pontoontodd

Wow, it sounds like you have done a lot to your drivetrain. I'm not sure if the forks would be strong enough.

If the spring rates were a little stiffer you'd have more compression travel from ride height. Even if it doesn't increase your total travel, then you can keep the damping relatively soft and not bottom out as often. Also I like the rear springs stiffer than the front to give some oversteer since there are no swaybars on my car. Your English is 1000 times better than my French! I was joking about the tape measure (cinta metrica in Spanish, mètre à ruban in French?), it's weird to see one with just centimeters on it rather than inches.

Thanks for the pictures. It looks like there's something wrong with your tape measure... I'm surprised the springs are inline with the struts, rather than pointed at the hub like the stock struts. That caused a lot of friction for us, maybe that's why they didn't ride smoothly on the street. I know how to calculate spring rates, etc, I'm looking for a chart of available mass produced coil springs showing height, diameter, wire size, coils, rate, etc. Moog has one but it's the only one I can find. All of the aftermarket/racing companies sell smaller diameter springs than I need. It's interesting, your front spring rate is about the same as mine but your rear springs are much softer.

Thanks, glad you like it. I don't daily drive anything, but I usually drive the car a few times a week and the bushings we're using now seem happy and greased when I check them. Keep meaning to add grease fittings between the bushings but haven't yet. I figure it's a good idea to go through them after a race or major beating, the top bearings often need replacement and the rear boots keep getting torn up. So I just grease them then. How did you calculate the maximum possible stroke? We just mocked it up and moved the suspension until things hit or bound. Ours don't have much more travel than yours, maybe 10%. We did make the extended front arms, which definitely helped. The real limitation we've run into has been the springs. Again, if anyone knows of a good coil spring size chart, I'd love to see it. We've been talking about getting custom springs wound since we might make a set for my friend's Forester soon. It would be nice to have a stiffer spring rate, right now it sits about in the middle of the travel at ride height. I'd rather have 7-8" of compression travel and 4" of extension. Plus an inch or two more ground clearance wouldn't hurt. Since the spring has to hang over the top of the tire, at coil bind it has to be about 4" tall to get about 12" of travel. Otherwise we could probably have more compression travel, which would be great. And that's really pushing the springs (about 150ksi / 1050MPa stress at coil bind), I'm surprised they haven't sagged yet, normally you're only supposed to compress a coil spring to half of its relaxed height as a rule of thumb. Extension travel is limited by the CV plunge travel and the tie rods binding up, and again the springs, although you could probably let them go slack if they were retained properly. I'm sure the Dakar struts were sprung and valved to be driven hard over rough terrain, and I'm sure they didn't care what the ride quality would be like putting around on city streets. I would love to see some pictures of those, especially torn apart. Our struts ride pretty well on the street. At parking lot speeds they're a little harsh, once you get going it's a little stiffer than stock but really soaks up big potholes, speed bumps, etc. If all we did was desert race this car I'd probably go stiffer on the valving, it does limit our speed sometimes since we know it will bottom out if we hit things too hard. If we started running it harder we'd probably break other things though.

Video from our race in Nevada:

Please, please don't do this, I really hope you're joking. This is why they don't want to talk to "Subaru people". The guy told me they've had hundreds of people over the years ask them to make Subaru struts but then no one bought anything from them. If you were selling something and the Jeep and Toyota guys actually bought your product, and the Subaru guys just wasted your time, would you talk to them? It's like when we go to the offroad park and they hesitate to let us in because other "Subaru people" just go in and do donuts in the parking lot and don't go out on the trails. Please don't be that guy that ruins it for the rest of us.

Thanks, I'm flattered, glad you like it. Started out as a much cheaper hobby than offroad racing, just trail riding with stock Subarus, and has gotten a little out of control. The struts have been a lot of trial and error. They've never failed completely on us but we've made a lot of improvements in the last year. At the moment I'm not willing to just give away all of that, but you should be able to figure most or all of it out from what I've posted here. I don't know how much fabrication and machining experience you have, but you'd need a decent amount to make a set that will hold up. On top of all that, your XV has a multilink rear suspension, right? So that would be a totally different animal, although probably easier. Please, whatever you do, do NOT call Fox and ask them to make you a set of Subaru struts. They've had so many people call before I did and then not follow through that they almost wouldn't sell me anything and I can't blame them.

