- Aug 25, 2014
- 6,359
- 7,091
Death Race 2019
- Thread starter Zambo
- Start date
- Aug 1, 2018
- 7,699
- 12,435
...updates?
- Jun 12, 2014
- 12,947
- 32,639
Founding Member
Sorry for the lack of updates. There is just no time. Done with the race. Had some crazy issues right at the first leg that haunted us the whole time. Starting the long drive back from Cabo tomorrow and will write a full report with pics when I get home on Sunday. Another crazy race and many stories of adventure. We didn’t win but we put on a good show.
- Aug 1, 2018
- 7,699
- 12,435
Glad everybody is safe!
- Oct 9, 2014
- 537
- 668
Looking forward to the stories and pics. Congrats on the good showing.
- Jun 12, 2014
- 12,947
- 32,639
Founding Member
Well we headed down last Saturday morning. I felt like we were as prepared as ever for one of these races, with the car being ready, chase vehicles loaded smartly with tools, spares, and consumables, and a good plan in place for the race. Baja definitely has a way of messing with any plans you've made however.
Tech inspection and registration went smoothly and we started the race Sunday morning with me driving and Max navigating. We were first off the line in our class of 25 cars. I was laying down a pretty good pace and had already passed about a dozen slower vehicles from previous classes.
About 40 miles or so into the race, I was pulling up behind another vehicle when we entered a very silty area. For those not familiar with silt, its basically brown talcum powder. Super soft stuff that makes a cloud of dust when you drive through it. The car in front made such a cloud and we were totally blind. Could not even see the instrument panel, much less anything in front of us. I was on the brakes but we drifted just off the side of the road and unfortunately there was a small embankment there. We came to a stop on the side of the embankment and I thought for a second we were ok, but then the car tipped over and was laying on the driver's side. Damn. We hopped out real quick and got the tow strap hooked to the cage and shortly thereafter another car came along and pulled us back on our wheels. No real damage to the car and we lost about 15 minutes or so. This turned out to be the least of our worries.
About 15 miles later we hit the highway for a short splash transit section. We took a quick splash of fuel from our chase truck and took off, but before we even got back to the dirt the car was overheating. We stopped and the chase truck came to us. Water from the cooling system was pouring out of the car between the engine an the driver compartment. We had to take the skid plate off just to see where it was coming from. Turns out there is a plastic tee fitting which also holds the thermostat in there, and it was cracked. Never dreamed such a thing would fail like that so I didn't have a spare. We took the tee fitting out of the car and patched it up as best we could with some epoxy, then we reinstalled it and put some stop-leak in the radiator. It plugged up enough for us to run again but the whole fiasco cost us another 2 hours and with it, any shot at winning this race.
We got to San Felipe without further incident and I was determined to figure out a more permanent fix to the cooling problem. However, when we got to the hotel we noticed that one of the front drive axles was pulling out of the front differential. These were aftermarket axles that were supposed to be "better and stronger" than the stock axles. Right. Kicking myself from using these things without doing extensive testing first. So we took the front end apart to install stock axles on the car and that's when we noticed that both front wheel bearing has been shoved outboard, past the circlips which hold them into the knuckles. Great!
All we could do was take the knuckles off the car, find a place with a hydraulic press, and push them back in the knuckles and hope for the best. It took a couple hours to do all this but we got it done. In any event, once those things got pushed out the first time, the groove which holds the circlip was mangled so keeping them from popping out again would prove to be a challenge. After we got everything back together I didn't have any time to address the cooling issue that night.The next morning Rudy and I went into town and bought some plastic fittings and whatever we could find for the cooling system. Then we went to a radiator shop and had them make a tee fitting for us by brazing two pieces of steel tubing together. We took that stuff with us in the chase trucks to have for later. I took Leekster with me on the short first race stage, which was only 19 miles. We passed car after car, but mostly because we had to start in the back of the field due to our poor overall time on day 1. There were sections where I could have been doing over 80mph but had to cruise along at 55 in order to keep the temp from getting too hot. I gave the car to Rudy near Gonzaga Bay and he had the same issue, however since we were still able to go at a good pace through the choppy sections we still put down a halfway decent time so we wouldn't have to start in the back again the next day.
