Brian Ellinger
03-07-2009, 12:27 AM
Ill try to keep this reasonable length...but I doubt it will happen!
First, back to the time when we get a spot to run our Ftoy in the Race.
Ideas were thrown around. Everything from a 200hp turbo motor dropped in, bypasses, air bumps, full hydro steering, tires, bigger diffs were all thrown around. We had to consider, than NONE of these changes would be useable in comps afterwards, only trail riding (FTOY rules). Then reality bit us, and we realized "cool we'll buy airbumps, and tuneable shocks, but we dont have the terrain, let alone the time to tune them!" So out the door that went. The cooling system had given us issues previously, so the motor went out the window shortly after. We finally settled on running what we knew would hold together, and survive, but we felt, with the level of competition we were up against, we weren't shooting for top 10, just a finish.
Time goes by, Halloween comes, we swap in some longer rear springs, do a little testing on those, and park the rig again.
More time goes by, and January shows up, and passes. Weekends in February get filled in with what we all know as "Thrash fests" I hate these as much as the next guy, but we'd made a promise to be there, and wanted to run this race more than anything else this season. Sacrifices were made by everyone involved (you all know how this goes) Finally we crashed through the list of must-haves for running legal, must do for not breaking in the first 20 miles, and somethings were left out, and "hope that doesnt fall off!"
One key item to everything, we felt, was getting a spare tire on the back (for ballast more than anything) and getting it mounted low, along with a new fuel cell, and the battery. Our ftoy runs ~2700 lbs, and 500 different front to rear, so the tire was key to getting 60-80 lbs back there. To keep the tire low, we kept trying to stuff it into the chassis-to-frame gap. No tire was fitting, no matter flat, vacuumed, full or otherwise. Finally, I recalled I had a 34x9.50 TSL hanging out. While it now measures ~32, much smaller than the 37's on the car, it would be better than driving on a wheel, and we'd have a full size spare available in the pits.
I arrived on the lakebed, fresh lexan in hand, picked up stickers from Rockstomper, proceeded to paint panels, and stick on the steekers. Register, meet a few folks, and prerun chasing around the Rockstomper car. He's only running 3x the HP, 1.5 times the weight, rear steer, coilovers, airbumps, and 42's. We'll play chase! That worked out well and we preran all the desert sections over te next couple days.
Race day came, and we'd be having a low/spongy brake pedal. Always figured it was due to redoing the back of the car, and never really bleeding the brakes. So we bled the brakes, seemed to still be low, but better. Probably air in the master, and we didnt want to hold anything up, so put the car in the starting order. I just figured if the brakes annoyed me too much, we'll bleed them at the first pit.
Jeepspeed team 1706 help us out with a loaned firesuit for Shane, the co-driver, and a radio to be able to talk to main camp. The GPS we're running cannot be downloaded to, and only got used to prerun the middle section of desert. So we're more/less running blind.
Race starts, Haines smokes us, and I dont think we saw him again! We started seeing rigs pulled off VERY early on. Again, we were running to finish, so settled into "running a marathon, slow down, take it easy pace" "Just another day at the hammers we said" Naturally, we got passed by several rigs before, and on Melville. Kept cruising along, and got into the rougher whooped out sections. As we all know, there are lots of smaller ones, then bigger ones thrown in. As I found the brakes felt terrible, and just werent slowing the buggy much at all! This forced downshifting to do 90% of the slowing effort. Naturally that forced me to drive slower in the smoother sections as well. "No big deal" I thought to myself, "Get the master bled at pit 1, and make up some time". After pasing broken/overheated rigs, and being passed by several others, 23 miles go by, and we pull into pit 1.
"Top up the fuel, and the brakes feel terrible!" Our Homegrown buddies get after the fuel, and Scott and Jeepspeed crew look at the brakes. Scott tells me no leaks. "I think the master's got air in it" At that time I happened to hit the pedal, he finds we're pushing fluid out of a flare, and find the front brake line busted. "Forget it, its a race, we'll see in in 40 miles" and headed back to the course, knowing we had minimal brakes, and some big drops to do.
Pass by a car-b-q, and just feel sick to my stomach seeing all that go up in flames. Head into Aftershock, and shortly into a traffic jam. We've got rigs behind us, and didnt see a way around, so we just hang out for a bit. ~20 minutes, and vehicles start clearing up, we grab a line, work on it a bit, and get though. At the top, a cluster. Someone on their sid, no one really moving. No way around we can see. Again wait for little break, head into the start of the boulder field, and very soon, hop up on the hill on one side, get around a couple, a quick turn, back into gibson 3 times, and out of the trail we go! I did notice, when I tired to do a rear burn, buth rear tires werent turning...
