Desert Dingo Racing

Here’s a quickie video of us prepping all the vehicles on Race Day morning. We all headed across town in a caravan around 10:15 to line up for an 11:30 a.m.-ish start.

The neighborhood kids would hang out with us. I took some photos. You can check out the gallery here.

We did our team briefing this morning with Seth, our logistics guy taking the lead. He mapped out fuel stops, who’s riding with whom, and a bajillion other details that only a guy like he could conceive, remember and then articulate to the rest of us sitting in plastic chairs in the barnyard.

Genas fabbed a new light bar for us and welded the mounts in place last night. Mike Taylor painted it this morning and a whole bunch of folks pitched in to install and rewire the lights after we got to our base of operations in Ensenada this afternoon.

We breezed through team registration this evening but encountered a hiccup with fuel distribution afterward. Terri with Sunoco has been great, and we’re meeting with Carlos of Baja Pits to iron out the rest of the details tomorrow morning. Richard and Cary get in line for roll cage inspection at oh dark early tomorrow, even though it only opens at 10 a.m.

Tomorrow we have our booth on Contingency Row with Norma Angelica Ramirez of the Asociacion Mexicana de Diabetes en Baja California, AC. We’ll be handing out the crayons and hero cards with the warning signs of diabetes printed on the back and literature provided by Norma.

Here’s a gallery of photos from last night’s work and this morning’s preparations. And, lastly, here’s a quick video of everyone hangout out at / working at Eric’s Tijuana workshop.

PS: Note to families and friends: Feel free to contact me, Roxanne Graham, at info@desertdingo.com, with your messages for the team or for anything when the race starts. I’ll post updates to the blog as I receive them once the Desert Dingos are on the road.

We crossed the border and made our way down the Highway 1 toll road to Rosarito, about half an hour south of Tijuana. Rosarito Beach is seeing its share of growth - with a new Home Depot and big box store complex on the north side of town - but for all intents and purposes, it’s still a small beach town.

We parked the RVs and trailered car in front of a Smart & Final and waited for Eric Solorzano, the nine-time Baja 1000 winner, who would take us to where we’d spend the night. We handed out a good number of hero cards and boxes of crayons to kids coming with their folks to the store.

Eric showed up after sunset and guided us to a yard big enough for all of our vehicles, including everyone coming in over the weekend and on Monday and Tuesday. It wasn’t til the next morning that I realized we were sharing it with two horses, three chickens, four dogs and were a block from the beach.

Midday Saturday we towed the car up to Eric’s shop in Tijuana and got to work. One of Eric’s suppliers is fabbing a set of brass braided brake shoes, so the car will stop as quickly as it accelerates. We’re moving the front shock reservoirs into the wheel wells so that they get more air (for cooling). Richard and Crusty tweaked the steering to maximize our left and right turning ability.

On Sunday they’ll add a short throw Empi shift with reverse lockout, complete welding on the left turn stop, install the shock reservoirs, and install a chain on the back of the motor fan shroud. I’ll probably play with the car cameras and load the detailed course data into the GPS unit. Seth, our head logistics and lead chase truck person, arrives today.

Here’s a gallery of photos from Saturday.

I accidently left the digital still camera at home, so decided to capture the final night of prep on the car with video. Richard, Dennis and I made a run up to Auburn to retrieve the trailer. Shawn completed the last of the painting and graphics. Bob, Scott and Cary did final buttoning up and then began pulling together all the spare parts and tools we’d be taking down with us. Elektra is headed to Sonoma today to pick up fuel cans we’re borrowing again from World Motorsports. Charlie even dropped by.

The car moves from San Jose to Felton this afternoon and we head out for Mexico at the crack of dawn Thursay.

Shawn and I (again, mostly Shawn) got started putting on sponsor decals and our numbers tonight. We needed to do some touch up on the paint, so we’ll finish it off tomorrow, after Richard and I return from Auburn with the trailer.

Two days to Mexico and counting. Photos of Shawn’s handiwork here.

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.

The video quality from the GoPro cameras is much better than you can tell from this clip. I’m testing different frame rates to figure out what we can get away with and still get decent video. This is 12 frames a second.

Here’s a view from the camera we’ll mount on the roof. We considered mounting it behind the driver and co-driver looking out the windshield, but the shot didn’t look good. Now it looks like we’ll go with it mounted on the roof, over the co-driver and between two of the night driving lights. This was rendered at 15 frames per second. In reality, the video is TV quality.

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 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.