That night in Bay of LA we pulled the skid plate off again and I replaced the plastic thermostat housing with the steel fittings we had made earlier that day. It worked like a champ...no leaks anywhere and the car ran a lot cooler. BOLA is a really remote village on the Sea of Cortez, and you are lucky if you get even a single room to stay in. Ordinarily in such a situation, some guys would just camp outside but it was super windy as always and sand was blowing everywhere so we just made do with the limited space inside.
Day 3 is always the longest, hardest day of the race...over 400 miles and very little ability to chase the race car because it goes so far away from the highway. Rudy and Eddie did the first section and were barely able to make it to the volunteer-run pit stop before running out of gas. The car was still running a bit hot when they got to the highway so as a last resort we took the lightbar off the front bumper to give it more airflow. That worked like a champ and the car never got hot again no matter how hard we drove it. I took off with Jack to do the longest stage of the race....208 miles to Loreto. We had zero issues on that leg and our time of 4:15 was only ten minutes behind the fastest car in our class.
In Loreto we got to our hotel and inspected the car and I noticed that the front axle was a little loose in the differential so we took the front hubs off again and found the wheel bearing had worked their way out the same way they had before. So we took the whole front end apart again and found another press to push the bearing back into the knuckles. Also, I didn't like how much slop was in the front differential where that axle pops in, so we pulled the diff out and installed the spare I had brought along. By the time we got done doing that, Rudy had returned with the knuckles and we got it all buttoned back up again.
The next day I let Max drive the car with Rudy navigating for him and he did pretty good for an east coast guy that doesn't normally race. He was about 5 minutes behind the leader on his fairly short stage, which is fine for us since we were really out of the running after the disasterous day 1. I got in the car with Leekster to do 180 miles to La Paz, and we railed it pretty good although still fairly conservative. We spent almost 30 miles in the dust of one truck who wouldn't move over....either he never knew we were behind him or he didn't care. The way its supposed to work when you catch somebody on a narrow trail is you hit the alerting button on our tracking device and it signals the car in front to move over. His stuff might not have been working but it was pretty frustrating. Eventually we got around and then wound up dicing with one of the class leaders the rest of the way. We got around him at one point and beat him to the volunteer pit, but the volunteers pitted him faster than us and he pulled out right in front of us. Then a couple miles down the road while I was trying to get back around him, our fuel cap came off since the guy in the pit didn't put it back on correctly. Thankfully I had it tethered to the car and we noticed it bouncing around, plus we could smell the fuel spilling out of the tank. So we had to stop for a minute to put it back on, then finished the stage without further incident.
In La Paz, we once again inspected everything and once again, found the wheel bearing pushing out. So once again, we took the whole front end apart and I found a couple of locals who were happy to take me to a shop that had a press to push them back in. By this time everybody was pretty good at this operation so we had the car back together pretty quickly.
The final day to Cabo was two short sections, each about 60 miles long. Rudy drove the first section with Eddie and put down a respectable time. I got in the car with Jack for the final run. This had been a really frustrating race for me so far because I wanted at least a podium finish if not a class win, and we had spent the entire time basically running with the leaders' pace but dealing with the 2 hour time lost on the first day. So no matter what, the best we were going to get in this race was 8th or 9th place in class, which I couldn't really care less about. So I just decided to see what the car would do if I drove it hard all the way.