I got a laugh out of some of these comments: https://www.instagram.com/p/BKUaIoiAPe5/

I do appreciate the advice. I PMed the guy about the EJ dual range and haven't heard anything back. I have seen the dual range case kits on ebay for about $1000, is that what you're talking about? The six speed idea was mainly if we were swapping in an H6 since the five speed might not be strong enough. We usually have too much traction rather than not enough, so I don't think locking the diffs would help. The center diff was locked up for a while before we replaced the trans and the car still drove on the street OK, so I could see doing that on purpose. If we locked the rear diff also the steering brake wouldn't do anything and I'm sure it would make driving around town noisier. That's the only thing I see you suggesting that would "suck bootie" on the street. I would not be worried about shifting the low range on the fly. Just about any exhaust would be better flow than what we had! I am talking to a guy about building us a fresh engine too with pistons and cams. I know what you're saying about the dedicated race car thing, but we already have a race buggy. It is much faster than the Subaru but getting it to and from the races is a lot more expensive, slower, and more work. Plus the Outback is still the nicest car I own and I already don't have room for the cars and projects I have.

If you know of an EJ dual range for sale, let me know. The divorced transfer case seems totally impractical to me for what we're trying to do. Are you suggesting we put the stock struts back on? We'd be going half the speed with a quarter the durability.

Yes, the biggest benefit would be a granny first gear. The lower gearing itself wouldn't help much, but the closer ratios of the six speed would help. There were at least a few times where second was too low but third was too high or something like that. Still, there were probably a few times in the race we would have gone a little slower through rough or soft stuff if we had a lower first gear and weren't worried about getting stuck. And it was very hard to get going with a flat tire on soft ground with the stock gearing. I've heard the six speeds are much heavier than the five speeds though, so I have to look into that. Just read one person online saying it's only 20# heavier and another saying it's 100# heavier.

Another thing we keep discussing is the gearing on these EJ cars. I know you can get them with a low range but they seem difficult to find and I've heard they wear out fairly quickly, and I know the five speed gearboxes aren't known to be super strong. I have a low range mostly drawn up that would fit in place of the center diff that would allow FWDhi/4WDhi/4WDlo, but it would be fairly expensive to make and complicated. One of our friends has suggested making a granny first gear, which would be great, but the first gear on the shaft is already about as small as it can be, and making that whole shaft would be expensive. On the long ride back home from the race, we were thinking that a 1.2 or 1.3:1 low range would be great for racing. I don't think we've ever gone over 75mph. Then I was thinking the six speeds are stronger and closer ratio and have a larger spread of gear ratios than the five speed. We'd want to swap one in if we went to an H6 regardless. So I think the simplest and strongest solution would be a fixed gear reduction in place of the center diff around 1.5:1. We could also made sixth gear about 0.6:1, which wouldn't be too hard or expensive to make. That would give us a decent low first gear, about perfect gearing for racing in second-fifth, and similar highway gearing to what we have now in sixth. All with one shifter. The main downside I see to that plan is that we'd have no center diff, which would be kind of annoying around town, but having driven a Loyale for a couple years with the center diff permanently locked, I'd say a worthwhile compromise.

Can you put up pictures? Not sure how you'd support it from crushing the exhaust.

I have a 1/2" drive 20V Dewalt and some other 20V Dewalt tools. The impact is probably good to about 200ft-lbs. It lasts a long time on a battery, you could probably change a dozen sets of tires. The higher capacity (4 or 5 Ah) batteries cost quite a bit more but are much more convenient than the little ones the tools sometimes come with.

Thanks, for some reason I hadn't seen that, got me on to some other systems that show all four pressures too. The Steelmate and Carchet sensors just replace your valve stem caps, which seems questionable, but would probably be the way to go if you swap tires around often. For your trailer, there are some systems that have up to 38 sensors, this is probably the cheapest one I saw with at least six: http://shop.greatrvproducts.com/TST-Tire-Pressure-Monitoring-Systems-Accessories_c29.htm

That part of the exhaust holds up pretty well. It's the part getting back to there that is the biggest problem. Anybody got a stock WRX Y pipe laying around?

