#35 is on pages 70,71 in this issue of Bronco Driver mag. Still the best looking racer .

You don't mess around, solid work! Be safe out there!

If you are coming to the Platte River meet next month . I will bring it for you.

Are you going to get new shoes for your Beast!?? Maybe sell your old beat up race tires or how many races do you think you can get out of them? (I might be interested) ;)

Well obviously you need 35s then!!!

Haven't been sitting idle. We prepped and tested the Racer this last weekend for about 500 miles from Grand Junction to Moab and back, about 95% unpaved with a few paved transitions thrown in - very similar format to NORRA. We have a few small things to tweak over the winter but the Bronco ran and felt great. One of the most awesome things was my 85 year old father came out to visit and I gave him a ride in the racer, he had a great time!

Bummed we won't make the NORRA 500, unfortunately my race budget was wiped out from the engine rebuild and racer fixes from the 1000. We will definitely be racing the 2020 NORRA 1000 and at least one other race - I am eyeing a certain BITD race in mid August, we shall see.

We shot a bunch of 360 video as the scenery was pretty spectacular on our route, hopefully get it posted up here soon.

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Glad to hear the shake down run went good and its super cool that you were able to give your Dad a ride.
BITD could it be "Vegas to Reno"
I'm going to severely age my self but I participated in the 1st Vegas to Reno on a CR500.

Well time to get to it, only 4 months until race time :)

Have a list of to-do’s but not many major lifts this year.

Mike and I have been working on organizing and focusing our lists, first things we are checking off are the shield mounts for the driver and passenger. Be nice to have some rock and wind deflection as anything over 70 cranks on our necks. We of course will be replacing the solid visors with some clear lexan just a little wider and taller.





We are adding a 2nd battery to our setup and building a “shelf” to cover/protect them and to act as a shelf for our cooler, tool bag etc.



We had some issues with the transmission barfing throughout the high speed stuff, so we added a catch tank that will allow the transmission fluid to expand and drain back to the C4



We will start sanding the Bronco down this week to get ready for primer and paint!


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Out of paint, into the prep mode. A few changes here and there - a bunch of tweaking, some more spare parts.

Race prep is in full effect for the April NORRA Mexican 1000

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Love it!!

Looks all brand new again

Looks great!

clean slate again !

Look good, drive good.

¡Me gusta mucho, el buen trabajo Señor!

Well we are all prepped and ready to race... for October :cry:

Actually, I am eyeing a couple of races this summer here in the states that I think we might attend but we will wait and see how things shake out in the next few weeks.

Lots of little improvements done, we learned allot from last years race. We also built and installed a fresh race prepped C4 and transfer case and will keep the previous setup as our backup.

I did find out why our Lowrance GPS/Compass started acting screwy this last summer. Apparently the repairs we did to the roll cage created a magnetic field across the roll cage top. I scanned the top of the cage with a magnetic field detector and its off the charts where the roll cage runs. The GPS/Compass is off by 159 degrees. I compensated via the Lowrance for now but would love to get rid of that magnetic field eventually.

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Hopefully we can get out and social distance ourselves in a month or so locally and have some fun in the racer.

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Phil's Covid19 mask

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You can throw up and filter your spray paint!

We ran the BITD Silver State 300 last weekend, a little race report below:

2020 BITD Silver State 300 - #4535 Race Bronco recap

Sharing our last race recap as someone might find it interesting -

As most things this year, the 2020 #silverstate300 was an interesting race, cut short by a forest fire, a downed chopper (everyone walked away) and a 48 year old drove a 48 year old Ford Bronco through some of the most torn up race course ever. We might not have been the fastest but we were the oldest and didn’t finish last. First in class.