I knew the leaders would be going as hard as they could since there was only 4 minutes separating the 1st and 2nd place car and the 3rd car only a few more minutes behind that. So I felt like comparing my time to their would be a valid test of the true capability of the car. Jack and I took off and just poured it on. He was navigating his ass off for me and doing a great job. Even though only a few cars started that stage in front of us, all of them fast cars, we were still passing people at a pretty good clip. Then about 20 miles into the stage I went through a fairly benign looking dip but there must have been a rock or something in the bottom because when the suspension compressed during the G-out, we felt the back end of the car bottom out hard. Everything was running normally though so we kept pushing. A little over 30 miles into the section, I was making a right turn up a pretty good hill climb when all of a sudden the transmission just exploded. A very nasty sound which I won't soon forget. I was praying that we had just blown the drive belt, which is sort of like the chain on a bike and you can replace it. But the belt was fine. Evidently the hard bottom-out from earlier had caused a small crack in the case and the gear oil slowly drained out of the trans. Then everything got hot and it all just grenaded in spectacular fashion.
We had no cell service there or radio comm due to line of sight issues, so I broke out the satellite phone and called my guys. They figured out a good access road about 15 miles from our position and drove in to where we were stuck. We put the car on a tow strap and dragged it back out to the highway and winched it onto the trailer. Then we headed into Cabo and got drunk.
At first you might think it is a huge crushing blow to break that close to the finish and to an extent that's true, but for the the crushing blow was really when the cooling system took a dump on day 1. Running basically the entire race knowing that your aren't even going to be on the podium is pretty depressing as far as the race goes. Frankly, I can take my car to Baja any weekend and just cruise down these roads and never have an issue breaking anything. So I don't feel bad about going hammer down on the last leg even though it cost us the finish. On the other hand, just being down there and doing this kind of thing with my buddies who are all great dudes is a huge reward. In the end we did some pretty good stuff to keep racing through some issues that would have sidelined a lot of lesser teams. And we raced every stage of the race, with the car still going fast all the way to that point at the very end.
Max and I made the pull back to San Diego in a day and a half. The whole team is back stateside safe and sound with some more cool stories for the resume. I gotta pull the whole car apart again and fix everything we broke, but first I think I'll take a bit of a break. I'm a little tired.
Tech inspection and registration went smoothly and we started the race Sunday morning with me driving and Max navigating. We were first off the line in our class of 25 cars. I was laying down a pretty good pace and had already passed about a dozen slower vehicles from previous classes.
About 40 miles or so into the race, I was pulling up behind another vehicle when we entered a very silty area. For those not familiar with silt, its basically brown talcum powder. Super soft stuff that makes a cloud of dust when you drive through it. The car in front made such a cloud and we were totally blind. Could not even see the instrument panel, much less anything in front of us. I was on the brakes but we drifted just off the side of the road and unfortunately there was a small embankment there. We came to a stop on the side of the embankment and I thought for a second we were ok, but then the car tipped over and was laying on the driver's side. Damn. We hopped out real quick and got the tow strap hooked to the cage and shortly thereafter another car came along and pulled us back on our wheels. No real damage to the car and we lost about 15 minutes or so. This turned out to be the least of our worries.
About 15 miles later we hit the highway for a short splash transit section. We took a quick splash of fuel from our chase truck and took off, but before we even got back to the dirt the car was overheating. We stopped and the chase truck came to us. Water from the cooling system was pouring out of the car between the engine an the driver compartment. We had to take the skid plate off just to see where it was coming from. Turns out there is a plastic tee fitting which also holds the thermostat in there, and it was cracked. Never dreamed such a thing would fail like that so I didn't have a spare. We took the tee fitting out of the car and patched it up as best we could with some epoxy, then we reinstalled it and put some stop-leak in the radiator. It plugged up enough for us to run again but the whole fiasco cost us another 2 hours and with it, any shot at winning this race.
We got to San Felipe without further incident and I was determined to figure out a more permanent fix to the cooling problem. However, when we got to the hotel we noticed that one of the front drive axles was pulling out of the front differential. These were aftermarket axles that were supposed to be "better and stronger" than the stock axles. Right. Kicking myself from using these things without doing extensive testing first. So we took the front end apart to install stock axles on the car and that's when we noticed that both front wheel bearing has been shoved outboard, past the circlips which hold them into the knuckles. Great!
