April, 2010

BITD Silver State 300

Voss Motorsports takes 1st in Trick Truck class!

The week started out with qualifying for the unlimited classes the Thursday before the race. As we showed up to qualifying just north of the Las Vegas speedway, it was not your typical Las Vegas weather. The tempurature was in the mid 40’s and it was raining pretty hard. We did a quick walk around part of the 4 mile qualifying loop before it was time to line up for our practice lap. We get one practice lap to mark the course on our GPS and then our second lap is our timed qualifying lap.

We were about half way through our practice lap when we noticed that we had lost 1st gear in our transmission. We finished our lap in 2nd gear and marked the course as best as we could. There wasn’t enough time between our practice lap and our qualifying lap to change out a transmission, so we knew we would have to do our best with just 2nd and third gear. We lined up and put down the best lap that we could, given the situation with our transmission. We were hoping to at least be somewhere around mid pack (20th) for the start of the race on Saturday. We loaded up the truck and headed back to town to change out transmissions.

Qualifying results were posted at 7:00 on Thursday night and we found out that we had qualified 2nd trick truck and 9th overall. We were all super excited about the results and even more excited for the race on Saturday.

Saturday morning came and we unloaded the race truck at the Alamo truck stop where the starting line was. The weather was perfect as we took the green flag and we knew what we had to do in order to win the race. Our plan was to try and stay out of the dust as much as we could and to pass the vehicles in front of us without getting any flat tires. We charged forward and passed a couple of class 1 buggies before pit 1. We were charging pretty hard to try and keep up with Andy McMillin, who qualified 1st out of the trick trucks. We didn’t want him to get the physical lead and pull too far away from us once he had no dust. As we went through pit 2 we had gained ground on Andy (the #6 truck) and were actually in front of him on time.

Shortly after pit 3 we came over a rise and #6 trick truck was pulled over changing a flat. We were now the 1st trick truck and as long as we didn’t get a flat or have any problems we knew we could win the race. We charged hard to pit 4 where we planned to get fuel and 2 new rear tires. Our pit stop was flawless, as we pulled out of our pit BJ Baldwin, driving Clyde Stout’s truck, came into the pit and was right on our bumper. That meant that BJ was actually leading the race on time because he had started 2 minutes after us. We weren’t too worried though because he was still going to have to pit at the next pit. We charged forward as best as we could, only to be stuck in the dust of a class 1 car that wouldn’t let us around him. We got within 30 feet of his back bumper and then we would lose him in the dust. The class 1 car knew we were behind him but wouldn’t let us by. I really wanted to drive through the dust and nail him in the back bumper, but we decided to play it smart and back off so we wouldn’t hit a rock and get a flat tire. We chased the car all the way to pit 5 and luckily he pulled in to get fuel right in front of us.
Leaving pit 5 I believe we were physically in 3 place overall with Sam Berri and T.J Flores in front of us. According to our pit crew the Grove buggy was right behind us and he was actually winning the race overall on time. The racing at this point was very close and we decided to not pay attention to the times, we were leading the trick truck class and didn’t want to blow it by trying too hard to get the overall win. We chased Sam Berri through the mountains and tried getting around him, but the dust was just too thick to make the pass. Our truck was getting light in the back because we were getting low on fuel so we backed off a little bit and just played it safe for the last 30 miles to the finish line.

As we crossed the finished line we were pretty sure we had won our class, we just had to let some time pass to see if anyone else was right behind us who could win on corrected time. No one came and we slowly realized that we had just won our first trick truck race. T.J Flores did an awesome job and beat us by 1 min and 32 second for the overall win. We didn’t get the overall win but we didn’t really care. It was our first trick truck win and the first win for a Jimco Trophy Truck.

We would like to thank Kevin Kroyer for letting us use his shop to change out our transmissions before the race. We would also like to thank General Tire for the awesome support and tires; we didn’t have a single flat tire all day. We would also like to thank Jimco, TrailReady Beadlocks, KC HiLites, Fox Shox and Teasdale Quality Foods for all the support that they give us.
We will see everyone in Baja at the 500!


 

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