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 »

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 »