We've got a detroit fron, and ARB rear, somethings wrong with locker. On our way to Sunbonnet, Shane plays with switches. Finds we're not get the the "psssh" when you turn the locker off, so we dont have air. 1/2 way up Sunbonnet, we find a nice sandy spot, and stop to investigate. As best we determined, we've got no pressure switch. So, we wire power to a switch, and straight to the compressor (A/C compressor) Now, with no gauge we can see on the system, we have to somehow keep between 40-100psi in the system for the locker to work! So the prcedure becase flip on compressor for 2 seconds, flip on locker. When we got nervous about how much pressure was in the system, just turn the locker on/off a bunch to bleed off pressure!
At this point we're running with minimal brakes, screwy air system, and our shocks have gotten so hot they just as well should have been taken off for less weight!
We find a traffic jam at the end of Sunbonnet, and ~8 rigs stuck in it or waiting for clearing. A winch point is being setup. I knew we were runnig slow already, and wanting to pass, found a route taking a trip up the hillside, and next to the trail for ~100 yards parrelleling, before dropping back in. This worked excellently!
Next up, cruise through bfg pit, dent the frame and chassis up in Outer Limits and bit, play pogo-stick in the desert somemor (remember those faded shocks!) Then see how fun dropping Resolution/Backdoor is with lousy brakes! Fortunately that went smoothly, other than sucking some air and trying to starve of fuel almost at the top of Resolution. We're only running a 9.5 gallon tank (4 cylinder after all) but sucked 6-7 allons out of it, so it started getting a bit annoyed!
As for cooling, we'd managed to see ~220, and I think breiefly 230. But as soon as we started heading downhill, everything cooled down rather quickly, back to ~180. We were both happy to see this, especially since were only running a 16x20 single core radiator!
After falling down Backdoor, we headed for fuel again, back to the Jeepspeed/Interco pit. It was nice to take a bit of a break for fueling, and drink of water! At this point, the top 4 finishers had already finished!
Out to some rock trails, bounce up, bounce down. We missed the turn to Jack, and had to back track after verifying the course with the Jeepspeed radio! Heading up Sledge Shane and I were both hoping the last leg of the course was marked well, since the GPS had been useless to us since before Outer Limits!
Fortunately we followed the course very easily until we hit the sand wash. At that point there was a vehicle we'd caught up to nearly. Yay, someone to follow in, sure hope thats not a spectator! We followed them in, until we were headed straight for the lakebed, then passed. It was Brandon from HMF who'd passed us earlier! Thanks Brandon! A final jump of the poor buggy at the berm before the finish line, and we were done! 9 hours, and 20 minutes later we finished, and beat 70% of the rigs that entered!
First, back to the time when we get a spot to run our Ftoy in the Race.
Ideas were thrown around. Everything from a 200hp turbo motor dropped in, bypasses, air bumps, full hydro steering, tires, bigger diffs were all thrown around. We had to consider, than NONE of these changes would be useable in comps afterwards, only trail riding (FTOY rules). Then reality bit us, and we realized "cool we'll buy airbumps, and tuneable shocks, but we dont have the terrain, let alone the time to tune them!" So out the door that went. The cooling system had given us issues previously, so the motor went out the window shortly after. We finally settled on running what we knew would hold together, and survive, but we felt, with the level of competition we were up against, we weren't shooting for top 10, just a finish.
Time goes by, Halloween comes, we swap in some longer rear springs, do a little testing on those, and park the rig again.
More time goes by, and January shows up, and passes. Weekends in February get filled in with what we all know as "Thrash fests" I hate these as much as the next guy, but we'd made a promise to be there, and wanted to run this race more than anything else this season. Sacrifices were made by everyone involved (you all know how this goes) Finally we crashed through the list of must-haves for running legal, must do for not breaking in the first 20 miles, and somethings were left out, and "hope that doesnt fall off!"
One key item to everything, we felt, was getting a spare tire on the back (for ballast more than anything) and getting it mounted low, along with a new fuel cell, and the battery. Our ftoy runs ~2700 lbs, and 500 different front to rear, so the tire was key to getting 60-80 lbs back there. To keep the tire low, we kept trying to stuff it into the chassis-to-frame gap. No tire was fitting, no matter flat, vacuumed, full or otherwise. Finally, I recalled I had a 34x9.50 TSL hanging out. While it now measures ~32, much smaller than the 37's on the car, it would be better than driving on a wheel, and we'd have a full size spare available in the pits.
I arrived on the lakebed, fresh lexan in hand, picked up stickers from Rockstomper, proceeded to paint panels, and stick on the steekers. Register, meet a few folks, and prerun chasing around the Rockstomper car. He's only running 3x the HP, 1.5 times the weight, rear steer, coilovers, airbumps, and 42's. We'll play chase! That worked out well and we preran all the desert sections over te next couple days.
Race day came, and we'd be having a low/spongy brake pedal. Always figured it was due to redoing the back of the car, and never really bleeding the brakes. So we bled the brakes, seemed to still be low, but better. Probably air in the master, and we didnt want to hold anything up, so put the car in the starting order. I just figured if the brakes annoyed me too much, we'll bleed them at the first pit.
