Blue Water Desert Challenge, 2015
By Justin Lambert, #1918 Cognito Motorsports
We just came from a win at Vegas to Reno, and were feeling confident but were not trying to let it get away from us as that has happened before and bit us in the rear. We prepped the 1918 Polaris RZR XP 1000 right up until the last hour to make sure we were 100% ready for this race in Parker AZ. There has been a lot of controversy in the last few months about how Turbo cars have joined the Pro class, and the naturally aspirated (NA) cars are now at a power disadvantage. We are still running an NA car and knew that Parker was going to be a lot of soft terrain where that turbo power was going to shine, but there is always that chance of something going wrong and we had to make sure that wasn’t going to happen to us.
We drew 21st starting position out of 25 cars, and that was a bit disappointing since we are sitting 2nd in the points chase, and to get to the front we had to pass thru the dust of nearly 20 other UTV’s. The start is rows of 2 cars at a time side by side, and 30 seconds between every row. BWDC is 2 days of racing, 3 laps each day for a total of 150 miles, loops are right about 25 miles each, the total time for all miles determines finishing position. We took off in the 11th row, motored on the utv next to us and were off into the thick silty dust. We start this race so early in the morning that it’s still dark and there is no breeze to move the dust which just lingers in the air forever. Laps 1 and 2 of 3 were very dusty, driving nearly blind in several sections of the course, lap 3 was much cleaner air as we had passed many cars, but the course was getting really torn up. Day 1 went flawless for us, but also went flawless for some others and we ended up 3rd place, behind 2 turbo cars that we actually felt like we were slowly reeling in, which put us starting day 2 in third place and just over 2 minutes behind the leader.
Day 2 we started 2nd row, motored on the utv next to us back out into the dusty desert again. The course mostly was even rougher than the previous day with a few graded sections, and with such a short race, I call it the roughest drag race I have ever been in. We were experiencing cleaner air, as the traffic was behind us on day 2, we were on the pipe and got past the 2 turbo cars that started in front of us as they had some issues, we were up front but were not sure how close the competition was behind us, we knew there was a chance of someone from behind beating us on corrected time. We kept up our momentum and came across the finish first with time to spare, beating the next competitor by over 4 minutes on corrected time for both days. It felt great to back up our Vegas to Reno win with another victory at the Blue Water Desert Challenge.
Thank you to Cognito Motorsports, Polaris Industries, Sparks Performance Products, Mystik Lubricants, ITP Tires, Fox shocks, Method Racing Wheels, Rugged Radios, Rigid Industries
