Alright! I finally found all the photos from other people since I didn't take very many and wasn't able to get photos most of the time. So credit is given to my Mom/Dad, Lance, and James.
I drove down to St. George for Trail Hero last Wednesday. My codriver, Miles, and I had spent until midnight on Tuesday working on the truck. Got a harbor freight winch on, clearanced the rear wheel wells and lowered the rear bump stops (the cage is what limits the rear flex, with how narrow the OEM 4Runner wheels are when it flexs the tires hit the cage so that determined the full bump spot for now), clearanced the front which consisted mostly of beating the s*** out of everything with a sludge hammer, and a few other odds and ends. It turned out that Miles ended up cutting through a harness when he clearanced the front, so of course I go to load the truck on the trailer and it won't start--no spark. So I ghetto hook the harness back up and she finally fires thankfully, it would appear the headlight harness grounds are important even though literally nothing else in that leg of the wiring goes to anything. I was able to stay on schedule, albeit I ended up missing class which I had otherwise planned on going to. Got food with my girlfriend and met up with another truck and headed out!
I ended up getting to Sand Hollow around 7pm and found my parents who already had a camp site. We ghetto rigged some Hella lights I had and I was able to go for a quick drive through the dunes with my buddy's rzr that night before going to bed.
Sadly the grille and headlights couldn't make it for the trip, the grille didn't fit with the winch and the passenger headlight wasn't even held in after the Knolls race so just pulled them off. So Thursday morning we began prepping for the race, of course stuff can't go smoothly--the battery on the 80 is stone cold dead. We jump it and get it going so decide to go for a quick drive and to prerun the course so the battery can get charged a bit. The course is super short, maybe 1/2 mile, probably like 1/4 or 3/8 of a mile loop. It goes up one side and is all sandy, drops into this canyon, and down the canyon and back around. Super simple, so we go to run it and on the first run through we get into the canyon and don't see this drop so end up tipping the truck onto the driver's side so the roof is leaning against a rock and the passenger tires are all off the ground. Luckily I was able to steer and give it some gas and get out. Alright, that was kind of gnarly, luckily there's a few different lines. We ended up running the course 4 time and got the optimal path figured out. We come back to camp after probably 30 minutes, turn the truck off and on and it won't even crank--the battery is totally dead. It was a Costco battery and there's a Costco in St. George, so we haul ass over there and get it warrantied and a new battery and luckily that seemed to completely fix that. We then rushed to suit up and run over for the driver's meeting for the rock race that was starting at 2pm.
We sit through the driver's meeting, ask some questions, etc. and we're starting to get scared--like there's people who have won King of the Hammers in the unlimited class and we're gonna be racing them in our essentially stock FJ80... We think we have everything figured out, and we're in heat 2 so we run back to camp and grab a few things and run back to catch the end of heat 1. We're all suited up and waiting, and what we had heard was everyone lines up at the entrance to the course. So we're sitting there and don't see anyone, finally three trucks come down and enter the course... and in our heat there were 5 including us, and we were last, so we're like okay... where is the last guy, do we go now since we don't know where he is? Finally the last guy shows up, so we follow him in. Turns out we were supposed to stage next to the announcer tent which we didn't know, then enter the course and line up inside the canyon. Oh well, as seems to be a pattern racing is a cluster and actually knowing what's supposed to happen is half the challenge. Anyways, we line up and everything is good. We're watching everything and don't know if we go one at a time, or all at once since in front of us there's two rows of cars so starting at once seems like it'd be tight but it's such a short course... we don't know, but we're slow and in the back so whatever. My codriver and I are like s***ting ourselves too, we are SO scared. The Knolls race was a LOT different, lot more cars but we were racing against UTVs and VW bugs and smaller buggies. Granted they were faster than us, but we had the largest truck in that race and it wasn't like a lot of spectators, everyone was just racing for fun. Well this race was a ton of people all around the course watching, and we are by FAR the most stock thing. It's not like a FJ80 vs a VW bug for last place, it's like a FJ80 vs a fully built mod class Jeep that has dual shocks and bypasses and twice as much horsepower--and that's the next slowest guy. Oh and in our heat is Jordan Pelligrino and Cody Wagoneer--well known offroad racers with tons of money and insanely capable rigs. And here we are, in a stock FJ80 on 40s....
So the flag waves, everyone takes off so that answers the question of how it starts. We start putting, getting the s*** beat out of us since I'm going as fast as I can which is painfully slow.
We go down the canyon, up the sand part and don't even see anyone at this point. We drop into the canyon and putting along, in the live feed on facebook you can see where the front end catches air as we come over this one rock. It was so brutal inside the truck, and felt like I was destroying it, and in reality we're going like 10mph. We're getting near the bottom of the canyon, and I hear an engine behind me. For some reason I never hear sirens or horns, I can always hear the engine behind us though. So I'm anxious now, I know someone is right on our ass and we are in a spot where no one can pass us in the one choke point of the entire race. It's a V crack type thing at the bottom, and in prerunning I knew I couldn't (or was highly unlikely) I could flex through it or go up one side or the other. I had to center on it, go through, and then there was a rock lip on the driver's side a bit of the way in that I had to go up and flex on a little and then drop out of. Well under pressure of knowing someone was about to kill us from behind, I was trying to go as fast as I could through the V. We went in and before I knew it we were too high driver's side and rolling over onto the passenger side. Right inside the crack, right where no one could get around us.
There was no way I could drive out of it I could tell, so I shut the truck down and we just hung in our harnesses. At the meeting I had even asked what happens if you roll, and they said just stay in the truck unless it's on fire. So that's what we did, and it felt like forever until someone came to the window and said they would roll us over. The whole time there's this drone hovering in front of us too that we're waving at. They hooked a winch up and pulled us over and had us drive forward a bit until we leveled out, and then got off the course. If we could of kept racing I would of, but the drag link was destroyed (again).
Presumably the roll was entirely my fault, though I have some speculation that it was unavoidable--the drag link was bent at almost 90 degrees, and it resulted in me not being able to turn right at all, though I could turn left and point straight fine. The drag link had been bent at Knolls too, and we couldn't get a new one in time so had used the tube bender to straighten it as best we could, point being that it was already compromised and would require hardly anything to bend it. If anyone sees the video, the roll is super slow and I didn't feel the steering wheel jerk or anything. I'm suspicious that the drag link had gotten bent as we came down the canyon and I was able to line up on the V crack but when I went to turn passenger it just wouldn't turn and as far as I knew it was full cranked, but really was just the link getting stuck against the radius arm. I don't know, but it's one of those things where I look at it like I should of driven better--but also the ONLY thing that broke would also have caused that exact kind of wreck. So who knows, unless I find a good picture of the front of the truck right before I hit that crack it's anyone's guess as to whether I just outdrove my talent or the steering didn't let me go where I wanted and correct how I needed.
We were able to drive the 80 back to camp, took like 3x 20 point turns to get away from the race area since I had to back up going left and then go straight everywhere. Once we were back in the sand I could slightly go right if we were going fast enough it seemed like so had no issue driving back. The following day I pulled the drag link but it was hopeless to bend it straight, so took it to a local shop, Sand Hollow Offroad, and the guy there cut out the center part where it was bent and then welded in a DOM center section and fillet and plug welded the tie rod threaded ends on. It's super beefy now, and will probably run it as long as I have this steering setup.
And that wraps up the racing half of the journey, I have some other pictures and stories from wheeling during the weekend that I'll post later!