Camera thing might be hard to see a low tire until is really low. These tires still have a few inches of sidewall with zero pressure. Key would be catching it quickly, like when it only drops 5psi, so we can just plug & continue. Probably would be cheaper though, especially if we have to buy ten pressure sensors. Maybe the best compromise is to start with sensors in the tires on the car, not bother with them in the spares. I like the turbo header idea. You're talking about something like this? https://www.amazon.com/Spec-D-Tuning-HH2-WRX02-DK-Stainless-Manifold/dp/B01DMSUUP6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1473174027&sr=8-2&keywords=wrx+header&refinements=p_72%3A2661618011 The stock ones are simpler and might not hang as low in front, right? I have no idea which would be better for NA power and torque. Crazy expensive from the dealer, I'd have to find one used. http://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2027896 Where would it go after that? It looks like it goes between the head and the crossmember. The crossmember on those cars looks a lot different than mine, but mine could probably be notched and reinforced. I don't think I'd run it right out the hood, for one thing BITD rules require it to go past the cab, for another I'd like to keep it fairly quiet. Even if I routed it back down to the driveshaft tunnel, it would solve the problem of having it hang under the steering rack where it gets smashed.

Still considering an H6 swap. Thoughts on that or building up a 2.5 a little would be good. Here are some other things we want to improve on the car in no particular order: Tire pressure monitoring system - I've seen these for a couple hundred bucks. It would have really helped at the last race if we knew a tire was going down, at least one we could have probably hopped out and plugged it and kept going. I haven't seen any that show four tire pressures at the same time. At least some of them have an alarm you can set if the pressures drop below a certain amount. One issue is that we'll have 8-10 tires. If we do have to change a tire, will it still be giving us alarm that the (now) spare is low? You can get these that monitor a lot of tires, up to 16, but we'd really only want to know about the four that are holding up the car at the moment. Quick release fasteners for spare tire - probably some type of big wing nuts or toggle/cam clamp. One thing that killed us during that last race is that it probably took us 15 minutes to change a tire since the spare tire and jack are bolted in place and other stuff was in the way, we had to get out tools, etc. Also easy access to breaker bar/socket so we don't have to dig that out. Quick release fasteners for jack or built in / better jacks. It takes about a minute to jack up (and down) the car with the big scissor jack. Not terrible, and the other guy can mess with lug nuts during that time. It can be jacked up a little faster with a floor jack and lowered much faster. But even the aluminum floor jacks are about twice as heavy, have less lift, and don't move straight vertically. For years we've been talking about having built in jacks at the B pillars so you could lift up one side of the car quickly for maintenance or extraction. It seems the easiest way to do this would be with a couple of electric actuators like this one: http://www.progressiveautomations.com/linear-actuators/stroke/24-inch/force/2000-lbs There's actually more info on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Automations-PA-17-24-2000-Industrial-Actuator/dp/B006P5905A/ref=sr_1_4?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1472999750&sr=1-4&keywords=linear+actuator+12v&refinements=p_load_capacity%3A2000.0+pounds The other thought is to have a couple of hydraulic cylinders powered by the power steering pump. Either way we'd attach some flat plates to the bottoms of them to lift up the car. Mount the recovery ramps / sand ladders to the back of the main roll hoop with quick release fasteners. This would just make it faster to get to everything else since we've been storing them in the back of the car. Wider wheels and tires. So far I haven't seen any off road tires near this diameter that are wider. If we could find them, it would probably help since a lot of the course was fairly soft. If not, I'll probably get a set of BFG MT, more stock alloys, and try those. As mentioned earlier, weight reduction, such as fiberglass hood, lexan rear corner windows, etc. Between the hood and windows we could probably take about 50# off the car. Exhaust. The exhaust system is beat. We've always wondered how it survives since it hangs so low. Didn't really this time. The only part of the front Y pipe that isn't smashed or torn is the short piece of 1.75 x .120 4130 I repaired it with a while back. I'm very tempted to make a Y pipe/header out of .095 or .120 wall 4130. I'm a little nervous we'd stretch the head bolts or damage the engine mounts if the exhaust didn't give at all and hit something really hard though. We can probably protect that part of the Y pipe near the engine but I'm not sure how we'd protect the part under the rack and trans. It would probably be good to keep the cat to keep the computer happy and provide some muffling, but after that I wonder if we would even need a muffler. The super turbo I put where the stock gas tank was is well protected and could be reused. One thought we had is some kind of flexible high temperature hose from the cat to the back of the car, but I don't know of anything that would take it. Again, maybe just a piece of .095 4130 is the answer. Struts - I've only gone through the fronts, but they were in pretty good shape. Biggest improvement here I think would be some stiffer springs, but the only size / rate chart I've seen are for the MOOG springs. Something 30-50% stiffer that would give us another inch or so of lift would be great. There's a few other things we might improve over the winter, especially if we make another set or two. Rear view camera - We usually didn't see anyone coming up behind us until they got very close. Since we don't want to hold anyone up or get nerfed, it would be good to see them coming. Have that other 10" tablet now, so we could mount that on the passenger dash. Just have to figure out some kind of camera to send it video with. Hatch handle - broke during the race one time we stopped. The one on my old hatch is also super rusty and the plastic is cracked. I was going to make one out of steel but I see the dealer has one for $24 so I'll probably go that way. Trip odometer reset button broke on the way home. Figure I'll just get a gauge cluster from the junkyard unless someone has an easy fix for that.

