Desert Toyz 904 San Felipe Race report

May 6, 2015
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Desert Toyz 2904 race report San Felipe

The 2018 San Felipe 250 (318 mile) is in the books. It all started on Wednesday morning when we rolled out of Peoria at 12:15 am, we meet up with Paul Champion #1955 in Yuma and headed for Calexico. Not 30 miles out of Yuma and Paul had a flat on his toy hauler (didn’t know that would set the omen for the weekend) and the caravan stops. We make quick work of the flat and get to about 5 mile from the border. Exhaustion had firmly set in, so we stopped and took a 2 hr. Nap. Well 6:15 came quick and trucks are not that comfortable to sleep in, so off we headed to San Felipe.

Finally arrived 8:30am and we need to get the cars unloaded, some final preparation, some food and get to prerunning, trying to cover 143 mile today. Got on track about 12;15pm and had Ryan chasing us. We covered ground quickly in our Can-Am Maverick X3 Max and wow does this machine do well. It was a lot of fun prerunning in X3 Max as it handled the woops with the greatest of ease, the stock spring package is a little week but over all ok. Our terrific sponsor Shock Therapy sent us with the 4-seat spring package but we did not have time to install. Back to the track. The course was different this year and had some great views of the mountains showing the beauty of Baja, let’s not forget to mention the famous woops and the amount of rocks was surprising on the north end. We completed our 140 miles around 8pm and found some new alternate lines as well as remembered some old ones. Time for tacos and a good night’s rest.

We also found a BFG truck tire and Method wheel in the middle of the course if you know someone that lost one prerunning.

Day 2

We needed to cover 175 miles today. We were up early and installed the spring kit received from Shock Therapy. Off we headed to RM 143. All was good and we were able to help out a motorcycle rider around RM 170 with channel locks to fix a flat. Somewhere along there we lost our prerunning partner Paul Champion. After about 10 minutes we decide to leave the channel locks with the bikers and off we went again. There were some very interesting parts of the course especially Matomi wash where we had some rock crawling to do. Hope no one is broken here as there is no way around. We completed our prerun, made all our notes and were very pleased. Off to meet up with the other team members that came to help, Darren and Carry and get some tacos and a good night’s sleep.

Day 3 we wanted to finish the race car, we still had a few adjustments to make and go test shocks on the power line Rd about race mile 10 to 14. The testing was good, and we made great strides, running up to 72 mph through the woops. The Desert Toyz team Finished up and headed to contingency which is always a good time. Had some good tacos, meet some nice folks, and chatted with several competitors.

Race day.

Waking up found us switching GPS units, as we could not get the prerun notes to transfer to the race unit. Once competed we tidied up, went over the chase plan and suited up. Well at this point panic set in as Scott could not find his helmet skirt, and pretty much tore through the house to no avail. Called PCI and got ahold of Char, she became my princess in shining armor as she agreed to leave the start line and walked back to her hotel room, get a helmet skirt and meet me in staging. Can’t thank her enough.

Ok off to staging and the race. Char made it with 30 minutes to spare, thanks again. Jason and Scott Strapped in and prepared to go. The Green flag drops and we peed off for 500’ and then slow to speed zone (20mph) until we get out of town. We resume race speed and go out attacking the course, the first excitement happened at RM8 as the car was jostled by the woops and pitch left, we did our best to avoid the tree limb but it was not to be. We clobbered the tree limb on the left side and folded in the mirror, I backed off a little and down the power line road we went, at the end of it RM 15 we had passed 12 cars and 8 in our class. We were steadly picking people off. At RM 65 we were the 1st UTV on course. The race was clean up to RM 80 when we had a RR flat, we made quick work of the change but 4 UTV went by, we quickly caught and passed one of the 4 and were cruising. What happen next was unexplainable, at about RM 95 we had what we thought was another flat, well we were not going to make it to RM 155, our fuel stop on a flat so we redirected crew to the dry lake bed about RM 110. We were going slow and were again passed by a UTV, yep the one we just passed. We came up on La Ventana RD. RM 99 and stopped at a crew to check on the car condition. Well we were surprised that we did not have one flat but 3. Holy buckets we can’t make it anywhere on 3 flats. While I assessed the car, Jason was able to again redirect the crew towards La Ventana. In fact we only had 1 flats and 2 low tire. We got some air from a helpful crew and took off towards the highway, we met up with the crew about 5 miles later and got all the service we needed. Back down the road we go to rejoining the course where we exited.

Then about 10 miles later the rigged GPS mount fails and falls off the dash. So now Jason has to hold the GPS and try to read it to direct us where to go, plus the wires are not long enough to rest the GPS on his legs, he has to hold it up and steady it on the face of the dash. The next 100 miles we ran clean with no issues all the time catching the leaders, our crew caught up with us at RM 195 for our fuel stop and some very needed tape to fix the GPS. With service completed we rejoin the race trying to get back to the front. We caught the Jagged car in Matomi wash, the smell of fuel was really intense, Jason saw that the Jagged car was leaking fuel pretty bad so when we caught them and they moved over we both stopped completely, we shut off our car to tell them about the fuel leak, once we were sure they understood we fired back up and took off. Our crew made it to RM 275 for a drive by and informed us that we were 30 minutes behind the leader and 6 minutes behind 3rd. With that info we pushed a little harder. By RM 294 we caught and passed the 3rd place car. At this point we thought we had 3rd in the bag and then at RM 305 we hit a rock and had another flat. Crap. We found a crew to change it but 3rd went back by, after the flat change we headed off trying to get back to third. Finally, only 2 miles from the finish the belt breaks and that did in our chances at 3rd. We repaired the belt and came across the line 4th. Over all we had a good day and our crew did an amazing job of keeping up with the ever-changing race plan. Update to our finish when the official results were posted the Desert Toyz team was 2nd in class. A solid start to a championship run.

Thanks to all our sponsors. Can-am Brp, CST Tires, Shock Therapy, S3 Power Sports, Tiger Lights, Douglass Wheels, Foddrill Motorsports, Triple X seats, PCI Race Radios, UTV WolfPack, Shoria Battery, Monster Seal, Summers Brothers Axles
 
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