The San Diego County Fair, known to the locals as the Del Mar Fair, is a staple of summer time in San Diego, California. Along with the endless supply of fried food, vendors, and carnival rides the fair offers a number of offroad events including monster trucks, a demolition derby and Tuff Trucks. We have been interested in competing in Tuff Trucks for a few years, but this was the first year we felt the Jeep was in good enough shape for the course. We signed up in the beginning of May, and once we were approved to race, the prep began.
Tuff Trucks is just a few laps in an arena filled with jumps, whoops and turns so there isn’t a lot we had to do but we did want to take a look at our suspension. We would need make some adjustment to account for the extra air time and harder impacts.
We knew that the overall stance of the Jeep was a little low. The front sat on a lot of it’s travel, with 6” up and 9” down. The rear could also use some work, we built it to handle 14” but had it strapped at 12”. We swapped out the rear coils for a set from Off Road Warehouse that was 2” longer and a little softer. Dan then made new limit strap mounts to allow the Jeep to use the full 14” of rear shock travel. Up front, the adjustment was a little more complicated. Since twin traction beams travel in an arc, simply increasing the ride height with new coils or tightening down the lock ring would cause the camber angle to be wrong when sitting at ride height. We increased the spring rate to make the front sit a little higher and adjusted the alignment cams on the upper ball joints to correct the camber. Now that the Jeep was sitting a little higher we lowered the dual rate stop rings on our Bilstein 9100s so we would hit our stiffer spring rate sooner, this would keep us from bottoming out when rapidly compressing the shocks. All of these changes gave us a taller ride height, a better balance between the amount of up and down travel, and a Jeep that could take harder hits will still maintaining control. With this new suspension we felt the need for a shake down run before the race.
The best part about adjusting the suspension is the testing and we can’t test on the city streets of San Diego so we packed up and headed out to the desert in the middle of June. Testing in the desert in the middle of summer presents some unique conditions. We trade endless empty trails for 100 degree day time heat. This means the only time we are able to put in any time behind the wheel is between 9pm and 7am. We have been doing these kind of trip for a few summers and fondly refer to them as Night Trips. A Night Trip schedule look like this: Arrive after dark, unload and start driving around midnight, drive nonstop until the sun rises, sleep until around 4pm, then start the cycle over. It makes for a long weekend but is well worth it for the endless empty summertime trails. After 2 nights of driving and some small adjustments we were feeling good about the suspension and headed home to wait for race day.
This was our first time at a Tuff Trucks event so we didn’t really know what to expect. With a handful of tools and some spare parts we loaded up the Jeep and headed to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Check-in went smoothly, we did a quick drivers meeting and track walk, then waited a few hours for the race to start. It was a timed race, combining the lap time of heat one with the best of two lap times from heat two.
The first heat went well, most everyone took it slow because this was the first time anyone had driven on the track. We finished our lap to find a broken a power steering line but had time to wrap it with a rag and zip ties before heat two. Heat two was a little faster but we weren’t pushing it. We had never planned on winning, this was our first race and completing all three laps without breaking anything would be a win in our books. We ended up in 17th out of 35 drivers, didn’t break the Jeep and finished ahead of some trucks that were better built than us. First place wasn’t the goal so we headed home to review the footage and plan our next build.
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