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So the further story on that jeep. The day before they had broken the right trailing arm. They trail repaired it by slipping a high lift jack handle inside the broken link and ratchet strapping things in place so they could drive out. They had it welded in town and got back to racing the next day. Today they broke the left one which also resulted in the rear coil spring being ejected and the driveshaft dropping out. They worked out a similar plan for this break but when they started to drive out they broke the panhard rod. That left them shuttling some pieces into camp where someone had a welder, the repaired both broken suspension links and made it into camp in the middle of the night. We didn't stay for most of it. Shortly after we arrived another truck came who wasn't running competitively in the points so we were able to get on with the race while they stayed to help the stranded jeep. We did not anticipate them having quite such an epic time when we left so we felt a bit bad when we heard they story but really it wouldn't have been any different had we stayed.
The orange suburban was the guys who stuck with them.
Here is a couple pics lifted from facebook of they repair just before the panhard arm broke.
They got things really well aligned.
They tried to replace the broken panhard rod with straps
That didn't work. So it came down to middle of the night grinding and welding in camp
While we were there at the break down site a massively lifted F250 came back down from the route we had planned to try to use for the shortest distance challenge. They said it was super rough and rocky so they had turned back. With this info we decided to backtrack back out the the tarmac and then take an alternate way in to the finish for the shortest distance. It was much longer but clearly flat and passable from the sat images.
We came across out livery mate in the mouth of a huge wash on our way into the waypoint and stopped for a quick photo. '
The route was flat and mostly smooth and the scenery was great as the sun set.
I say mostly flat because the smooth illuvial soil was punctuated with occasional ditches from smaller rain falls. I failed to see one in the flat light on the way out and we took a pretty hard hit on the front skid plate. Nothing broken, the skid plate did it's job so on we went.
The next waypoint gave only a latitude and asked "what is in the seashell"
We are pretty sure we got that one wrong despite our best efforts to use the maps we had which was many.
We rolled into camp at the tail end of dusk and with a couple hours to spare on the 10 hour time limit.
You can see a big mess of calculations from the average speed section as well as us trying to puzzle out the treasure hunt. We never came up with anything logical for an answer to treasure hunt. We found out days later that the sign we we had assumed would be either 3 or 6 bolts should have been 5.
It became pretty clear to us during the event that there is a lot of junk on the market when it comes to lift kits and other offroad stuff. That, and there's maybe a lot of bad installation going on. The parts on that Jeep were supposedly from Rough Country, and I don't mind naming them because both control arms broke at visually obvious stress risers, but it could easily be that the Panhard rod (the offroad crowd tends to say "track bar") broke because the suspension bound up as it compressed, which could be an installation issue. Those parts were on the Jeep when that team bought it so they didn't have primary culpability in this case IMO. But coupled with the multiple failures on the UGM trucks and a few other cases that I don't remember clearly now, I really come away with the feeling that light and well-chosen mods, or none at all, have the reliability advantage.
The only real nav challenge of the day was deciding what to do in that last section where the SHORT was. Here's how it looked on the map:
We were driving northwest and knew we could drive easily to 709 and then 710A. The question was what to do then; there was a pretty questionable road running clockwise from 709 to 710B or we could go counterclockwise from 710A to 710B. Remember, our hope with these challenges was always to find a slightly-shorter-than-obvious route in hopes of getting the top score.
Just after 710A is where we encountered the broken Jeep. At that point anther vehicle came back from farther north having turned around, saying the trail was extremely rocky and difficult, so we had another think. We knew how long/fast the green route to 709 had been, and we knew the same about the red section from 709 to 710A. We had already been quite concerned about the red 710A-710B section and now we had intel indicating that it was as bad as we feared. Having another look, we decided to backtrack to the main road (paved) and get to 710B by running along the bay on the green section to complete the SHORT, albeit with a non-winning distance.
It turns out we probably got "bad gouge" about the red route. That vehicle had actually been following one of the leaders who had taken (or attempted) a shortcut like we were looking for, and the red route itself was not that bad.
As we drove north on the paved road we tried to figure out where the treasure might have been, as we now had the necessary info. Attempt after attempt placed it at unlikely spots off the established and relevant tracks. The best we came up with was the longitude which is shown by the purple line, and crosses the track just after 709 and again up on the red track. I think it was by 709 but I don't recall for sure.
As for what was in the seashell, we thought it was probably Baja California Sur but after I did a bit of research at home I conclude it is a slightly stylized image of the Comondú municipality (like a county within the state of BCS, in US terms). Only about 100m of the route passes through Comondú, and the sculpture was just north of it (probably there was no pull-off at the right place). Here is the same image flipped around, and an actual map of Comondù. It was nothing I could have figured out at the time. You can see the border of it in the map above, but as soon as I zoom out a bit that border disappears. I had no way of seeing that whole border well enough to figure it out.
Camp that night was on one of two beaches and would be decided by the organizers that afternoon as they were beaches that were right off the 1 and at times are jammed full of gringos in RV's so they would need to decide where we could fit. The one with the nicer views ended up having enough room. We pulled into camp in the last minutes of dusk and found a little patch of beach basically bumper to bumper with other participants. We didn't have much of a record for getting to camp before dark despite many mornings thinking we would be able to.
We wanted to see how the front control arms fared with another day of racing so we could gauge our strategy for the next day.
Things looked pretty much the same so we decided with a couple long stretches between fuel coming we would might need our cracked fuel can back in action. Two of the team (to remain nameless to reduce spousal wrath) set off to the middle of the parking lot to drop a match in the open can to flash off the fumes. The other two thought this would burst the already split plastic jug but would make for a good story so we only protested a little. The match wielders were right, the can came back none the worse for wear so we could try to heat weld the crack by burning a strip cut from the rim and dripping in the melted plastic just like patching the base of a snowboard. That didn't work for this plastic so the next move was some 2 part epoxy.
We didn't want to trust that to haul fuel indefinitely but our plan was to top up both the truck and the gas can and then dump the can into the truck as soon as we burned enough to make room.
03-23-2019, 08:58 PM
