RACE REPORT SAN FELIPE 250
By Marc Burnett
I just want to start by saying congratulations to Scott McFarland car # 1942 for winning the 2015 San Felipe 250.
Our weekend did not go so well in San Felipe.We are still in the process of working the bugs out of the car.I want to tell all the Polaris haters out there that I’m very happy to be part of Polaris team.My stock Polaris’ that I use for pre-running have not missed a beat.These cars are by far the best UTV’s in the market.We have modified a lot of stuff in the car and the issues that we are having with the car are because of our modifications.
Back to our story; We basically built this car in 28 days.We are approximately 40 or so days into this car now.I was hoping not to have any problems but as you can see we had had two races and problems at both.When we started the race the car was only doing 63 MPH down a flat road to approximately mile 4.At this point we were passed by Scott by at least 10 mph.We stayed behind him until about mile marker 15 then it was time to put the hammer down to catch John.As we approached the 30 mile marker we were in second place.As we proceeded to get closer to the road crossing we were 25 seconds behind Johnny’s UTV.As we were crossing the road crossing about ½ mile up the road we broke our first belt.We did not know the reason why the belt broke.At this point everybody passed us all the way the 6th place.We got going again after fixing the belt trying to catch the leaders.We were in deep sand at approximately the 86 mile marker.We then broke another belt.At this time I was pretty pist off.We replaced it pretty fast and got going again.We traveled another 10 miles or so and the exhaust was blown out and making noise.We stopped again to look at the exhaust and come to find out there was a hole in the muffler.At this point I was thinking the car was too lean again but we got back in the car and started driving.We went approximately another 10 miles and I started to smell rubber and did not know where the smell was coming from.I quickly stopped again and found my rear spear time was starting to catch fire from the hole in the exhaust.We got the spare tire off the car and we started throwing dirt on it.At this time we did not know what to do.Do I leave the spare tire and the $700 OMF wheel or take the exhaust mufflers off that had two big holes on it?.I decided to take the two mufflers off and leave them in the desert.We proceeded to drive down the road again and notice the temperature cage rising and motor started going to limp mode so we pulled over once again to see why the motor was so hot.Come to find out the fan in the radiator was not working.We noticed the antenna was somehow in between the fan blades.What happened was it blew the circuit breaker.We reset the breaker and got back on our way.This time the Murray past us.At this time we were solely focused on finishing the race.We went approximately 15 miles in the sand wash at mile marker 114 and all of a sudden there was a big noise and the car rolled to a complete stop.We got out of the car and noticed the drive shaft came off the rear transmission spline and bounce up and down and made the clutch disintegrated.The drive shafts broke the motor mounts from the coming off the spline.This was not the cause of the drive shaft coming off.Also our motor mount brace in front of the motor was all redone before this race.We’re in the process of taking the car apart to see what caused the problem.As of right now it looks like it’s the carrier bearing.We think it moved the drive shaft too much and the drive shaft was only on the splines about a ¼ inch and underload and it did not slide back to the shaft so it came off.We will find out the real problem in the days to come.
I want to thank all my sponsors for all their help and support for this weekend.I’m pretty bummed out that we are not finishing races but we are getting familiar with the car more and more every day.I also want to thank all our fans for their loyalty to us and I apologize for our bad results.
Please check back to see more photos of the cars soon.
Thanks
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