Gravel Crew

2001 Victorville
As 2001 session was ending the Gravel Crew was putting some finishing touches on the Ford Escort ZX2 suspension and had made a few shake down test sessions at some of our favorite test locations in the desert. The Inland Prerunner society thought it would be fun to invite some rally cars out to their “Sand Blast” event at the Victorville Motocross track. We thought it to be a good idea for another test session. Our previous rendezvous with these guys were usually loose knit jumping competitions. This time to our surprise they had organized a real race event. Looking at the course we were quite nervous about the jumps. Quite all right for trucks with 24inch wheel travel, but how would our car act with the 8.5inches of wheel travel? We were in front of a very serious off-road clan with sneers and snickers at our car. A few chuckles and laughs were at hand as well, but we walked the course and plotted our theory and basically felt that this would be the ultimate test for our suspension so we let it all hang out, well only what the limiting straps would allow…

Rodney Wills, team manager handed the task of driving over to Scott G., since he built ZX2 with co-pilot Anthony Burciaga. Rodney worked the media skills of capturing images of the car as these images would either show destruction or BIG AIR, and big air was the results with a first place in class that doubled our entry money as prize!

Afterwards, Rodney and Anthony spent about two hours working over some local dirt roads and sand washes when some obvious Clutch Masters clutch problems that put the car back on the trailer to head home for repair. It was time to call our old friend Phil Racer of DPG Performance and Design to whip up some gravel spec clutch technology.

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