The Bronco is actually mostly stock, built to race the NORRA Mexican 1000 in Baja Mexico in the Pioneer class we are required to run a stock suspension setup with original suspension points, Dana 44 front, rear ford 9 inch, stock size rear leafs (length and width) stock coil buckets, stock radius arms and limited to a single 2" reservoir shock at each corner. In addition we have to run a Ford small block, original transmission and transfer case as it was offered from Ford so in our case we are running a 351w stroked to a 408, C4 transmission and Dana20. There are obviously a few things we can upgrade and the additional safety items, which we take very seriously. But overall its probably more Stock than most race vehicles and even production class racers out there.

I knew going into this years Silver State 300 (SS300) the course would be tough, there were almost 300 vehicles starting ahead of us and a bunch are running 40" tires which as you can imagine plow massively deep ruts through the majority of the race course. Undeterred our 72 was prepped and we stepped up our tire game this race and crammed 35 inch BFG KM3's under it to help us out and glad we did!

We traveled from Denver to the oven known as Las Vegas on Thursday, the day before tech, and arrived before sundown to do some quick prep for the next days safety and tech inspection before grabbing a good dinner and a good nights sleep. The next day we sprinted to registration so that we could get through tech early in the day before it got really hot. Tech went fairly smoothly, we have a few things to address but nothing major, we were good to go. We spent the rest of the day checking fluids, zip tying stuff to various parts of the Bronco, taking care of a leaking rear axle seal and a broken leaf spring retainer that had been diligently bailing wired from the last years NORRA (apparently the crew didn't appreciate my bailing wire retainment approach). We took a break during the heat of the day to relax, watch the drivers meeting and subsequent race changes from a lightening induced forest fire and then headed off to grab some In-n-Out before hitting the parking lot once more to do final prep and a quick light aiming.

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Saturday morning is race day. We grabbed a good breakfast and headed out with the rest of the racer north to Alamo Nevada. A quick last minute truck stop to fuel up the chase trucks and top off the racer and dump cans we headed for the starting line.

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The Forest Fire was very obvious in the mountains above the starting line and the wind certainly wasn't helping the efforts.

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We knew we would be one of the last off the line and as it turns out we were third from last - which was just fine by me. To finish this race you have to keep above a 30 mph average pace. There are closing times for each pit and the goal for us was to run a consistent smart pace.

Waiting for our start time we did last minute prepping and relaxed staying well hydrated. The start of the race was around 3500 feet and it was probably mid 90's, so not quite as hot as Vegas (108F) but still hot. The course would take us up to 7800 feet and back to 4000, so we anticipated the first three hours to be pretty warm in the Bronco and would keep an eye on our temps as we hadn't raced in this warm of weather, even in Baja.

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We lined up behind a ocean of Golf Carts (and some Jeepspeed folks) - basically as far as you could see, never seen so many side-by-sides in all my life and they certainly were not stock, the photo below doesn't do it justice...

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We left the start line right at 1:30PM, almost two hours behind the first "Trick Truck" (Trophy Truck in Baja, its a trademark thing apparently) and quickly ran into a bunch of stuck trucks in silt. The Bronco easily maneuvered around the stuck trucks and silt and we settled in to some nice power line roads to get up to speed and a feel for the course. About 10 miles in, we noticed our Transmission temps creeping up. We have a pretty beefy transmission cooler and after racing 4 days straight we never saw temps above 195F in Baja, even running long high speed stretches. As we kept up the pace were now at 220F within a few miles. We slowed down and ran conservative to the first Pit at race mile 27 or so, we didn't have anyone at this pit so we cruised through and slowed our pace as the transmission came down to around 200F. A few miles later we hit another long straight and opened the bronco up, sure enough our transmission temp quickly pegged out ~250F. We were pretty worried as we were really not pushing the Bronco very hard and so far the course was relatively easy. We knew the hard stuff was coming up and we would have a tough time keeping our finish pace if the transmission was overheating. Again, we slowed down for the next 10 miles or so and finally got into some technical narrow race course through the mesquite trees and through some very rocky and torn up gulleys. The transmission finally decided to cool off. At Race mile 74 we meet up with our chase team for the first time at Pit 2, for a quick 1 min stop for a visual and off we went.