Jeepspeed team 1706 help us out with a loaned firesuit for Shane, the co-driver, and a radio to be able to talk to main camp. The GPS we're running cannot be downloaded to, and only got used to prerun the middle section of desert. So we're more/less running blind.
Race starts, Haines smokes us, and I dont think we saw him again! We started seeing rigs pulled off VERY early on. Again, we were running to finish, so settled into "running a marathon, slow down, take it easy pace" "Just another day at the hammers we said" Naturally, we got passed by several rigs before, and on Melville. Kept cruising along, and got into the rougher whooped out sections. As we all know, there are lots of smaller ones, then bigger ones thrown in. As I found the brakes felt terrible, and just werent slowing the buggy much at all! This forced downshifting to do 90% of the slowing effort. Naturally that forced me to drive slower in the smoother sections as well. "No big deal" I thought to myself, "Get the master bled at pit 1, and make up some time". After pasing broken/overheated rigs, and being passed by several others, 23 miles go by, and we pull into pit 1.
"Top up the fuel, and the brakes feel terrible!" Our Homegrown buddies get after the fuel, and Scott and Jeepspeed crew look at the brakes. Scott tells me no leaks. "I think the master's got air in it" At that time I happened to hit the pedal, he finds we're pushing fluid out of a flare, and find the front brake line busted. "Forget it, its a race, we'll see in in 40 miles" and headed back to the course, knowing we had minimal brakes, and some big drops to do.
Pass by a car-b-q, and just feel sick to my stomach seeing all that go up in flames. Head into Aftershock, and shortly into a traffic jam. We've got rigs behind us, and didnt see a way around, so we just hang out for a bit. ~20 minutes, and vehicles start clearing up, we grab a line, work on it a bit, and get though. At the top, a cluster. Someone on their sid, no one really moving. No way around we can see. Again wait for little break, head into the start of the boulder field, and very soon, hop up on the hill on one side, get around a couple, a quick turn, back into gibson 3 times, and out of the trail we go! I did notice, when I tired to do a rear burn, buth rear tires werent turning...
We've got a detroit fron, and ARB rear, somethings wrong with locker. On our way to Sunbonnet, Shane plays with switches. Finds we're not get the the "psssh" when you turn the locker off, so we dont have air. 1/2 way up Sunbonnet, we find a nice sandy spot, and stop to investigate. As best we determined, we've got no pressure switch. So, we wire power to a switch, and straight to the compressor (A/C compressor) Now, with no gauge we can see on the system, we have to somehow keep between 40-100psi in the system for the locker to work! So the prcedure becase flip on compressor for 2 seconds, flip on locker. When we got nervous about how much pressure was in the system, just turn the locker on/off a bunch to bleed off pressure!
At this point we're running with minimal brakes, screwy air system, and our shocks have gotten so hot they just as well should have been taken off for less weight!
We find a traffic jam at the end of Sunbonnet, and ~8 rigs stuck in it or waiting for clearing. A winch point is being setup. I knew we were runnig slow already, and wanting to pass, found a route taking a trip up the hillside, and next to the trail for ~100 yards parrelleling, before dropping back in. This worked excellently!
Next up, cruise through bfg pit, dent the frame and chassis up in Outer Limits and bit, play pogo-stick in the desert somemor (remember those faded shocks!) Then see how fun dropping Resolution/Backdoor is with lousy brakes! Fortunately that went smoothly, other than sucking some air and trying to starve of fuel almost at the top of Resolution. We're only running a 9.5 gallon tank (4 cylinder after all) but sucked 6-7 allons out of it, so it started getting a bit annoyed!
As for cooling, we'd managed to see ~220, and I think breiefly 230. But as soon as we started heading downhill, everything cooled down rather quickly, back to ~180. We were both happy to see this, especially since were only running a 16x20 single core radiator!
After falling down Backdoor, we headed for fuel again, back to the Jeepspeed/Interco pit. It was nice to take a bit of a break for fueling, and drink of water! At this point, the top 4 finishers had already finished!
Out to some rock trails, bounce up, bounce down. We missed the turn to Jack, and had to back track after verifying the course with the Jeepspeed radio! Heading up Sledge Shane and I were both hoping the last leg of the course was marked well, since the GPS had been useless to us since before Outer Limits!
Fortunately we followed the course very easily until we hit the sand wash. At that point there was a vehicle we'd caught up to nearly. Yay, someone to follow in, sure hope thats not a spectator! We followed them in, until we were headed straight for the lakebed, then passed. It was Brandon from HMF who'd passed us earlier! Thanks Brandon! A final jump of the poor buggy at the berm before the finish line, and we were done! 9 hours, and 20 minutes later we finished, and beat 70% of the rigs that entered!