I talked to a guy yesterday who's built a bunch of Subaru engines. Specifically an engine for another guy with a 98 OB who was running desert rallies. They did the 2.2 heads on 2.5 block for that car, mainly for increased compression ratio. He said they then had to use the 2.2 intake and wiring and it was not simple. His advice was to just use higher compression pistons and/or mill the heads/block, and add some reground/aftermarket cams.

I've read a bit about various Frankenmotor combos. What heads and block (model / year)? What cams? I assume you have to run premium gas then. Can we use the stock intake? Are there any sensor or plumbing issues to deal with? How about exhaust, how much is to be gained there? I have to do some serious exhaust repairs now, so it might make sense to put in something that can make a little more power and torque. Propane probably wouldn't be practical for what we're doing.

I was thinking the same on the fuel door. Fuel pump heat issue seemed fine after we moved it to the top of the cell away from the diff. Have to do that and some plumbing with the second pump so we can use the surge tank again. I agree on the coolant level issue, when we first did the head gaskets and this big radiator set up the level would be exactly the same every time, I'm guessing they're starting to go again. So maybe that's a good place to start, what sort of engine should we get/build for this thing? It's not that H6s are that hard to find or expensive, I'd mainly be worried about having to rewire a lot of the car and having some portion of that fail. And as I think Uberoo said, if we had 50% more power and torque we might start breaking drivetrain parts. I think if we just had 10-20% more power and a fresh EJ engine we'd do better, especially if we could confidently run it at 5000RPM all day. So what's the best way to do that?

Agreed on the glass hood and lexan windows. Hard coated lexan isn't super expensive, but I think making something with the compound curves of the hatch glass wouldn't be worth the effort anyhow. Rear wiper and squirter is very handy. Probably right about the speakers, I should see how heavy those are. Most of the other things I think are worth their minimal weight. I haven't been very impressed with lightweight batteries.

Maybe I'm a snob but to me a race car has a tube frame or a carbon tub. This is just a street car that we race. Having built and raced a buggy for a long time, I can tell you it's really nice to be able to drive this car on the street to make sure everything's working properly. The street miles don't usually seem to cause a lot of problems but it's often easier to tell if something's wrong on the street than on the trail. I already have a buggy that we can only race and it just sits 99% of the time. Being able to drive out to NV with the cruise set at 80 and AC going is much more comfortable and faster than driving our truck and having to deal with weigh stations, log books, etc. Then we would have had to get it to Tonopah or Reno somehow, or drive back to Vegas. We hit a lot of whoops in the UP when we went in July, they are fun.

Thanks. There weren't any woops that I remember, just some big rollers. It's sort of like an average day in the desert if you're trying to destroy your car. There's no way I would have been going that fast trail riding. Probably wouldn't have even gone down some of those trails at all if we were just out having fun. We have a list of about thirty things we came up with on the way home to fix or improve, I'll post it up sometime since I could use some help figuring a few things out. For argument's sake, what would make it a full race car? Remove the glass, interior, and AC? I think that would be a marginal performance improvement when racing and make the car completely impractical to drive on the street, which is what it's mainly used for. Honestly with all the dust you might actually be able to go faster with glass and AC than an open cockpit. I was thinking about making a fiberglass hood, that's the easiest significant weight reduction I think. We were talking about removing the rear seat for the race, it's pretty light but we could make more usable storage that way.

