03/07/2020
TL;DR...we did good, I made a mistake, we got 4th.
Well I'm finally getting a chance to recap the W.E.ROCK Events opener in Bagdad, AZ. As many of you know I had to scramble and work day and night to even make the event. The weekend before the event my motor started to smoke bad and was showing signs of it being hurt. I did a compression test and the results were pretty bad. At that point I tore the whole motor down and started rebuilding. Long story short I replaced, cleaned or rebuilt just about the entire motor. Somehow it came together and even ran.
With absolutely zero testing and about 15 min on the motor I loaded it up and left for Arizona. On the way to the event we had a bunch of trailer brake issues that slowed us down. I finally I just disconnected the trailer brakes and went without them.
We got the opportunity to run all the courses on Saturday even though I hadn't slept in about 36-48 hours...we did pretty well. We hit some cones we shouldn't have and didn’t take some lines we probably should have but all in all it went well.
After getting about 12 hours sleep it was time to start Sunday’s courses. On the way to the courses we were about 100 yards from the gates and the car died. It wouldn't run, idle, nothing...at first it appeared I had lost a fuel pressure. I got a ride back to the pit area and luckily Jesse Haines had a spare fuel pump. I went back to swap it and quickly realized that when I pulled the seat and could feel it the pump was working. About that time Jesse showed up and started revving the motor as I checked everything out...aaaaaannnnndddd that's when I saw it. The intake had slipped off the throttle body which was causing the maf to freak out. At first, I thought I had lost the clamp holding it on. Then upon further inspection I just forgot to put them back on when trying to get the car running. I was super glad it was such an easy fix.
The rest of the day went pretty similar to Saturday. We ran pretty smooth, hit some unnecessary cones but kept moving forward. On the last course Randall noticed my belt had jumped the power steering pulley, thank you again for telling me, and was halfway off. When I took a look at it I realized my PS pulley was about 60% off the shaft and probably would have popped off and causes MAJOR issues if I would have ran it. I borrowed a pulley tool from Jason Reeves, thank you for that, and took some break down time, sorry Cody and Randall, and got it fixed.
After the scores were tallied from both days, we landed in 4th behind Jacob Reeves by 10 points. That means we just qualified for the shootout and got the opportunity to make a grab at third. The shootout started off pretty decent as we walked gate 1 and dropped down bonus 2 gate. This is about when things went downhill...as I was rear digging around trying to get set up to climb the crack up to gate 3 there was a loud pop. I knew better but, in the moment, I was trying to get lined up as quickly as possible and not waste time. I had the rears turned full lock or close to it and broke a CV cage on the driver rear side. That was the end of that. I wanted to keep going but didn't want to cause any more damage, so I made the decision to stop before it got bad. I honestly feel like I could have and would have finished the course if I wouldn’t have made that mistake. You never really know but that's how it felt.
After that, no matter what happened, we were ending up in 4th. At the time it was disappointing because it was my mistake but overall, I am extremely happy with how we did. Now it's time to focus on getting a few other things fixed and see what we can do in Sand Hollow. I think a few things were clear at the event if nothing else...I am too stubborn to give up and with some seat time, a little more experience and a lot of luck we may irritate some people this year 🤣
I want to thank everyone that helped make this happen, supported me on this adventure and continue to help me learn how to become a better competitive rock crawler.
No matter what happens I going to have a great time!
Photo: Miller Truby
