Brendan_91XJ
NAXJA Member #1163
- Location
- Long Beach, CA
John Brannon – Driver
Brendan King – Co-driver
John Matkoski – Chase
Roy Garner – Chase
That’s the team, two in a two wheel drive Jeep, and one chase team always one step ahead at the next pit. We were the last jeep to start off the line at almost exactly 11 o’clock for our ironman run through the desert. We thought our race was almost done at mm 18 with the water temperature hitting 250+ and loss of power. We did some quick rewiring of the fans to keep them on all the time, and figured that the loss of power was probably vapor lock with the heat. After 20 minutes or so we were back on course and had little to no issue until we hit the silt bed coming into pit 5 and sank. Quickly pulling out the TRED sand-boards (half the cost of a Maxtrax board with lifetime warranty) we were out of the stilt and moving in less than 5 minutes.
Steering was getting sloppy and it was found out the tie-rod end was wearing in the knuckle. With no spare parts for steering, John nursed the jeep through the next couple of pits where we were told the problem was not getting any worse so we got back on it. Turning the Vision X lights on as it was getting on towards evening we destroyed what night vision, people may have had as we entered pit 8.
Here at Pit 8 we were first told of the “silt” just after pit 10 that was eating vehicles. We raced on into the night and to Pit 10 for a stretch and a 5-hour energy and food. We had to wait about minute in the pit for our chase crew to get there. (The first and last time they were late on arrival). We were told that the silt bed was at mm 371-372 and that we should go high or right or both… So I am thinking cool I will start searching for problems at mm 369-370, Nooooo… at mm367 we hit a group of 5-6 vehicles stuck, we may have had the momentum to make it, but got bogged down in silt and traffic just about 12 am. It took us three shots of using the sand boards to get far enough over to the right to get out of the silt, which I now refer to as “liquid sand”. In this two and a half our time period, we had to direct traffic and ended up helping two other teams out of the silt, a trophy light and a class 2000 (who shared their Tecate with us at finish line 6 hours later).
After being stuck for so long John push the jeep and himself to make sure we stayed ahead of the cut-off; coming into Pit 13 just after sunrise for our last gas, some water and some encouragement from a BITD official with just 15 minutes until cut-off, we headed out to finish this race!
Pushing the jeep hard we made pit 14 with plenty of time to spare and feeling confident we were going to finish our first V2R race!! Until the rocks… no one said anything about rock crawling. The last 25 miles of this course was brutal to us and the jeep, about 15 miles from the finish we started to smell the gear oil. There was nothing we could do at this point so we just backed off and crawled the rocks to the finish at just around 8:30 am, 21:30 hours in the jeep.
Big thanks to our sponsor;
General Tire, again another race with no flats!
Clayton, for a four-link suspension that has had no issues with over 1500 race miles
Vision X for turning night into day from sunset to sunrise.
OC Driveline, Deaver, Anaheim Gear, Currie, RDM, Jeepspeed.
Another big thanks to Casey and all the BITD volenteers for all the hard work and hours they put in.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sector-7-Racing/453089891377065?ref=hl
Brendan King – Co-driver
John Matkoski – Chase
Roy Garner – Chase
That’s the team, two in a two wheel drive Jeep, and one chase team always one step ahead at the next pit. We were the last jeep to start off the line at almost exactly 11 o’clock for our ironman run through the desert. We thought our race was almost done at mm 18 with the water temperature hitting 250+ and loss of power. We did some quick rewiring of the fans to keep them on all the time, and figured that the loss of power was probably vapor lock with the heat. After 20 minutes or so we were back on course and had little to no issue until we hit the silt bed coming into pit 5 and sank. Quickly pulling out the TRED sand-boards (half the cost of a Maxtrax board with lifetime warranty) we were out of the stilt and moving in less than 5 minutes.
Steering was getting sloppy and it was found out the tie-rod end was wearing in the knuckle. With no spare parts for steering, John nursed the jeep through the next couple of pits where we were told the problem was not getting any worse so we got back on it. Turning the Vision X lights on as it was getting on towards evening we destroyed what night vision, people may have had as we entered pit 8.
Here at Pit 8 we were first told of the “silt” just after pit 10 that was eating vehicles. We raced on into the night and to Pit 10 for a stretch and a 5-hour energy and food. We had to wait about minute in the pit for our chase crew to get there. (The first and last time they were late on arrival). We were told that the silt bed was at mm 371-372 and that we should go high or right or both… So I am thinking cool I will start searching for problems at mm 369-370, Nooooo… at mm367 we hit a group of 5-6 vehicles stuck, we may have had the momentum to make it, but got bogged down in silt and traffic just about 12 am. It took us three shots of using the sand boards to get far enough over to the right to get out of the silt, which I now refer to as “liquid sand”. In this two and a half our time period, we had to direct traffic and ended up helping two other teams out of the silt, a trophy light and a class 2000 (who shared their Tecate with us at finish line 6 hours later).
After being stuck for so long John push the jeep and himself to make sure we stayed ahead of the cut-off; coming into Pit 13 just after sunrise for our last gas, some water and some encouragement from a BITD official with just 15 minutes until cut-off, we headed out to finish this race!
Pushing the jeep hard we made pit 14 with plenty of time to spare and feeling confident we were going to finish our first V2R race!! Until the rocks… no one said anything about rock crawling. The last 25 miles of this course was brutal to us and the jeep, about 15 miles from the finish we started to smell the gear oil. There was nothing we could do at this point so we just backed off and crawled the rocks to the finish at just around 8:30 am, 21:30 hours in the jeep.
Big thanks to our sponsor;
General Tire, again another race with no flats!
Clayton, for a four-link suspension that has had no issues with over 1500 race miles
Vision X for turning night into day from sunset to sunrise.
OC Driveline, Deaver, Anaheim Gear, Currie, RDM, Jeepspeed.
Another big thanks to Casey and all the BITD volenteers for all the hard work and hours they put in.
Ironmen of Sector 7 Race and Chase
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sector-7-Racing/453089891377065?ref=hl