The next 15 miles were pretty rough, huge rocks, huge ruts, deep river bed silt and did i mention rocks? Yes, rocks.. lots of them, it looked like the bigger trucks threw dynamite out the windows as they went by. At mile 100 we started to hear some clunking from the suspension. We took some pretty big hits and thought we had thrashed the rear end or drive shaft. We pulled over and crawled under the bronco looking for the obvious stuff and just couldn't find anything. I knew we had about 20 miles to go to the next pit and the Bronco was still running and driving great so we jumped back in and headed on down the course to Pit 3.

We radioed ahead to our crew about the suspension issues, the banging was more of a hammering and in time with certain cycles of the suspension. I knew it was on the drivers side and it was somewhere near the front. I suspected we had blown an air bump or lost a bushing. Pulling into pit 3 the crew immediately saw the front axle moving back and forth and sure enough we had lost the drivers side radius arm bushing completely, there was nothing left of the front half and the back half was already half gone.

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The crew quickly assessed the situation, dug through the parts bins we started to formulate a fix, possibly using used bearings and random poly bushings, luckily digging further through the spare parts bins we found a used set of Radius arm bushings! The guys lept into action strapping the front axle and pulling it forward to get the radius arm out of the mount - bushings in we noticed the passenger side was just about done but still in place. Time was ticking, each pit has a closing time and if you are not underway before it closes you are done. Additionally we were told that the fire has worsened and they had shortened the race, the finish line would be at Pit 7. We decided that the bushing could wait as we had a fuel stop with BFG at Pit 4 and we would swap the bushing there.

The next section seemed to be even rougher than the last as I tried to keep the passenger side axle from taking too big of hits. This section was filled with rocky washes with deep ruts and lots of high centering possibilities but we didn't have any issues and arrived at BFG pit 4. Taking on fuel and with the BFG folks help we got the passenger radius arm bushing swapped in and even a little time for a couple of new decals

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At this point we were told that the race was shortened once again - this time the finish would be at Pit 6, about 70 miles away. We decided to have the crew skip Pit 5 and we would just meet them at the finish, a bit of bummer but we enjoyed the last 70 miles as it was the best so far, lots of elevation changes from sandy washes then into the mountains (where we came across the helicopter crash from earlier) and then toward the end nice open roads and huge sweepers. We even got to run with our new light bar for a few of hours in the dark and with the temps dropping and faster course we were having a great time!

A couple miles before Pit 6 we rounded a corner and crossed the finish line, a quarter mile later we were greeted by the BITD crew, race tracker removed and then headed down the road to Pit 6 - where there wasn't a soul in sight...



We radioed our crew and were told they were a few miles down the road, apparently they were stopped from coming to the finish line - later found out there was allot of out bound traffic from the pit earlier and thats why they restricted two way traffic. So we headed off down the road and finally found them in a field, loaded up, had a beer and headed home.

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A huge shoutout to #bfgoodrichtires and the BFG pit support. They flat out rock, nothing better than seeing the big Red white and blue truck out there! Most of all i have to thank my crew - no way we would have finished with them.

Upon further investigation we found that the brand new rubber bushings that I had installed recently in the Racer had metal re-enforcements in them. The metal re-enforcements were discs that fatigued the bushings and acted like a razor blade and destroyed the bushing from the inside out. I know the vendor I bought them from doesn't make them and have reached out to them to let them know. I will be replacing the rubber bushings with poly AND keeping a spare set of polys as backup :)

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Thank for letting me bore you! We have a bunch of 360 degree 4K video we are reviewing from the race and some on course actions shots and will post up soon.

Will be cleaning and doing some prep starting this week. Need to check the rear housing as it might be "more" bent.. lol .

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You...and your crew are total BadAsses!!!

Nice write up Chris!!
Glad to hear you finished the race that's a HUGE accomplishment its sounds like you have a very solid rig, your team should be proud

Can you run an aftermarket rear housing? Still 9" based but something fabricated and super strong.