Paul with TrailGlow made this pit sign for us. I’m pretty sure it will be visible from other planets.

I first saw Paul’s work at the KC Hilite’s Midnight Special race when some race truck tore past us at Road Crossing 11 (RX11) and all its numbers were lit up like neon. I turned to Roxanne, pointed, and said “As God is my witness, I’ll own a set of those.”

It’s been a few weeks and Paul was kind enough to come on as a sponsor of the team and has treated us like royalty. Not only is he providing us with lit number panels for the SNORE races and the Baja 1000, but he’s sending illuminated pit vests, an illuminated pit sigh (above), a set of illuminated sponsor and contingency logos and the pièce de résistance:

Oh yes, a set of HID lights with the Desert Dingo Racing logo laser-etched in the glass. Batman, eat your heart out.

Shawn did this for about five minutes before I declared it “too hot” and we went in and played Baja on the xBox.

It’s bad enough racing in the heat, but when it’s 100 on the front porch and we (ok, Shawn) is sanding on a white car in the glaring sun. Well, there are limits. We declared the body work “good enough for rock and roll” and headed inside, where it wasn’t much cooler.

It’s too hot to write a blog post even. So I’ll just post this photo. We’re in third place in class and 25th overall out of 193 vehicles that have raced SNORE this season. Not shabby.

We love our Bilstein shocks.

We’ve been with Bilstein since we started building the car and Joel and his team with the Off Road Motorsports group have been tremendously supportive of our efforts. They just upgraded us to their “Ensenada Package” for the KC Hilites race and the results were great.

So when Joel asked us if he could use an image for a flyer for the shocks, we naturally said yes. You can check out the results here.

Roxanne put together this video of us at the KC Hilites Midnight Special outside Ridgecrest, Calif. this past weekend. A seven hour drive to get there. A day of standing around watching the team prep the car. A night in a hotel. More daytime standing around and then nine hours of sucking dust while flagging a road crossing before packing up at 3 a.m. and driving seven hours home.

Honestly, life doesn’t get any better.

Consensus, without tearing the car apart, is that we fried the ignition system, which is a lot cheaper to fix than a blown No. 3 cylinder.

Next up, the South Point 250 in Vegas in October. But first pretty much everyone takes a break for Burning Man.

Scott and Richard take 1107 out for a test drive before the bad stuff happened.

Update: A lot of people have asked, and I told both of them that the reason I stopped Twittering sometime after the car broke is that I rolled the car seat back at Road Crossing 11 some time after we got word that 1107 out for a quick cat nap and apparently sawed logs for almost two hours.

The short story is that we were in great shape at the start, got a flat on the first lap but caught up with the other Class 11s quickly, demonstrating all the fine tuning the team has done over the past few months.

Sometime shortly after the driver change-out, apparently something went South. It could be a fried distributor or something else. Regardless, after the team spent more than an hour working to fix it, we realized we couldn’t continue.

We’ll pull the engine apart, figure out what caused it, get it fixed and be ready for the SouthPoint 250 in October.

A photo gallery from the KC Hilites Midnight Special.

The 44 mile course pulled from the GPS track.

I think this is the only race we do where we actually get to sleep in. Everyone will start to gather out at the pits in a bit. Scott and Carrie will do prerunning on motorcycles. Sometime this afternoon is the driver’s meeting and then those of us not in the car head out to Road Crossing 11 to control traffic when the cars come through.

I’ll be updating via Twitter throughtout the day at @desertdingo . Her’s the KML file that you can download and plug into

Any racer who loves his or her mom so much that they put it on their car is ok with me.

Up at 3:15 a.m. On the road an hour later. Arrived in Ridgecrest with a thousand yard stare around noon-ish.

Found the hotel, then drove out and found the pits. Met up with Jason Mace of Class 11 Coalition and eventually Class 11 driver fame. The plan was to meet up later and he’d take Richard out for a run around the course later in the afternoon.

Roxanne and I headed back to the hotel to catch up on some much needed sleep. Not sure what Richard and his brother-in-law did. Scott and Carrie were inbound in “The Cube” and eventually Creech and Crusty departed with 1107 in the toy hauler. Seth and Kristy were inbound in Seth’s chase truck and hauling a small sleeping trailer.

Eventually made it over to Contingency and Tech, where the cars were being inspected. Bought the hat and the shirt, purchased the GPS track from PCI, which I’ll load into the 1107’s GPS unit tomorrow.

Tomorrow all the drivers and co-drivers will pre-run the course. we’ll get the data loaded in the GPS unit, we’ll get last minute tweaks done then hit the afternoon driver’s meeting where we get last minute updates from race organizers. Drivers and co-drivers will head to the pits and those of us staffing road crossing 11 will load up and head out. Assuming there’s internet connectivity, I’ll be updating via Twitter at @desertdingo .

Shots from todays activity, courtesy of Roxanne.

1107 in repose in dry, flammable grass.

Crusty, Bob, Richard, Creech and, to a greatly lesser extent I, prepped 1107 for its trip to Ridgecrest, California for the KC Hilites Midnight Special.

Shocks – installed. Quick release steering wheel – installed. Radio – moved. Hood – installed. Headlights – ok, we’re not a NASCAR team. We’ll dial them in on Friday.

1107 is in the toy hauler. Tomorrow we load tools and everything else. Friday, at various ungodly hours, we head east.

A gallery of photos from today’s work here.

Everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off on Sunday.

We’ve got less than a week to go before the KC Hilites Midnight Special in Ridgecrest, California. The team met on Sunday and reinstalled the front skid plate, attached the fenders and moved the race radio so it’s now above the GPS unit on the co-driver’s side, nearly touching the roof.

This gives the tall people quite a bit more leg room. Also, we don’t spend a lot of time futzing with the radio during the race, so moving it out of the way is fine. And this frees up room for an iPod dock.

The folks at Bilstein finished the upgrades to the shocks this morning and we expect them here tomorrow.

Some photos from Sunday’s work day.

Ok, technically none of us are Canadian and, technically, we’re only two-wheel drive, but Trevor and his team were kind enough to name us August Rig of the Month on Gear Centre Group’s 4×4 Club website.

We will, however, be heading up to Montreal in October to put the car on display for the World Diabetes Congress where I’ve set a personal goal of eating my weight in poutine.

We’ll be working on Creech’s toy hauler this weekend. Bilstein is wrapping up work on our prototype “Ensenada” race package shocks, which will arrive Tuesday. And somewhere out on the East Coast, an R&D lab is putting the finishing touches on our secret weapon for the Baja 1000.

The KC Hilites Midnight Special race is coming up August 8.