The Vegas to Reno was quite an adventure. I've raced in over a hundred off road races in at least six organizations in about ten states and I've never seen anything like it. Thanks to everyone here who's given advice over the years, some of it has been priceless. My friend stopped by Monday night after work and stayed the night. We left Tuesday morning for Vegas. I was reviewing the GPS track they gave us for the course on the tablet on the way and one thing I noticed is that it seemed to be difficult to get the tablet to get a GPS signal. After a while it seemed to be working if we started the tablet GPS when we were stopped. We were making good time when all of a sudden the car started sputtering in eastern CO and my friend pulled off on the next exit. He stopped at a stop sign and then the car died and wouldn't start. We tried a few things like unplugging the MAF sensor and the car would run a little bit but kept dying. We pushed the car off to the side of the ramp. Seemed like it wasn't getting fuel at the engine. Pulled a hose off the bottom of the surge tank and nothing came out. The transfer pump seemed to be making noise but didn't seem to be pumping fuel. We switched the inlet hoses on the pumps so the high pressure pump was drawing directly out of the big fuel cell. We went to an O Reillys and found fittings and some other things we needed to use our spare high pressure fuel pump. We used that in place of the transfer pump. By that time it was dark and we decided to just drive past Denver and stop at the next open hotel (most were full for some reason) for the night. The next day's drive was more scenic and uneventful. The section through Glenwood Canyon and into Utah was very cool, haven't been that way in a long time. We realized the tablet GPS wasn't working at this point so we ordered a bluetooth GPS receiver to be shipped to the hotel on Thursday. We checked the fluids at every gas station and one time the overflow bottle was empty. Stayed at the same level at all the other stops. Used about a quart of oil every 500 miles as usual. We got to Vegas at about 3PM and stepped out of the car. It was HOT, I think about 110F, a shock since we'd been blasting the AC all day. We parked in the shade and put in the door bars, corner windows, number stickers, checked all the suspension bolts, etc. I got ahold of a friend we used to race who lives in Vegas and he met us at the hotel and took us to dinner. We talked for hours, he told us all kinds of racing stories and gave us advice about trying to finish V2R. He didn't believe we'd driven the Subaru out and were planning on racing it and driving it back. He had also never considered just trying a desert race to finish and have fun, he's always trying to win (in class). The next morning we went to registration early and got in line. There were 343 entries, but I think the trophy truck and class 1 teams had registered earlier since they had qualifying the day before. Casey Folks, the owner of Best in the Desert, thanked each person in line for being there. He asked one kid in line in front of us if he was going to be riding during the race. Casey told him when he goes to school next week and they ask what you did over the summer, tell them you were in the longest off road race in the US. The other kids will say they got to play horseshoes. We signed up and got shirts and hoodies. Went out to the parking lot and got the Subaru in line for contingency/tech. Trying to pull into the parking lot to stage for contingency, the security guard was blocking us until we convinced him that we were racing. Baja pits, the pit service we hired for the race, was back there so we talked to them and tried to figure out our pit strategy. When we went to pull in the lot for contingency, the security guard would not let us in. I told him we were racing and he said “this is for race vehicles only” so I told him this is our race car and he finally let us in. Tons of people in contingency loved the Subaru, took pictures, laughed, gave us high fives. At least one guy told us were his heroes, insane, but still his heroes. They were also jealous that we had air conditioning. The racing trax guy gave us a tracker and thought it would be best to just stick it on the roof. It wouldn't get power with the ignition on. My friend realized the rear lights weren't on so we spliced them and the tracker into the old wiring for the rear fan. That switch goes directly to the battery (fused) so we could leave the tracker on all day like they wanted. Hours later we got to tech and as I was giving the suits and helmets to one guy, the other guy told my friend he thought our car would be a nightmare to tech but it looked like we had our spoob together. Thinking we didn't have much else to do before the race, we drove down to Fremont street and wandered around. Ate lunch at a buffet, saw the shark tank, world's biggest gold nugget, a million dollars under glass, guy making paintings with spray cans, container park, etc. Headed back to the Aliante for the driver's meeting. Took longer than expected and there was probably at least a thousand people in the room. They presented Casey Folks with two helmets that all of the drivers (including me) had secretly