October 24, 2004

Truckin Nationals Tough Truck

My wife and I went down to Firebird Raceway to watch the Truckin Nationals Tough Truck Competition.  Jack, Pat and Scott signed up to compete.  The timed obstacles consisted of several courses. The guys ran each course twice and the best time was kept.  This was also the first time out with our new camera.  We picked up a Cannon A95, it's 5 megapixel so that was an upgrade from my previous Nikon 990 but it also can take videos.  Several of the shots below are captures from the video which was taken at 640x480.  I am hosting some of the video files, I have reduced them in size and used the DivX 5.1.1 codec to compress them down to a manageable size, if you can't see the video you can download the codec here.

(Click for larger images)

One of the courses had a tire pit followed by a log pit to cross.  The tire pit was the most fun to watch as the guys would let loose and fly on this one.  The landing wasn't bad but the bounce afterward could be pretty nasty as this guy found out.  He rolled his Jeep pretty hard after bouncing out of the pit, nobody was hurt.

Here's Brian's brother-in-law Craig on the tire pit and later on the rock pile.

Jack running the road course.  The turns were very sharp which may have been to keep the speeds down but I think it kind of backfired as because the rigs seemed to take quite a while to go thru and without much excitement.

Here's Pat on the rock pile and tire pit. The video of the tire pit is here.

Followed by the road course. Some of the turns were 3 point turns due to his welded front differential.

I think Scott had the best tire pit jump of our group and he stuck the landing pretty good too, here's the video.

This guy builds his truck just for jumping at this event.  I heard last year he broke the frame in two.  This year he had a much better suspension and survived this jump.  Later in the day he blew his rear driveshaft and did something to the transmission.

Here's Jack on the tire pit, video here.