ODO: 315,043
In case you were curious, we’re still running 10+ hour days, and the weather is just lovely.
Part II Of our spotlight on pre-running continues now:
We do not pre-run fast. Sometimes pre-running feels like punishment. Sometimes we ask ourselves WTF are we doing out here. Sometimes we go through sections of racecourse at 10mph beating ourselves, and the truck, to death, knowing that in the racecar we’ll likely be going 50 or 60mph. This is life pre-running in a truck that is just as suited to a Home Depot run as pre-running goat trails in Baja. Don’t get me wrong, Justin’s truck is a legitimately badass truck, but there’s only so much you can do with a 8,500lb solid axle one ton truck.
As it turns out, there’s only so much that cheap cast aluminum Raceline wheels will put up with under such a truck as well. We were bumping along one section, bouncing between 5 and 50mph, between nasty rocks, silt, some fast two track, and sections that we refer to as “baby’s head hell”. We cleared a section of baby’s heads and transitioned to a little fast section when all of a sudden, BANG! I checked the mirror real quick and, well, all I saw was disappointment. We both assumed we caught a rock that neither of us saw and destroyed a sidewall. What we actually found once we got out and looked was, well, something else. In front of me was an entirely intact tire, and pieces of wheel, both big and small, scattered over about 100yds of road. The only thing we can figure, is that we drove over a section of smooth rocks, and one of them rolled up in JUST the exact, precise, perfectly wrong way that it smacked the edge of the inner bead of the wheel and instantly shattered it. That, or, the wheel was made up entirely of micro-cracks and it was just its time.
Either way, there we are with a mess on our hands. I feared the worst. A 40” tire and huge chunks of aluminum flailing around uncontrollably in close proximity to brake lines, bypass shocks, ABS sensors, etc, and NOTHING was touched. Throw the spare on and we’re back to 100%??? Neither of us could have dreamt to have been so lucky. Another fun fact about Home Depot truck pre-runners is that they only carry one spare. There’s no Trophy Truck spare tire rack on the back, and no chase truck waiting for us at the end of this section ready to re-rack a spare for us. Thus began the search for a spare wheel. We “took it easy” on the tires for the next day or two until we were able to borrow a wheel from a fellow race team. Come to find out, that tire did have a hole in its sidewall, but I’m pretty sure that hole was put there by the broken wheel. A Mexican sidewall patch and a borrowed wheel had us back up and running at near-100%.
Silt beds galore. We had the pleasure this race to run through some of the worst silty sections Baja has to offer. If you’re unfamiliar, silt is a desert phenomenon that can be particularly prominent in Baja, where a certain type of dirt, under the right conditions, gets churned up into an extremely fine powder, think talcum or baby powder. Sometimes you can go around it, sometimes you can blast through it blindly, sometimes its just your turn in the barrel. Unless you’ve seen it first hand, you likely wouldn’t believe me if I told you how deep these ruts can get, and how miserable it can be. Needless to say, Home Depot trucks don’t love going through 3ft deep ruts. The interesting wrinkle of these particular silt beds in our section of race course is that it goes through the trees. There is no blasting around the edge for the safety of hard packed dirt. We spent hours, and HOURS, pre-running 20 miles looking for little alternate lines here and there, mapping out dangers and day-enders. We got stuck several times and broke the truck once.
Stop back next week for part 3!
