Stephen Watson Tackles V2R in Hybrid Rock Crawler

The very first thing we need to do is thank our entire team for the work and sacrifice it took to make this happen.  Some of our team are businesses that we work with every day at Offroad Design, companies like Tom Woods Driveshaft’s, TrailReady wheels, PSC steering, King Shocks and Premier Power Welder have been helping keep our race and trail vehicles at the top of their game for nearly a decade!  A little newer to the team but no less important are Amsoil fluids and filters, Lightforce lights, Bighorn Graphics, Nitto Tires and Stage 8 Fasteners.  All of these companies are full of people that are great to deal with on an everyday basis and do their best to make our customer’s vehicles and ours own rigs perform their best. Also another important addition for this race was from FOURWHEELER Magazine, Feature Editor Robin Stover.  Robin joined our team to cover our effort.

The race starting line was in Beatty, it was the normal starting chaos, lots of cars, lots of dust, and we were passing stopped cars and being passed in the first few miles. I can say I was EXTREMELY glad to be driving a 4wd with 37’s on it in the silt and hills, there were stuck vehicles all over and we just drove around everything, the entire race. We were getting behind on checkpoint closing times and had to run super hard to stay in the race and whacked a boulder at high speed and flattened a tire.  We lost enough time that we didn’t make the next checkpoint, and were turned back by course officials at mile 215.

We started Day 2 and had a pretty good run up to pit 2 where we added fuel. About 10 miles from the finish we saw the 4461 stopped and thought we finally had them but came blazing up to see a BITD race official stopping both of us with a stopwatch. The course was closed to recover another vehicle. They took our times coming in and out and even released us with the same split. We came into the checkers about a minute behind and had no idea who won the day, all we knew was that it was a great afternoon of racing.  We didn’t find out that we’d come in first on time till the next morning when we lined up for the start.

Day 3 started and the shocks did an amazing job soaking up the hits and we drove right on with nothing but speeding hearts and even more respect for the King shock package to show for it. That rocky summit to the finish line was mostly uneventful and we rolled through the hot finish about 45 seconds in front of the 4435.  On corrected time they had the day and as the only Ultra4 to finish all 3 days they also took the overall leaving us in 2nd place for the race.  We met our team at the finish, did the cool live interview and took off for the hotel in Reno for a hot shower and post race party and a little sleep before the long drive home.