down, I heard Nissley’s motor almost bouncing off the rev limiter, as Lance began to power brake our 4wd Jeep. Read more »

The Shaffer Offroad, Pirate4×4.com Jeepspeed team of Mike Shaffer and Lance Clifford are gearing up for the Mint 400 this weekend.

This will be the longest sanctioned Jeepspeed Race completing 4 laps at 106 miles each.  There is no pre-running on this course, but it is rumored to be extremely rocky and silty.

The team will split the driving with Lance Clifford and Dave Schneider taking the green flag 12th in the class and running the first two laps.  They will then do a complete pit and driver change where Mike Shaffer and Dave Gibson will finish the race and take the checkered flag. Read more »

A little back story to the train wreck leading up to the race. With striking an agreement to have BJ Baldwin race the 4471 in the 2010 KOH, i knew my time to do major rework to the car to both make it more comfortable for someone over 5′10, but to also help improve it’s offroad performance time was limited. So i used the time between Offroad Expo and Henderson to do that, because BJ would be very busy with preparing for the Baja 1000.

With seeing the level of work Shaffer’s Offroad did to Jason Scherer’s car, and how well it performed afterwards, the decision was obvious who I wanted to oversee the work!

With being as far along as we possibly could be a week before the race, waiting on some very specific key part’s to arrive via the brown truck, we were becoming pressed for time to be ready. Talks of withdrawing from the race came up, but knowing what the bigger picture was, if we could just start the race, we pushed forward. Read more »

Shooting for 4 Baja 1000’s in a row!

We’ve won three Baja 1000’s in a row and we were going for our fourth. We spent countless hours on logistics and preparing the car for this race. We thought everything was 100% ready as we headed South for Ensenada, Mexico the Saturday before the race (Boy were we wrong). Our schedule was, for myself and Steve, to pre-run our section on Sunday and Monday in the Shaffer’s offroad JK. Monday night we all met up for the Pirate party at Mike’s Sky Ranch. Then Lance used the JK to pre-run what he hadn’t ran in his dodge.
Wednesday we had to get our annual cage inspection. Once that was out of the way we deiced to try and play with the ignition timing a little bit. The car had a really bad flat spot off idle and we were hoping to get rid of it. So we advanced the timing and ran the car up the wash to see if it ran better. We immediately noticed that the transfer case was making a strange noise. We brought the car back to our hotel and after diagnosing it we decided that we needed to install a new transfer case. The spare transfer case we had was by no means in good shape. Jeff Knoll made a few phone calls and found that Dustin Webster had the exact t-case we needed and it would be brought to us in the morning. In the mean time, we pulled the transfer case out the vehicle and tore down the spare case and built 1 good unit out of the 2. We finished about 3am Thursday morning. Dallas showed up with the spare from Dustin. We ran the car through tech and contingency, and passed with flying colors. After tech was over we wanted to run the car to make sure the transfer case was good to go, and that we weren’t getting any pinging from advancing the timing. Everything seemed to be great! Read more »