We’re driving back as we speak but I wanted to send out a quick note. We didn’t finish but would have if we had more time. We worked hard and relentlessly the past month and did end up putting over 125 miles of hard prerunning on the car. We broke a ton of stuff after each prerunning seasion that we had to fix between sessions. When it finally stopped breaking and ran strong for 30+ miles on course, we said it was good and quit pretunning. Some of the pre-race stuff was epic - running through hammetown with Marlin himself leading the charge on repairs, borrowing tools from Jason Scherrer, getting help from GenRight, Fox, GBR, using BFG’s press, having Don Brennon help us fix issues late into the night, having RCV overnight parts from Illinois, etc. The support we received from everyone was out of this world - we are truly all in against the course and it was so great to see everyone pitching in to help anyone competing.
The race was awesome. We had zero mechanicals, zero body damage, only winched once (probably didn’t need to but thought it would save us time), and got a Top 10 in 4600 class when they pulled us off the course at RM 126 despite us having 40-mins left of run time.
The 4runner did great in the desert - even better than we expected - but really surprised us in the rocks over and over, walking past solid axle cars stuck left and right. The most epic was when a 4500 car was stuck in the line we wanted on Jackhammer and their co-driver said “I can spot you down the 4400 line but really don’t think you will make it.” A few minutes later his jaw was on the ground as maneuvered through an impossible line with his spotting help without any damage and only having to back up once. Having the same clearance as 40s on a solid axle with our IFS in 35s really paid off and our gearing, v8, Atlas, ARBs , axles, driveshafts, etc all worked flawlessly together.
Our pit crew did amazing and Justin recorded an other Top 5 finish!
The only issue we had all day was when we took the wrong line on a bypass (4400 level route iMO) that wasn’t marked well (markers fell down) and drilled our drivers front on a big ledge and then had to baby it a little more after a few creative pit fixes. Without that I think a finish was certainly within our grasp.
I could tell stories for days, but we’re still worn out from the 9-hr marathon race and have been driving for over 20-hrs toward Homs at this point.
I’ll be shipping RCLT v3.0 to Marlin next week for R&D purposes and then we’ll eventually run their final version of the HD kit with a few final tweaks Mike wants to make after inspecting the car after the race in Hammertown.
There are some pics on FB and IG, but more should start coming in soon after people get out of Hammertown. We had drones, helicopters, and camera crews on us for a good bit of the 9-hrs we were on course so they better have gotten a lot of content! Wish Ultra4 gave us more press but we’re thankful for the coverage we got. Thanks for your support - we had fans all over the course who really helped push us on. We heard “Team Toyota” over and over!