TTAC Racing

The Alcan 5000 Rally might not be what you think of when you think of rallying a car. It’s not an event chocked full of sideways-sliding Subarus or overpowered hatchbacks catching air over hills as hundreds of fans gaze as rabid drivers hurtle through the woods in search of the fastest stage of a gravel rally.

Only 37 of 84 cars finished the King of the Hammers, proclaimed the planet’s toughest one-day off-road race, on time this year. Tad Dowker and Jordan Pellegrino, two racers on Mickey Thompson Baja Boss X tires, were among the finishers.

King of the Hammers returned to Johnson Valley, California for a week of racing, featuring the largest desert racing purse: $270,000. That was doled out to winners in T1, T2, B1, B2, B3, and Class 11 vehicles.

It’s a question that I often joked about in relation to racing in LeMons competition. The joke being that small fires are normal for $500 crap cans and don’t necessarily warrant a pit stop (this is not actually true). As I stopped the not-a-crapcan GT350 in the pits to have grass cleared from the grille openings, I heard someone yell, “Fire!”

Knowing the probable source of the combustion, there was just one thing to do… drive.

Gorgeous, huh? She appeared in the night like a white-robed dream, resplendent in her restrained livery and requiring just four or five hours of work to be ready to race.

Problem was, the race had already started.

Yesterday, The Syndicate – SLC formed like Voltron for an assault on MSR Houston’s pre-race practice day. Fresh from an evening at a the Denny’s next to the “G Cabaret”, Jack and Derek were tanned, rested, and ready to come up to speed on the crocodile-head-shaped track’s fastest, or perhaps least car-damaging, racing line. Philip drove his 1.8-liter Impreza parts car three hours from his bunk in the loft of Brianne Corn’s secret race shop. (He lives at the shop like Shawn lived at Han’s shop in Tokyo Drift. Or maybe not.) Marc P. was in an uncharacteristically good mood, primarily because he wasn’t aware that we’d been creeping through his ex-model wife’s Facebook profile just before he arrived. Mark B. was still in transit, complaining about how the first-class seat in his connecting flight “smelled like middle-class people” or something like that.

There was just one little problem: we had no car.

The Truth About Cars has long had an explicit editorial policy and tradition of not covering motorsports.

However, nobody ever said that we couldn’t go racing ourselves. For the first time in the site’s history, TTAC will be fielding a race team. And because we love our readers, we’re having a T-shirt made to commemorate the disaster occasion, and we will be giving those T-shirts away to our commenters.