Desert Dingo Racing

Ok, it’s only one quote in a tremendously cool article written by Judy Smith, a veteran Baja racer and longtime writer for Hot VWs. A good number of the photos were shot by Trackside Photo, which got the great shot of us catching air at last year’s Baja 1000. They even mentioned our fundraising for World Diabetes Day. Click here or on the image to download a PDF of the article.

The folks at the Press Banner did a piece on us and a local motorcycle team prepping for the Baja 1000, “1000 reasons“. A great headline. Thank you Chuck and Peter.

Our 1102 numbers arrive from STS Graphics tomorrow via Fedex.

Shawn and I (mostly Shawn) complete painting the car tomorrow. I pick up the Desert Dingo logo for the hood, sponsor graphics and some surprise stuff on Monday.

The team is pulling together spare parts that we’ll either load in the car or carry in the chase vehicles.

We were contacted by the local American Diabetes Association with an offer to display the car at the San Jose City Hall rotunda. Unfortunately, we’ll be down in Mexico doing pre-running. I’ll be meeting with them on Monday, will give them hero cards and loads of crayons and we’ll figure out how we can work together on future events and have the car available. This should be fun.

We’re going with a new paint scheme for this year’s Baja 1000. We took the car to Holly Oak Elementary School in San Jose where Ms. Battistella’s students painted their palms in red, blue or gold paint and pressed them on the fenders. I’ll put a gallery of photos up later tonight.

We depart for Mexico on Wednesday. More painting and final prep work to do this weekend. Graphics start arriving tomorrow. More to come.

We did our logistics meeting today, mapping out everything that has to happen before we leave, what we need to do between the time we leave and the time the race starts, and what happens during the race.

Seth is a logistical genius. I Twittered the meeting here, which is the best way to get the recap.

While all that was going on, Shaw was prepping the car for paint. We made a rocket run to OSH for Rustoleum gloss and matte white paint for the rattle can work and to some hot dog stand that looked like a giant orange and which has been in business since 1936.

We are so much smarter than we were a year ago and still, with a week to go, there is so much to do. Check out shots from today’s effort here.

We all meet at noon today to work through logistics for the Baja 1000. We were told early on that logistics is 75% of winning the race and I’m coming to believe it. I’ll live Twitter the meeting, so watch http://twitter.com/desertdingo for live updates.

But first, check out the unbelievably cool book that Blair created for the team. She’ll be putting more of her creations online, but until then you can check out what she has for sale here.

One of the greatest miscalculations I made last year was expecting that everyone in Mexico spoke English. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but my mistake became quite apparent pretty quickly after we got south of Ensenada. It’s a mistake I won’t repeat and I’m now relearning Spanish by listening to a great Spanish language learning series by Michael Thomas.

Julia has also been tremendously helpful, coaching me on some desert-race-specific phrases, including:

“Help me flip the car back over” translates as “Por favor aduyame endedicar el coche.”

And then there’s “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” You say: “Parecia una buena idea en el momento.”

and, most importantly:

“Es sólo una herida superficial. No le diga a mi esposa.”

KPIX sports reporter Kim Coyle and cameraman Greg (who swims from Alcatraz for fun) came by last night to do an advance piece on our planning for this year’s Baja 1000.

KPIX followed our exploits last year and you can check out the pieces here, here, and here.

I’m going to be uploading in-car video to them during the race. Looks like I’m going to have to rent that satellite uplink after all.

The first piece should air after this Sunday’s 49er’s game. Photos from the video shoot are here.

We all got together on Saturday to work on the car, soon to be rebadged 1102. Crusty and Richard repositioned the GPS display so that it’s to the right of the rear view mirror. This should make it easier to track and reduce glare. Cary and Scott worked on the front end, fixing damaged sheet metal from the 250 and reinforcing the front bumper. Mike Taylor picked up a new(er) front bumper, so now we have a spare.

Pretty much everyone worked on installing the shocks that Bilstein shipped back to us. Skid, Shawn and I made a run to a hardware store for a ton of nylock bolts. Richard also needed an eye bolt and a couple of rubber bungie cords that he’s using to secure the hood and trunk, on top of the other clamps we’re using. I busted out the credit card and ordered a Parker Pumper breather from Dezert Nation. I completely botched the mailing address but Nick who was working there got me straightened out.

We’re going with a new front tire this time around. A Traxxion vintage WWII military tire that was probably used on Jeeps. I ordered them via one of our equipment sponsors, Skips Tires, then took them to Dave Dixon with Dixon Tires in Watsonville, who used a grooving iron to, not surprisingly, add some grooves to the tread. The tires are optimized for driving in ruts. Dave’s grooving will give us more traction when we need to get out of those ruts. We’ll be running BFG 215-75-15s on the back.

Thanks Dave, and thanks to everyone at Dixon Tires for your support.

Photo gallery of today’s work is here.

Flew to LA and then drove 90 miles down to the Off Road Warehouse in Temecula on Saturday for the SCORE live drawing party for positions for the 2008 Baja 1000. Great BBQ courtesy of Baja Pits. Lots of booths. A couple hundred people. Hooters girls with a very affable chihuahua.

I twittered the juicy bits (check out the Twitter stream in the column on the right), but in a nutshell Sal Fish said security is much enhanced in Baja. Still not smart to drive at night and best to pre-run in groups. Tourism is way down.

Placement picking started at 2 p.m. and they got to Class 11 by 3. Only two have registered so far. We both went for front starts and Eric got the first, so he’ll be 1101 and we’ll most likely be 1102.

Update: it looks like Brown snuck in under the wire as 1103. I figure there will be 8-10 Class 11s this year.

After the event, Dave Hendrickson, known on the Class 11 Coalition board as DaveCo11, invited me over to his place to check out some of his projects. I had no idea he’d been involved in building as many of the prominent Class 11s throughout the years. Here’s a shot of him with his project car for the Primm 300.

He had the Autism car in his yard. It looks like they put puzzle piece decals on the car with the names of people who donated. I think that’s a great idea and will brainstorm something similar for us. The hero cards and boxes of World Diabetes Day crayons were a hit with the kids at the event.

This was long overdue but I finally took some time to add all our work day photo galleries online and (I know this is crazy) labeled them with what we were actually doing, so folks can follow our progress and figure out what we were actually working on each day.

Also added the shots from the 1000 and the San Felipe 250. You can check them all out here.

The front part of the transmission gets fedexed off to Transworks today.

First the bad news. We have to ship a piece of the transmission to SoCal to be fixed. The good news is it’s a small piece - a bushing and the “hockey stick” part of the shifter. That goes out to Transworks by Fedex on Monday. Hopefully we’ll have it back by Friday.

Cary and Scott focused on the front bumper. Richard finished up some welding on the rear end and briefed us on a spares list we’ll start working to collect. Bob and Skid looked after the transmission. Crusty worked on everything. Shawn and I discussed a new paint job. We’re joined by Mike Taylor (of DPW fame), who knows his way around a VW and will be working with Seth on Chase Truck duty.

Gallery of photos from today’s gathering is here.