Trip report-
I failed to get my car back together in time for our Halloween trip so that sucked. But a day sitting in camp is better than a day in my shop so my son and I headed out Wednesday. My son now works for me full time and has been killing it lately and saving every penny. He was offered a great deal on a 2016 Yamaha YXZ 1000R with a Weller turbo package. Stock is 140hp and this makes 200hp. He picked it up last Monday in Las Vegas and we took it out for the first time last week. I had one more chance to get my car running and needed to pick up my daughter (high school sophomore this year) so I ran back home Friday. The MEFI 4a computer in my car is dead and there's no reviving it. But it was already on our flatbed and we were in Upland so we just took it to Glamis. We stopped at the ARCO in Salton Sea- side story- The ARCO in Salton Sea no longer has gasoline, diesel and race gas at the pumps out on the truck/RV islands. Maybe they'll get them back in service soon but the pumps are literally not there right now. The few pumps that had race gas were pad locked. Weird.
My daughter is 15 1/2 and has her driving permit, so I got her a Chevy Volt from my buddy
@URCLEVER. She's driven my Duramax truck plenty of times and for whatever reason she decided that she wanted to tow the trailer. Huh? It's 7pm and dark out. Why now? She said she needs to learn to tow a trailer and why not now with our own car loaded up? Better than learning with a client's car. Made sense so we traded seats and hit the road. She got up to 60 mph and settled in for a 60ish mile drive to Gecko Rd. Once there I thought we'd trade seats and I'd drive us to camp at Roadrunner. Nope, she said she was fine and wanted to keep driving. Then we got to Roadrunner camp and once again, I thought we'd trade seats. Nope. She wanted to tow the trailer to our camp and park it. I quietly text my son to come out and greet us. He damn near shat himself when he saw her driving and towing the flatbed. I told him good because I had been shatting myself the last 60 miles. She did great and I only had to help her once when I thought she as getting too close to a parked car.
My son told me his YZX had a bad battery and had to be jump started a few times when they were duning that day. The next morning I found it had dual 6volt batteries so I swapped them out for a good 12volt and the problem was solved.
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The YXZ was not running well at all. RPM's were limited and it didn't seem to be making boost. I checked what I could but there wasn't anything obviously wrong. Last season one of my drivers left his bone stock 2020 Yamaha YXZ with us all season and my son put a lot of hours on it. He's a capable duner and having duned the same machine, only with no turbo, he could tell his YXZ wasn't at 100%. I got a call to work on a friends car but he was in Wash 23 so my kids went duning and I went for a long drive.
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I got back to camp that afternoon and was told to be ready for a 3pm ride to Sunset Ridge, aka The Ledge. I had several cars I could have jumped in but decided to grab a helmet and ride with my son.
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I noticed right away that the YXZ was struggling bad. It would rev to 11k RPM and then he'd grab 2nd gear and it would drop to 6k RPM and never climb from there. We had to turn out on a lot of dunes and make several attempts to catch up to out group of 10 cars and a few SxS's. At one point we were climbing a bowl and not good to make it so he turned out and we ended up in a small canyon and stuck. I was pissed. Not pissed at him, but at the fact that he bought this Yamaha and was told it was turn key and ready to go, yet here we were stuck in a bad location. It sucked big time. Our friends climbed down to help us get turned around and pointed the right way to get out. My buddy Chris, who also races SxS's, hopped in to drive the Yamaha out. He made it to the top of the bowl and said there was definitely something wrong with this machine. I asked him to drive it the rest of the way to The Ledge to see if he could help diagnose it. I jumped in
@Fisher855 Racer sand truck and we headed out. We made it to The Ledge and parked near the rest or our group. I was still catching my breath from the long climb out of the bowl where my son and I were stuck. Beer time.
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The Ledge was filling up fast and all of a sudden a 2 seat RXR hucked a jump and rolled three times maybe 100 yards away from us o the next ridge over. He got out and threw his arms up to say he was ok so we cheered and let the jokes fly. We hung out till the sun was pretty much set and headed out. But that turned into a sh!t show with so many SxS's parked at the bottom of The Ledge where we needed to exit. We had to ask several people to move so we could leave.
I was back in the Yamaha YXZ with my son and for whatever reason it seemed to be running much better. I've talked to several people and made a call to Weller Racing in Chandler, AZ today and they said they will tune it for us if we can get it to them quickly.
I got a call to pick up a new Tatum that needed to go back to Redline for a health check and the same client had a CanAm we had picked up in Blythe and delivered to Glamis and he wanted us to transport that to Yucaipa.
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Full trailers make me happy.
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I just bought this Triton Elite 20' aluminum deck-over flatbed and this was really the first time taking it on a long transport. I was skeptical of how the small torsion axles would do with a car as heavy as mine (3529lbs) but my son said it towed great.
My son is headed back to Glamis on Wednesday and my daughter and I will head back out Friday after school.
Also... Bernie got some new equipment for this season. Jot that number down.
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