The Wild West 100
This race was a butt kicker for sure. Glad we did it though, it put some new stressors on the car and the team and that is exactly what we needed.
We loaded up the truck and trailer and headed up on Thursday evening to allow ourselves a whole day of pre running and some time to work on minor changes the car may need. This proved to be very helpful.
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We spent most the morning get the car through tech, registering, setting up the tracker and getting a few last minute changes done to the car. By noon we were suited up and headed out for our first lap.
It was apparent the course was rough right of the bat. Hayden went out in his Tacoma to just follow us and have some fun in his taco but after about 2 miles decided it wasn't worth it. It wasn't hard by any means, but super bumpy, big dips, lots of branches and close trees and big nasty rocks in silt. So, you had to be careful about tire placement etc.
After the first lap the only adjustments we made was more preload to get the front end higher off the ground as we hit our front diff skid A LOT. This helped a ton. Then we headed out for the second lap of pre running. This is where about half way through the car started to feel real rough. We lost all dampening from the right rear. Limped it to pits and saw that we blew the cap off the resi. Snap ring and all, it just pushed out the aluminum housing.
So, we threw the 14" shock from Hayden's Tacoma in the race truck. By the time we were finished, pre-running was over and we just had to hope that it worked.
Race Day
The team got suited up at 8am so we could line up at 8:30.
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Chase Brock
Pulled up to staging and got in some last minute stretches
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Chase Brock
Then it was time to lineup and start the race.
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
Right away, you could tell that shock was WAY softer than the rest. Not setup for what we are doing at all. This proved to slow us down quite a bit. We hit that corner to full bump nearly every hard hit, and there were a lot of hard hits on this course.
Lap 1 was great for us. We made really good time on both cars that started in front of us and even got a pass in. We zoomed past pits on lap one and hunted for the leader on lap 2.
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
This is when we started to notice that the right rear was getting softer and softer and more and more harsh on bumps. We blamed shock fade, which it very well could have been. Then, after another hard hit, we heard a terrible rattle and banging. It sounded like a driveshaft bouncing around in a drive shaft loop. We decided to roll through pits at the end of the lap, so we limped it the last 2 miles of lap two.
Sure enough, as we pulled into pits, the checked the drive shaft and nothing, no problems. But, someone noticed the entire right rear shock tower was ripped off the frame. It turned out that the King we put in was about 1” longer than the Locked Offroad 14” short body shock we normally run. This caused us to be bumping on the shock and not using the entire hydro bump.
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock, on Flick
The pit crew thought fast and just removed the whole thing and sent us out on lap 3 with no shock on the right rear. It honestly did not feel terrible and we still were making really good time. We zoomed out of pits right behind a Bronco, eating their dust for about a ¼ mile before going through a marked caution and speeding up only to smash into a massive G out we did not have marked because normally it was super easy to see. Live and learn, mark EVERYTHING on the GPS. The truck took it like a champ though. It annihilated the front diff skid and bent the front cross member but we had no issues outside of that.
We kept cruising at a slower pace but still pacing towards a second place finish within our class. Which is not bad at all for who we were racing against. Then, a new noise. Very similar sound but it really did sound like the left side. We were close to starting lap 4 so we limped into pits again. This time, the whole bump stop on the right side was bent out, and it had punctured our soft line going to our caliper. No bueno. It had happened very recently as I had working brakes the entire time with zero sign of fade. Very thankful for that.
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
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Chase Brock
Sadly, the soft lines we had at pits had different fittings that this one and we had to call the race. There was no way to pinch to head back out and we put ours and others safety first. Not worth another band-aid just to hurt someone or wreck the truck.
Heads held high, we went and resigned from the race, but we were all in high spirits as we found new weak points and tested ourselves under rougher conditions. Gives us a lot to work on and to learn from which is what it is all about.
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Chase Brock