Friday, September 30, 2011

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Got a new set of 14 inch STI Paddles in today

New 14 Inch STI paddles mounted on SS rims showed up today. These things are huge and will float on the sand really nice.
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Sunday, September 11, 2011

Factory UTV Equipped Team Jean XMF Polaris RZR Takes VORRA 24 Hour Endurance Race


Fallon, NV – September 4, 2011 - It was a warm sunny weekend for the inaugural VORRA 24 Hour Endurance race.  The race consisted of two 12 hour legs, one on Saturday (clockwise loop) and one on Sunday (counter clockwise loop).  Friday was a day for pre running of the 41 mile loop course.  We quickly found that with the addition of the Holz Stage III motor kit on our desert RZR motor this year made our RZR much quicker and faster than last year when we ran with the stock RZR 800 motor.  In addition we had hit our set up perfectly on the XMF/Walker Evans +8 suspension as the suspension was working perfectly through the long whoop sections in the early part of the race loop.  We finished our pre run in a leisurely 1 hour and 30 minutes at which point we loaded back up and headed off to tech inspection at Stockman’s Casino.
There were a total of 28 cars, trucks, buggies, UTV’s and bugs in the race.  We drew a starting spot of number 18 behind the class 10 buggies and number 1 for the UTV’s.  Our goal was 8-10 laps per day depending on how the RZR held up.  We ran our first lap in 1 hour and 2 minutes well ahead of the other UTV’s.  As the day wore on the lap times decreased slightly with each lap along with the increasing silt, height of the whoops and rocks getting kicked onto the course.  With the other UTV’s dropping out due to mechanical issues we called it a day after 6 laps in order to save our equipment for day 2.
Day 2 brought a wrinkle to the start as VORRA promoter Wes Harbor decided to go with a land rush start of the nearby dry lake bed.  Part of the start would require that each vehicle’s pit crew would need to change a tire prior to the vehicle being able to take off from the start line.  The 28 car field had now been narrowed down to 15 cars with our UTV the only one to be able to start the day 2 race.  Sunday’s loop was to be run counter clockwise so our goal was to have a good showing with the start and then pull over to let the faster cars, trucks and buggies head off in front of us.   Our pit crew did a quick tire change and we were off the line 5th.  We quickly moved over so as to not get run over in the dust cloud but proved that our crack pit crew could hang in with the big boys and their pneumatic guns from their fully stocked chase trucks.
The counter clockwise direction proved to be challenging and devastating.   Unfortunately for two vehicles the roller section at mid course proved to be a shorter jump in this direction and two vehicles had serious crashes which forced a red flag stoppage forcing a 2 ½ hour delay.  During our long stop at Check 1 we found a small crack on a motor mount that we believe may have been caused by a hidden rock in the silt during lap 1, it appeared that the crack was not race ending and once the race started we continued on.  Towards the end of lap 2 we managed to find the same rock that we found on lap 1 as well as another about a mile further up the course.  As we came into the pits we heard a vibration in the clutch area and upon inspection of our RZR we found that our two encounters with the rocks had caused more damage to the motor mount which ended our day.
Fortunately enough for us our aggregate 328 completed miles was good enough to take the overall win for the weekend.
Thank you to our sponsors:  XMF (+8 suspension & roll cage), Walker Evans shocks, Factory UTV, Sapa Extrusions, Cal Custom Trailers & Power Sports, Pape Rentals, MUZZY Exhaust, Holz Racing Products,  Hiper Technology carbon fiber racing wheels and our new sponsor Summers Brothers Axles.