All we could do was take the knuckles off the car, find a place with a hydraulic press, and push them back in the knuckles and hope for the best. It took a couple hours to do all this but we got it done. In any event, once those things got pushed out the first time, the groove which holds the circlip was mangled so keeping them from popping out again would prove to be a challenge. After we got everything back together I didn't have any time to address the cooling issue that night.The next morning Rudy and I went into town and bought some plastic fittings and whatever we could find for the cooling system. Then we went to a radiator shop and had them make a tee fitting for us by brazing two pieces of steel tubing together. We took that stuff with us in the chase trucks to have for later. I took Leekster with me on the short first race stage, which was only 19 miles. We passed car after car, but mostly because we had to start in the back of the field due to our poor overall time on day 1. There were sections where I could have been doing over 80mph but had to cruise along at 55 in order to keep the temp from getting too hot. I gave the car to Rudy near Gonzaga Bay and he had the same issue, however since we were still able to go at a good pace through the choppy sections we still put down a halfway decent time so we wouldn't have to start in the back again the next day.
That night in Bay of LA we pulled the skid plate off again and I replaced the plastic thermostat housing with the steel fittings we had made earlier that day. It worked like a champ...no leaks anywhere and the car ran a lot cooler. BOLA is a really remote village on the Sea of Cortez, and you are lucky if you get even a single room to stay in. Ordinarily in such a situation, some guys would just camp outside but it was super windy as always and sand was blowing everywhere so we just made do with the limited space inside.
Day 3 is always the longest, hardest day of the race...over 400 miles and very little ability to chase the race car because it goes so far away from the highway. Rudy and Eddie did the first section and were barely able to make it to the volunteer-run pit stop before running out of gas. The car was still running a bit hot when they got to the highway so as a last resort we took the lightbar off the front bumper to give it more airflow. That worked like a champ and the car never got hot again no matter how hard we drove it. I took off with Jack to do the longest stage of the race....208 miles to Loreto. We had zero issues on that leg and our time of 4:15 was only ten minutes behind the fastest car in our class.
In Loreto we got to our hotel and inspected the car and I noticed that the front axle was a little loose in the differential so we took the front hubs off again and found the wheel bearing had worked their way out the same way they had before. So we took the whole front end apart again and found another press to push the bearing back into the knuckles. Also, I didn't like how much slop was in the front differential where that axle pops in, so we pulled the diff out and installed the spare I had brought along. By the time we got done doing that, Rudy had returned with the knuckles and we got it all buttoned back up again.
The next day I let Max drive the car with Rudy navigating for him and he did pretty good for an east coast guy that doesn't normally race. He was about 5 minutes behind the leader on his fairly short stage, which is fine for us since we were really out of the running after the disasterous day 1. I got in the car with Leekster to do 180 miles to La Paz, and we railed it pretty good although still fairly conservative. We spent almost 30 miles in the dust of one truck who wouldn't move over....either he never knew we were behind him or he didn't care. The way its supposed to work when you catch somebody on a narrow trail is you hit the alerting button on our tracking device and it signals the car in front to move over. His stuff might not have been working but it was pretty frustrating. Eventually we got around and then wound up dicing with one of the class leaders the rest of the way. We got around him at one point and beat him to the volunteer pit, but the volunteers pitted him faster than us and he pulled out right in front of us. Then a couple miles down the road while I was trying to get back around him, our fuel cap came off since the guy in the pit didn't put it back on correctly. Thankfully I had it tethered to the car and we noticed it bouncing around, plus we could smell the fuel spilling out of the tank. So we had to stop for a minute to put it back on, then finished the stage without further incident.
In La Paz, we once again inspected everything and once again, found the wheel bearing pushing out. So once again, we took the whole front end apart and I found a couple of locals who were happy to take me to a shop that had a press to push them back in. By this time everybody was pretty good at this operation so we had the car back together pretty quickly.