signed during registration. We headed back to the hotel to find out that the bluetooth GPS wasn't there. It was already 7PM and it was still supposedly going to arrive by 8PM but the hotel manager said their shipments usually come in the early afternoon. Package tracking said it had left Phoenix at 6PM so we didn't see how it would be there that day. We went to Fry's, they didn't have any bluetooth GPS so we checked out the tablets. They had a couple of 10” tablets with GPS on display but apparently none in stock, so I bought one of the display models, so they had to get a manager, etc. Lower resolution than the one I had, but it worked. We were up until about 10PM transfering over the maps, tracks, etc getting it to work how we wanted it and getting back to the hotel. We had hoped to get to bed early. Got up early Friday morning for the two hour drive to the start of the race. Put on our driving suits, packed things up, and headed northeast. Filled up with gas in Alamo and got to the start area. There were hundreds and hundreds of trucks, trailers, and RVs lined up for at least a mile. We parked near a port a potty and put the rear number plate on, aired down, pulled the air bag fuse, etc. It took hours to start all the cars and trucks, they start the TTs and C1s a minute apart and everyone else 30 seconds apart. There were about 3 trucks behind us so we were starting almost last. Just before the start I realized the windshield wipers didn't work. The start of the course was fairly fast and smooth, then we got to the silt beds everyone had warned us about. For about ten miles we must have passed fifty trucks and buggies that were stuck, broken down, or rolled over. We weren't on the course most of the time since it was full of stuck vehicles. Many people looked up from their trucks to cheer us on or give us a thumbs up. A bunch of times it was so dusty we couldn't see anything, probably not even the end of the hood, but it's not a good idea to stop. We got to one place where a wash crossed the course and people were trying all kinds of detours. Some guys pointed us to a gap that dropped into the wash and back out the other side. As I was going down into it we saw a truck that had started behind us coming down the wash from the left. I stopped to let him by and then crossed out the other side. Another time we were driving in the dust along the course and all of a sudden there was a fence in the way. I looped back around and went around the end of the fence. Eventually the dust and traffic mostly cleared and the course smoothed out. People told us the next day that was the most carnage they've ever seen at the start of a desert race. We were going well until about the 30 mile mark the car sputtered to a stop. Didn't seem to be getting good fuel flow/pressure when I pulled the hose off at the engine. After we switched around the fuel lines it seemed to be getting fuel again so we kept going. While my friend was working on that I checked the fuses and the wiper fuse had blown, which is probably what the rear lights and tracker had been spliced into, so I replaced that. After another five miles the engine died. More fuel line diagnosis/rerouting. It did this a couple more times and every time it seemed that both fuel pumps were running. We eventually figured that the fuel pump was just getting too hot. We had to put it close to the rear diff when we replaced it with the wiring and hoses we had, and the diff was super hot. The whole fuel tank was hot. By the time we got to the first road crossing they told us the first pit was already closed and we should just drive up to Tonopah on the highway. We drove down to Ash Springs for gas and to check over the car. A guy there said their motorhome was overheating and would have to be towed back to Vegas. Finally got ahold of Baja pits and they said we should go to pit 2 on the highway and see if his guys could help. They couldn't and that pit was closed so we drove up the highway to Tonopah. Going up a long grade the car died again, I hopped out and dumped a bottle of water on the fuel pump and it fired right up and ran fine the rest of the way. Went to the finish line to tell BITD that we'd timed out but were going to start again on Saturday. We moved the pump to the top of the fuel cell in the parking lot of the Clown motel and rerouted the wires and hoses. Checked all the suspension and subframe bolts, lug nuts, tires. They didn't have a room for us so we drove to camp adventure and found a place to park and set up the tent close to a port a potty. Slept fairly well, got up the next morning to pack up and check over the Subaru. Here's our campsite: Saturday morning again a ton of people stopped by, impressed that we were going at it again the next day and that we planned to drive it home. Another long wait in staging for the start of the race. Parked by a port a potty again since we were there for hours. Went to the rescue truck so they could bandage up some minor burns I'd gotten on my arm. Some guys in staging said they'd been desert racing for 20 years and Friday was the most challenging race they'd ever had. Saturday we started dead last, but there were supposedly only about 220 entries still running. Here we