Desert Dingo Racing

A big shoutout to Ms. Battistella and her students, Mrs. Velasquez the art teacher, Principal Corpus and everyone else who made our visit to Holly Oak Elementary so much fun. The car looks great. Click here for a few more photos of the event.

With three days to go, the car is coming together. Yesterday Shawn focused on painting. Cary and Scott tested the pumper unit and comm links. Scott installed the greasy greasy axles. Cary fabbed a box to hold six quarts of oil. Dennis tied up loose ends. I futzed with the cameras. Wrapped everything up by 10 p.m.

ETA for departure is Wednesday morning, arriving in San Diego in the evening and then on to Rosarita on Thursday.

Here’s a gallery of photos from yesterday’s work.

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.

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.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, October 31, 2008/ – Whether your tastes tend toward bright lights and big cities, quiet contemplation or off-road racing, groups around the U.S. are gearing up to celebrate World Diabetes Day and raise awareness of the growing threat of diabetes.

The International Diabetes Federation (IDF), which led the effort to get the United Nations to recognize the existing World Diabetes Day (November 14) as an official UN world day, announced that this year’s campaign theme is “Diabetes in Children and Adolescents.”

Over 200 children a day are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and over 500,000 children under the age of 15 live with diabetes worldwide. In the U.S. 40 children a day develop type 1 diabetes, roughly 15,000 children each year.

“People around the globe have embraced the effort to raise awareness of the growing threat of diabetes,” said World Diabetes Day Campaign Director Phil Riley. “All diabetes is increasing and children are not spared. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that 75,000 children with type 1 diabetes worldwide cannot access the medication, monitoring and education they need to survive. This story goes largely ignored and these children remain in the shadows to face an uncertain future. We aim to bring diabetes to light.”

Read the entire press release here…

SCORE released the initial GPS track for the race. We purchase a more detailed version that loads into the Lowrance GPS unit mounted in front of the co-driver. It’s a bit more detailed and has cool little skull and crossbones icons that warn of things like sheer cliffs, deep water and boulder protruding into the course.

If you want to check it in Google Earth, you can download the KML file here.

Less than three weeks til we depart. We’ll drive to San Diego on Nov. 12, spend the night, then drive to Rosarita Beach the next morning and spend the next week with Eric Solorzano (who starts in front of us) tweaking the car and pre-running sections of the course.

Car still needs to be painted. That will happen next Sunday most likely. And we’re waiting on two digital video cameras that we’ll mount to capture in-car footage, that, if everything goes as planned, we’ll upload to the Internets during the race.

Still only three teams in Class 11 - Eric, us and Alaskan Michael Brown, who I’ve heard is making his first run at the race. I expect a few more will register in the next week or so.

If you’re checking in from seeing the KPIX, howdy. If you can spare a few dollars, we’d love it if you pledged to our drive-a-thon fundraiser. Even a penny or five cents a miles would be fantastic. And 100% of the money goes toward diabetes awareness and education programs managed by the International Diabetes Federation. You can donate by clicking on the “Donate” button on the upper right side of this web page.

You might want to bookmark this page. On the day of the race you’ll be able to track us in real time on Google maps. One of the GPS transponders on the car relays our car number (1102), position and speed and updates every two minutes. We’ll be using this to keep our chase trucks updated on the race car’s location, because it’s almost impossible to communicate via radio unless you’re pretty close to each other.

Any questions or comments? Shoot me a note at jim@desertdingo.com .

The LA Design Challenge, which coincides with the L.A. Auto Show, picked “Motorsports 2025″ for this year’s theme. VW went with a Baja 1000 entry in the new “One Tank Unlimited Solo Class.” The only stipulations are one driver and one 10-gallon tank of fuel, forcing competitors to use every bit of technology, strategy, and wit to finish.

“The vehicle is powered by dual-turbine engines that run at an ultra-efficient 500,000 rpm and operate on a patented bio-synthetic jet fuel.”

Yep, we’ll totally be able to work on those when they clog with cactus.

“The vehicle also boasts an Aerial Reconnaissance Drone (AR-D) which feeds video to the driver when visibility is limited.”

Ok, that I like.

“The Support Team Chopper transports, follows and in the event of a crash, swoops down to perform repairs. It also contains telemetry analysis software, which in the case of emergency, takes over piloting to avoid danger unseen by the driver.”

A chopper? Where do I sign?

Check out a great AutoBlog writeup here, and the official website 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.

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.