The final day to Cabo was two short sections, each about 60 miles long. Rudy drove the first section with Eddie and put down a respectable time. I got in the car with Jack for the final run. This had been a really frustrating race for me so far because I wanted at least a podium finish if not a class win, and we had spent the entire time basically running with the leaders' pace but dealing with the 2 hour time lost on the first day. So no matter what, the best we were going to get in this race was 8th or 9th place in class, which I couldn't really care less about. So I just decided to see what the car would do if I drove it hard all the way.
I knew the leaders would be going as hard as they could since there was only 4 minutes separating the 1st and 2nd place car and the 3rd car only a few more minutes behind that. So I felt like comparing my time to their would be a valid test of the true capability of the car. Jack and I took off and just poured it on. He was navigating his ass off for me and doing a great job. Even though only a few cars started that stage in front of us, all of them fast cars, we were still passing people at a pretty good clip. Then about 20 miles into the stage I went through a fairly benign looking dip but there must have been a rock or something in the bottom because when the suspension compressed during the G-out, we felt the back end of the car bottom out hard. Everything was running normally though so we kept pushing. A little over 30 miles into the section, I was making a right turn up a pretty good hill climb when all of a sudden the transmission just exploded. A very nasty sound which I won't soon forget. I was praying that we had just blown the drive belt, which is sort of like the chain on a bike and you can replace it. But the belt was fine. Evidently the hard bottom-out from earlier had caused a small crack in the case and the gear oil slowly drained out of the trans. Then everything got hot and it all just grenaded in spectacular fashion.
We had no cell service there or radio comm due to line of sight issues, so I broke out the satellite phone and called my guys. They figured out a good access road about 15 miles from our position and drove in to where we were stuck. We put the car on a tow strap and dragged it back out to the highway and winched it onto the trailer. Then we headed into Cabo and got drunk.
At first you might think it is a huge crushing blow to break that close to the finish and to an extent that's true, but for the the crushing blow was really when the cooling system took a dump on day 1. Running basically the entire race knowing that your aren't even going to be on the podium is pretty depressing as far as the race goes. Frankly, I can take my car to Baja any weekend and just cruise down these roads and never have an issue breaking anything. So I don't feel bad about going hammer down on the last leg even though it cost us the finish. On the other hand, just being down there and doing this kind of thing with my buddies who are all great dudes is a huge reward. In the end we did some pretty good stuff to keep racing through some issues that would have sidelined a lot of lesser teams. And we raced every stage of the race, with the car still going fast all the way to that point at the very end.
Max and I made the pull back to San Diego in a day and a half. The whole team is back stateside safe and sound with some more cool stories for the resume. I gotta pull the whole car apart again and fix everything we broke, but first I think I'll take a bit of a break. I'm a little tired.
- Dec 31, 2018
- 15,019
- 28,446
Best post I’ve read yet. If this doesn’t break a record for likes, there’s something seriously wrong with us.
- Dec 31, 2018
- 15,019
- 28,446
Awesome. Looking forward to it.
- Jun 11, 2014
- 11,023
- 12,243
Founding Member
What happens during the race when you have to poop?
- Sep 15, 2014
- 10,302
- 14,056
- Jun 11, 2014
- 11,023
- 12,243
Founding Member
Depends on what?
- Sep 15, 2014
- 10,302
- 14,056
Depends on Zambo :)
- Aug 1, 2018
- 7,699
- 12,435
Great post Zambo! Love all the detail. Can't believe you get to do this...so jelly.
- Jun 9, 2014
- 78,577
- 111,212
Founding Member
I dont really think he controls his poop like that.
Besides, I heard he has been known to poop where he sits then throws the poop at passing drivers.
- Aug 1, 2018
- 7,699
- 12,435
- Oct 15, 2014
- 12,201
- 17,005