are waiting to start Saturday: They were taking down the signs as we pulled up to the starting line and then we were off. We quickly caught up to the guys in front of us in the stockish Ford SUV but it took a long time before I got close enough to get them to pull over so we could pass. We were running a 37mph average pace which we thought was good. Had to average 30mph including stops to hit the pits in time so we wanted a little extra time. This meant I had to push the car harder than I really wanted to but it seemed to be taking it. Every five miles or so we'd catch up to someone and pass them and a few times someone must have gotten their car running after being broken and passed us. The course had some very fast sections but a lot of it was about two foot deep ruts. Some were in silt, some in rocky river beds, and it was always almost impossible to stay out of them. Early in the day we went up a long grade up a mountain. It wasn't very rough but I had the throttle wide open for maybe 20 minutes. In third gear it would slowly lose speed, so I'd have to downshift to second but didn't want to run too high RPMs for that long at full throttle so I'd hold it around 4500 in second. At the top of the mountain was a narrow, rough, rutted pass that went by an old mine. Going back down the other side was a pretty smooth long run we did at about 70mph. We eventually passed pit 7 and some of the people working on their trucks stopped to cheer us on as we cruised by. A couple of times in the silt beds we'd be cruising along through soft silt and suddenly hit a big rock. At about mile 70 we realized we had two flat tires. The course being so soft it was hard to tell when the tires were going down. We only had one spare in the car. We could still hear the left front leaking so we jacked up the front end but couldn't find the leak. The left rear wheel and tire were both completely destroyed so we put the spare on that corner. Here's what was left of it: This all took an eternity with our bolted in spare and jack, maybe a half hour, plus we got stuck for a little while before we got back on the course, had to do some digging and used the sand ladders. We knew it would be difficult to impossible to make pit 8 before it closed but we got back in and hammered down. After another five miles or so the front tire was clearly shredding apart and the car shut off, everything went dark. Popped the hood and saw the alternator belt was off and figured out the positive cable was loose. Fixed those and eventually got back on the course, difficult in soft terrain with no left front tire. By the time we got to the public road crossing before pit 8 we were out of time again. Eventually the guys from Baja pits showed up with a couple of our tires. We replaced the front tire and put the other one in the back of the Subaru for a spare. Baja pits noticed the LR was missing a lug nut and others were loose. I probably never tightened them when we were rushing to replace it and get to the pit, so we jacked up that end of the car and tightened them down. We headed towards Tonopah on the highway, they were going to help us repair the exhaust back in town where they had more equipment. As we were getting close to town something bad was clearly going on in the rear and we smelled burning rubber so I pulled off on a big gravel shoulder. We replaced the LR wheel studs and wheel and tire. While it was jacked up and apart they straightened out the LR rear lateral link with our bottle jack and by supporting the bottom of the link with their bottle jack. Another guy and I bent the driver's wiper arm away from the windshield, it had started scraping the glass by the end of the race. We also noticed the windshield was cracked. This was a dust storm blowing in while we were doing that: We drove a few hours to Ely, NV just to make some progress and stayed at a Motel 6. We got some decent sleep and kept heading north to 80. On the way home the LF tire (one of the old ones we'd shipped to Baja pits) was leaking badly enough that we had to add air a few times a day. The overflow bottle would also randomly empty completely or overflow. With the high pressure fuel pump just pulling from the RR of the big fuel cell, when it got down to about half a tank it would start to die on right hand turns or hard braking, so we had to stop for gas every 150-200 miles. Went across UT on 80, got to see salt flats and lakes. By the time we made it home there was some kind of rattling noise coming from the rear we could never figure out. Got home OK though. The course was much rougher than everyone we'd talked to beforehand told us it would be. The race was a ton of fun. I knew it would be different but not running laps is so much more interesting. Even the 50 mile course in Texas was great but after a few laps you usually know what's coming up next. At the V2R you just keep going and going and going, never really knowing what's around the next turn or over the next hill. Working on cars in the middle of the desert isn't my favorite activity, and it was a big disappointment that made us time out both days, but it really adds to the challenge and adventure, rather than just waiting for the tow truck to take you back to the pits.