No oil spewing all over everything = “success”

At the Fallon 250 desert night race, where we finished last because I’m an idiot, we had a problem with an oil leak that required us to add a quart of oil every 40 mile loop of the course. In a regular car, that’s reason enough to pull the car over and call the mechanic, but this is racing and you just put more oil in until you finish the race or the big red light comes on and stays on. We opted for the former.

Anyway, so now it’s two weeks later and we got under the car and figured out that the majority of the leak came from a failed valve cover gasket. Richard and Scott swapped it out for a new one and then Crusty (seen in the above video) followed out with swapping out our yellow rubber oil lines with braided steel ones. Much stronger and they look cooler, too.

Probably tomorrow I’ll get the new radio mast from Skid and we’ll see what kind of range we can get between the car and the pit radio.

Three weeks to the Hawthorne 250.

Crusty and Scott, hauling the mail at the Fallon 250.

This is a screen capture from the Bower Media coverage of the Fallon 250. Many thanks to Two Larrys & A Megan Racing for bringing this to my attention.

Here’s their video of the race. The good stuff happens 41 seconds in:

I credit clean living with our two point stranglehold in season points.

VORRA posted season points post Fallon 250 and for some reason that probably requires long math, we’re still in first place, albeit by two whole points. Hawthorne should be a fun time.

If you can close your eyes and imagine Bob “Busboy Bob” Russell as Ken Block and me as Alex Gelsomino (except without the cool accent), this is pretty much what it sounds like inside the car when we’re racing. Also, we’re not going that fast, we’re not usually around trees, and our car doesn’t look anywhere that cool. We do drive through cattle guards, though.

The VORRA Hawthorne 250 is Labor Day weekend.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the dust devil that ripped through our camp, pinning Crusty under a shade structure, or me being so delirious from the heat that I keep filming rather than rescue him.

The Koenig Racing Total Chaos team is the best. I greatly appreciate their friendship and support. So I’m shocked…SHOCKED…that they have to blow past us in this otherwise awesome-tastic video from the VORRA Fallon 250 desert night race.

That’s us at about 2:19 into the video getting our doors blown off. We’re the ones who look like one of those flying saucers from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Anyone can show you race footage. We’re showing you the behind the scenes footage of what happens before the race footage. Mostly its banging on the hood of the car and people pointing at you telling you where to put the car.

Richard and I returning from tech inspection at the VORRA Fallon 250 desert night race. Playing with the HD Flip camera. Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out.

We make a cameo appearance in this video from Two Larrys Racing shot at the April Prairie City short course race.

Bill is stuck in the Philippines because of a typhoon and won’t be back in time for the race. Here’s our current driver/co-driver lineup for this Saturday night’s race. We start at 6 p.m. and have until 3 a.m. to complete six 40 mile loops.

Pre-running
Richard / Crusty in 1107 Friday
Scott / Bob on Saturday

Lap 1
Scott / Crusty

Lap 2
Crusty / Scott

Lap 3
Bob / Richard

Lap 4
Richard / Bob

Lap 5
Scott / Jim

Lap 6
Scott / Jim

Finish line / pancakes

This is pretty much “Dust to Glory” packed into five minutes.

For some unknown reason, one of our GoPro cameras started recording upside down and it took me months to figure out how to fix it. Mostly months because I forgot about it and then about 10 minutes of Googling to solve the problem, courtesy of Quicktime Pro.

This is Richard and me at the start of the Yerington 300. In this video you see us standing around, get buckled in, I fiddle with my iPhone, we fist-bump and at some point pass a Class 9 car. That’s pretty much desert racing in a nutshell.

Coming up the weekend of July 16-18 – The Fallon 250 Desert Night Race.

Since I forgot to turn the camera on for the actual race, here’s video of us pre-running the Xtreme Outlaws 250. Cursed road hooligan Weasel in the red Petfinder Class 11 cuts in front of us without signaling, then we promptly get stuck in the silt and get towed out by a Hummer. Then Roger Norman in the No. 8 trophy truck blows our doors off.

Team meeting tonight. Two page agenda.