Pics from the Baja race (10 pics may not be dialup friendly)

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Some of you know that I participate on a mini-baja team.  I finally got the complete set of pics and video and I figured I'd post up a few.  I wish I could post the vids because I've got vertical T-bone.  A car mule kicked over a roller and the car behind it drilled it right in the skid plate.  I've also got a vid of a Mexican car flipping over backwards on the rock crawl.  The mexicans go balls out in every event and this was one instance where a little finesse would have been better.

I'll narrate a little here.

1st pic:  Our car in line for the manuverability event.  This is as clean as you will ever see this car.
2nd pic:  That's me getting ready for the hill climb event.
3rd pic:  The mudpit.  This makes for a hell of a mess but makes for good pictures.  The mud was the reason we put a flag on our car.  We were the only team to have a flag.  We figured that the mud may obscure the numbers so to make our car mor recognizable we put a flag on it.  It worked because the event staff all reffered to our car as the pirate.

4th pic:  Hitting the logs.  This killed the most cars.  I saw cars scattered all over with broken parts.  Broken wheels, axles, chains, spindles, hubs, you name it they broke it.  Our car survived the logs without incident.

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5th pic:  This is the short cut.  You had a choice of taking the long smooth route or the rough short cut.  You could save at least 10 second a lap on the shortcut.  Only the most capable and durable cars could make it though.

6th pic:  A bit of goofing around.  We decided to play monster truck and crush a car. 

7th pic:  A pic of the whole team together after the race.  We finished in 8th place in the endurance race and 7th overall with points from all events added together.  Oh, that's out of 80+ teams.

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These next pics are from winter comp in Houghton Michigan.  We placed 3rd in this event out of 20 or so teams.  This was basically a long distance beer run for us.  Temperature on race day was in the neighbor hood of -10. 

8th pic:  This is last years car in the big air competition.  This was an informal event to see who could fly the highest and farthest. 

9th pic:  This is our test mule car.  This is the car that came in 3rd.  As you can see we can get some pretty good air.

10th pic:  This is landing the jump.  It took a bit of skill to hit the jump with the most speed possible without flipping end over end. 

That's all I got folks.

[Charger_Fan]

Man, those landing pics make my back hurt.

Looks like a fun hobby/sport. What do those use for a drivetrain? I see a centrifical clutch setup, but can't tell what sort of engine.

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The landings usually don't hurt much.  Once in a while you'll land wrong and really knock yourself around though.  I jacked up a landing once and landed on all 4 wheels at different times.  My head got slammed around like a pinball and almost knocked me out.  I was still concious but I had lost coordination.  I basically unbuckled and rolled out of the car and laid there for a bit.  To prevent injury we use a 4 point harness.  We also use a motocross style helmet for visiblity, goggles, wrist restraints, neck roll, and for competition a fire suit. 

Our drivtrain is a 10hp briggs engine.  The rules don't allow any motor work so we have to focus on making a fully optimized car.  Even with the 10hp we still get up to speeds of 40+mph depending on the gear ratio.  We also use a double reduction chain case but there are many different things that can be used.  I've seen double reduction clutch setups, gearboxes, single reductin chains, hydraulic drives, anything.  The clutches you see are comets.  They seem to work ok but we're doing testing with polaris setups to get a little more power to the ground.  We're also looking into a totally new CVT.  It's a primary and secondary clutch in one package.  Currently Nasa is the only people to use such a setup so we're trying to work with the company to get a "research grant" of one of these clutch setups.