That’s when I got in the car for the first time, just as the sun was setting. Limited to third and fifth gears and being told by Marshall to take it easy and conserve the gearbox, I tiptoed around the track as darkness fell. Once the sky was fully black, the loonies came out again, just like last year, with cars spinning off left and right and dragging all kinds of rocks and dirt back onto the track with them. At one point there was literally a river of dirt across the track going into turn 3. Was this the Baja 1000 or the 25 Hours of Thunderhill?
To add to the madness, it was getting harder and harder to find third gear and fifth gear wasn’t much better. As a result, I was falling off the pace more and more, which left me mixing it up with the loonies in the slower cars. Not a happy situation, and after some radio communication with Marshall we decided to park the car to let the gearbox cool down so we could change the fluid and consider our options. Without a spare transmission on hand, things were looking grim.
That’s when the fog rolled in. Having parked the Scion no more than 15 minutes earlier, the race was red-flagged and we were no longer losing laps to the field. That’s when Mike from GST suggested we search Craigslist.org for a spare transmission. A bit of web browsing and a few phone calls later, we found what we needed. After that, it was all in the hands of GST wrenching superstars Tommy Wu and Mert Solis, who tore into the Scion once again, this time doing an emergency overnight tranny swap under the cover of fog.
From there, it was simply a matter of the drivers adapting to the lack of a limited-slip differential and bringing the car home in one piece. But in endurance racing things are never simple, as proven by the mysterious right rear brake lockup problem that emerged late in the race. Unable to completely fix the problem, and with ailing front lower ball joints, Dave McEntee, Gary and Andrew nursed our wounded Scion to the checkered flag at 3 pm on Sunday afternoon, completing 390 laps and finishing ninth in a class of 19 teams and 42nd overall. Not the glorious class victory we were all hoping for a few days earlier, but given what the last 68 hours had just been like, the feeling was just as sweet.
And that’s when things got even sweeter. Turns out event sponsor Muscle Milk was giving out the only cash prize of the event to the team that persisted through the most hardship to make it to the finish, appropriately named the “Muscle To The Finish” award. When our team was announced as the recipient of this award during the driver’s meeting, a huge cheer and a standing ovation erupted. This unexpected outpouring of support from our fellow competitors was truly the ultimate reward and made our 68-hour display of perseverance, madness and masochism one of the most fulfilling experiences a racer could ever hope to have.