We did the race back in early May. I think Baja won this one
On the first stage I got behind another car trying to pass him. He kicked up a huge cloud of dust and we couldn't see past our own visors. The road made a small turn and before I could slow down enough we got the left wheels off the shoulder. We came to a stop and I thought we'd be okay, but then the car flopped over on its side. No damage to this kind of vehicle for something like that but we lost about 15 minutes getting it back on 4 wheels and underway again.
That was no big deal compared to what happened next. We got to the pit stop and the crew noticed fluid all over the back of the car. The motor was running hot too. It was from the radiator/cooling system. I had to shut it down and we had to pull a lot of stuff off the car to find the leak. Stupid plastic thermostat housing buried way in the bowels of the vehicle...total PITA to get to, plus I didn't have a spare because I never dreamed that thing would fail. We pulled it out and make the best repair possible with some stop-leak and epoxy. By the time we got the car back together and on the road we were already a couple hours down. So basically out of any chance of winning the race even though we still had 4 days to go. Of course the other cars could have problems too but with so many cars in the field there was no chance that they would all have that much down time.
That night we pulled stuff apart and found that the front wheel bearings were being pushed out of the knuckles. Had to take most of the front end apart, find a shop with a press to push the bearing back in the knuckles, and put everything back together again. This kept happening throughout the race. We had to do this big job on 3 of the 4 nights of the race. Aside from that, I found a radiator shop that made me a couple of tee fittings that I used to bypass the broken thermostat housing. The car ran a good pace the rest of the way but never fast enough to get near a podium finish.
On the last leg of the last day, I decided to just drive the car as hard as possible to the finish just to see how well we could do overall. I wanted to not only win the stage in our class (24 cars) but I wanted to see how we could do overall in the race. The previous year I finished this stage 10th overall out of about 200 cars and I wanted to top that this year. Well we were doing great, passing cars left and right on the 75 mile stage when I went through a small ditch a little too fast. The back of the car bottomed out pretty hard but other than that we kept up the fast pace. But then about 15 miles later, the transmission (which is in the back) just exploded. We were done. Evidently when I bottomed out it cracked the case of the trans, and the gear oil started seeping out. When the oil level got low enough everything inside got so hot that it finally grenaded.
Our guys found an access road and came in where we were and towed us out to the highway with a tow strap. Loaded the car on the trailer, got cleaned up in Cabo, drank a lot of booze and ate a lot of tacos that night telling stories and lies. Two days later back home safely in San Diego. Fun times as always but the first day was really a kick in the junk after all that prep and planning. There's another race in October, just a two day rally, hopefully we'll have better luck in that. Here is a video with footage and pics from this year's race: