The factory Racing takes on the challenge of San Felipe Challenge of Champions Sept 9-11. This was a new venue for our September race and the temperatures forecasted for San Felipe wasn’t looking to good (well over 100 degrees and humid) but the team was ready to take on the challenge of racing in San Felipe in the late summer. The team arrived a day early to avoid having to work during the middle of the day. They arrived at Contingency as soon as it opened to be done early. Race day temperatures were not as hot but still a concern.
Dan drove the entire race with Brent Thompson as his
co-driver. Due to the weekend change many of our regulars where unable to
make the race, leaving us quite shorthanded. Dan started really well
gaining a lot of time on his competitors by race mile 60. However at race
mile 97 he lost his first cooling fan. We had been battling with this
problem the last few races but thought we had it figured out, but we still had put
a spare on the truck. After changing it quickly the spare cooling fan only lasted until Race mile 122. Dan radioed to Laurie who was at El Dorado Ranch (approx. 40 miles
away) that he needed the cooling fan in her chase truck. Laurie and Valerie headed out in the Raptor to take him the part. They sure had a great time with the raptor but was feeling bad because they didn’t have good directions and took a few wrong turns delaying getting to him. That cooling fan only last a short time but he was able to limp to race mile 262 losing 1 position, meanwhile while Laurie and Valerie traveled back to San Felipe, Dean and Amy went to a junk yard and found a used one. Then Laurie and Valerie took the used one in to them. It didn’t work very well
so they had to slow down to prevent overheating the engine but we knew time was running out. But we were able to finish with a couple minutes to spare, keeping
our dream of Every mile of Every race still alive. We placed 2nd behind Arturo Alvarez, in 10:55:22 averaging 23.1 mph.