Vegas to Reno 2014 - Canguro Racing

As some of you know I'm part of the chase team for Canguro Racing, a grassroots desert race team made up of a bunch of friends from our local Land Cruiser club. For the past few years we've been racing a Class 5 Unlimited buggy. It's been great and we have had several great races including a third in class podium finish at the Baja 1000 in 2012.


Our Class 5 car is currently for sale and ready to race for anyone looking at getting into competitive desert racing. And the team purchased a new race vehicle this year that moves us to a different class. It also gets us back to our roots since the new race truck is a 2012 Toyota Land Cruiser built by Geiser Bros Racing and Long Beach Racers. It actually began life as a Lexus LX570. It has been raced by the Lexus/Toyota factory team and won the stock fullsize class in two Baja 1000 events. It's a totally different animal from the Class 5 car and this years Vegas to Reno was the teams first race in the truck.


The truck is fully race built with King Triple Bypass racing coilovers and all the other race goodies you'd expect on a Class 8 (Stock Fullsize). Toyota is back in the desert race scene again with the new TRD Pro Tundra that they will be racing in this years Baja 1000, so we will be competing directly with the Toyota Factory team in Baja this year. we've become pretty good friends with a lot of the Toyota race team so it should be a fun time.

Rather than give a long report of the race I'll just share a huge dump of photos from the race and contingency leading up to the race. I will say that for our first race in the truck we finished in second place in our class at Vegas to Reno.

Contingency Photos
























still rockin the factory leather dash.

 

More contingency

 

More contingency

 

Canguro Chase 1 en route to the race start


This is Chase 1 on our team and the chase truck I spend my time in during races.

 

Pre race photos






Did I mention I was official press for the race?

 

At the start line


Jason Voss starting in the first position. He led the entire race and came away with the overall win.






where there's trophy trucks, there's helicopters.

 

Subbed

 

Robbie Gordon in his Dakar Rally race truck




this truck looked much worse by the end.

 

'Merica

 

Any of the races in the US are pretty heavily regulated on who can be on the race course. Even chase teams have extremely limited access to the race course and are usually only allowed at pit locations. As a result, you don't get a lot of chances for good racing photos. Baja on the other hand is a free-for-all shich is a lot more fun but also a lot more dangerous.

Anyway, I only have a small selection of race photos other than those from the start line. Enjoy.


























results of "nerfing"




Remember that number 58 Trophy truck from the start line that I said didn't look so good later in the race? Here's what happens to a trophy truck after it rolls 5 times at speed.


waiting for our truck to come into pit 8


And at the finish line. Second in class


That's all I got.

 

I shared this in the video section but I'll share it here too. Here's some in-cab race footage of us nerfing the VORE Racing team. These guys could not get the idea to get out of the way.

Good times.
http://youtu.be/2K2Tq5V8eig

 

Wicked pics! Thanks for sharing, always wanted to try a high speed desert race!

 

Cool stuff Adam. Would love to get involved in a team like that some day. Thanks for sharing.

 

Great pics as always, that looks like a blast to be involved with.

 

That was a fun race to chase -- I see you got a couple photos of our team, COPS Racing.

 

Very nice pictures! Those look like some fast desert rigs.