And the Battle of 2011 Begins
by JT Taylor (aka J-Tree Taylor)

 Man what a fight! And by that I mean the fight against the calendar, the clock, parts and fab work! Then the fight against the great competitors of KOH and Mother Nature herself. I've been in some good scufs in my life but this has to be one of the best.

 As for my part in this race, it started by getting my TubeShark car ready to go to the desert as a pre runner. So work on it was fairly easy and not too stressful. Then I loaded up my chase truck, tools and car and headed to reno. When I arrived I was blown away by the talent of the guys in the shop. This was gonna be some car! But, it was a LONG way from race ready. So I jumped in to help with both feet. Jesse, Nick, Jake, Kat and Thomas were steady working on their projects so I tried to help organize, timeline and source parts. It was a long fight of victories and setbacks, but very few losses. There were many nay sayers out there who didn't believe we could get the car done in time. Well, they don't know the heart that the Torchmate crew has like I do.

 We finished the car on the Tuesday afternoon before the race. I got the honor of taking her out of the shop, and promptly ran it into a tree! I was testing it out a bit behind the shop, came by the guys a little hot and found to my dismay the brakes had gone away. So I pitched it into a slide to scrub speed, slid around the corner and dodged a big concrete pillar and two big evergreens. Thankfully the only casualty was an Aspen tree who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I acquired the nickname jtree Taylor for this race. Jake even put a tree air freshener on the mirror on the car right before I started the race!! So off to Johnson Vally. Once there we started testing and pre running. The car showed to be very stable and fast. We ran into a few problems with cooling, brakes and hubs. All of which the Torchmate crew attacked and conquered. The last brake issue we buttoned up at 1:30 am the morning of the race!!!

 We started the race next to my good friend Shannon Campbell. As I expected he took us off the line, so Nick and I tried to settle into a good rhythm where the car was happy. And man what a rhythm!!!! That is an amazing machine. We passed 40 something cars in 20 miles and my face still hurts from having permagrin! Once in the beginning of outer limits we ran into a log jam of cars and had to sit for a few. The over temp light came on and our day went badly from there. We fought our way through outer limits 100 yards at a time. Stopping to let the car cool then going again. Somewhere in there the right rear coilover bound on the lower arm and broke the end off. But with Nick Socha spotting me we made our way through. So over heating, leaning gangsta right and tired we rolled into remote pit where Bill, Damian, Kat, and Mike were waiting to work on the car. Glen from Radflo had busted butt and built a new shock for the right rear that was immediately installed. We then worked on the cooling issue. While working on that we found that the front hubs were loose again. We fixed that. Then Bill noticed that the rear drive shaft was shaped like a banana. With no spare rear shaft at the pit and pit closure times looming, we called our race done. Walking the walk of shame to the volunteers at remote pit to tell them that 13 was officially out of the race was a hard pill to swallow.

 So there you have my story of an epic battle that I had the pleasure of being a part of. And you Torchmate boys, I'll head into a fight with you any day!