Friday Updates #2

-Unfortunately, we've suffered our first casualty of the NEFR 2011 MaxAttack! Event. New competitors Briar McGee and Josh Dampier showed up in an awesome piece of engineering. They took a Suzuki Swift and placed a Suzuki Hyabusa superbike engine in the bay, with a chain coming off the stock countershaft and driving a final drive to the axles. I'll post photos of the arrangement, as the machine is just too cool. As can happen with fresh engineering projects, the weak spots are surfacing and the car suffered a broken axle after landing the jump at Mexico. This sidelines them for MaxAttack!, but they'll try to get going to get some experience. We look forward to seeing them continue the development of their car and their rally experience! And I'll definitely post pics of that 'busa engine sitting between the fenders!

-It seems the Mexico jump is catching some others out this year, too. As usual, it's a tabletop type jump, but this year the landing ramp is rather sharp edged without a long run out...more like a motocross tabletop. This makes it very hard to try to “clear” the jump, as it would require the attitude of the car to be very nose down and the length of the leap to be judged perfectly. Hence most cars just go easy, jump up on top, and then roll off.

-One car that suffered a lot from the jump was the Ford Fiesta of William Petrow and Jeremy Neyhart. The team judged the length about right on the jump, but since the landing was so steep, the car came down with the rear hitting the top lip first and slamming the front into the ground hard. They broke the front subframe and messed up the skidplate on the first run of the stage. They removed the skidplate and threw it in the hatch for the second run, and then got to work welding up the front end when they got to service. They're back out on the stages now.