SCORE Desert Challenge – Class 1
Class 1
Class 1 – anything goes, as a matter of fact a couple of the Trophy Truck teams took the body panels off of their trucks and ran them in Class 1 as well. The Class 1 car has evolved into a fairly light weight long A – arm front suspension vehicle powered for the most part by aluminium LS2 Corvette engines driving custom made manual transmissions.
All I can say is I would love to have had one back when we were racing.
Well that is it for this year! Hopefully we will be able to do this again in 2011!
Trophy Trucks
The Trophy Truck class is the only one that has to qualify – one lap fast time for starting position on Saturday. It gives the spectators a chance to see the truck before most of it’s body work is left laying around the course and whatever is left is covered in dust and mud! These vehicles are truely brutes around 5000 lbs, 800 to 1000 HP, close to 30 inches of suspension travel and costing in the $250-$300K range. These trucks are not for the feint of heart or with small check books.
The overall winner for the weekend was Brian McMillin, grandson of Corky and nephew of Mark. ‘Back In The Day’ Mark and Corky were the major driving force in SCORE. Their Porche powered Class 1 cars ruled the desert from Nevada to the tip of Baja. It is really good to see the family back at it again. Brian is proving that the fruit never falls far from the tree. Mark also ran in this class, but was not as competitive as in the past. If I am not mistaken the McMillins had around 6 vehicles entered in the Desert Challenge this year.
Class 10 & Class 1200
These two classes are perhaps my two favorite SCORE classes. Class 10 is limited to 1600 cc engines and unlimited suspensions. Class 1200 is pretty much like the cars we used to race in Class 1 ‘Back In The Day’ – aka the late 80′s to mid 90′s. Back then the engines were unlimited as were the suspensions. Today the Class 1200 cars must run air cooled VW engines – 1700 or so for single seat cars and 1835 for two seaters – the front and rear suspensions must be VW based trailing link designs – no A-arms etc. To me these two classes offer the most bang for your offroad racing buck and if we were still racing it would probably be in a 1200 car.
Oh, and I forgot! There was one Class 5 Baja Bug! This car won Class 5 last year.
SCORE has a bunch of classes for just about every kind of off-road vehicle that you can imagine. The format of the Desert Challenge is to group similar performance vehicles together and have each Group run either 7 or 8 laps on Saturday and then again on Sunday. Winners are determined by whomever has the lowest combined time for their class. Group 1 which are all of the lower powered/limited suspension cars are 1st off at 6:00 AM – way too early for this old man to haul is butt out of bed to sit in a cold grandstand and watch the 1/2 1600 cars go putting around the track. Around 8:00 they start Group 2, the stock and modified trucks but by the time we had breakfast and chit-chatted a bit it was more like 9-9:30 before we got out to the track – so not a lot of photos of them either.
Class 6 and Trucks
In the second photo from the end of this short slide show you will see a photo of two guys being interviewed. The guy on the left with the sun glasses is Bob Gordon, Robby Gordon’s Dad. Robby and BJ Baldwin were both down in Argentina running the Dakar race and would not make it back to Laughlin until late Saturday. Robby had his dad qualify and race his Trophy Truck on Saturday. BJ had Chad Ragland do the same for his truck. As luck would have it the drive shaft broke in the Gordon ride during qualification and the truck was not sorted out for the race on Saturday which put Robby at the back of the pack on Sunday. Robby put on a real show on Sunday but could not overcome being down 2 1/2 laps in a 8 lap race. Chad did a great job in putting BJ’s Trophy Truck in 3rd after the Saturday race, however BJ blew it up on the 1st lap on Sunday.
All in all the Gordons and Baldwins went to a lot of effort for little return.
2010 SCORE Desert Challenge
Once again Michelle and I made the trek across Arizona to Laughlin NV to attend the SCORE Desert Challenge off-road race that is held on a 6.25 mile closed course at the Laughlin Event Center. We drove over on Thursday and met our old racing friends; Doug Boelman and Danny Eichhorst who drove up from Tucson. Our good friends Paul and Judy Nolte were not able to make the event this year due to Judy having to finish up her chemo treatments.
With all the cold weather that we have had this year, I was hoping for some sun and warm temperatures but our current El Nino pattern decided that we could only have nice weather on Friday. Both Saturday and Sunday were overcast and windy and by Monday it was pouring and we had to deal with a blizzard from around Ashfork to a bit past Winslow on our drive home.
Anyway… back to the race! Friday’s main activities were Contingency in the morning and Trophy Truck qualification in the afternoon. On Friday evening they held the Laughlin Leap – the basic idea here is to accelerate your car/truck as fast as you can up a dirt ramp and then launch into space and see how far you can go before touching back down. The Trophy Trucks and Class 1 buggies were hitting around 100 mph at the end of the ramp and were traveling in the neighborhood of 120 ft or so. Last year the ramp was longer and higher and the trucks were getting close to 170-180 ft as I recall.
Unfortunately the dummy with the camera some how forgot his spare compact flash cards and was not able to get any photos of the Leap action since his one 4GB card was back in the hotel room being downloaded to the lap top.
Contingency Row & Tech Inspection
Most of the money that you can win when racing SCORE, is from Contingency Sponsors; i.e. they award you prize money if you are running their tires, wheels, shocks and/or parts. To give the sponsors an opportunity to look at your car and for you to sign up with them or buy last minute parts that you either forgot or trashed during practice, SCORE has you push your car by all the sponsors/vendors on your way to Tech Inspection. In general it a great time to meet old friends and do a bit of visiting and BS’ing and to check out what all the latest and greatest stuff!
A couple of interesting things of note: Check out the photos of what looks to be a BMW sport car – 6 cyl turbo diesel – 6 speed trans – carbon fiber body parts – and good ground clearance all for $52K and you can drive it on the street! Also check out the small red buggy, it’s a new SCORE spec racer based upon a snow mobile engine and belt drive – looks like a really badass golf cart – I especially liked the fact that it had to ignition keys – one for slow and one for fast! And finally take a look at the new Class 1 buggy that was for sale for only $150K – from what I have heard it was a real bargain.
