Will Higman's Racing Blog

450 miles of Southern Nevada’s finest was on tap for this years SNORE Buffalo Bills 400 which took place Saturday March 31^st at Stateline Nevada. Known for its rough terrain with many rocks the Primm area is a great proving ground for an off road racing team. My team comprising of the boys from Kreger Fabrication and veteran Derelict Pit Crew would come back from major downtime to finish 2^nd place in class 10 and 3^rd place overall out of 120 entries.

After testing in Barstow Thursday we arrived in Primm and Buffalo Bills that evening. Friday morning we took 3rd place (joke) in the prerun behind the two Hutchins El Fuertes which are also built by Kreger. V8 vs. V6 wins most of the time, but not usually! Tech and contingency took place Friday afternoon and Derek and I did a TV spot for Pinned TV, they were out there covering and filming the race for a future episode. I will update everyone when the show will air.

On to racing… Jake and I were locked and loaded to solo the event with Derek waiting in the wings incase I couldn’t pull it off? There were 17 class 10 cars starting and we started 15^TH off the line. SNORE started the cars two a breast every minute and it was a great twist to the same old single file spacing. I pulled my guy off the starting line and off we went for the first 89 mile lap. Knowing it was going to be a long day I cruised the car at a good but conservative pace. At about race mile 42 we lost a power steering belt but it only took Jake a minute or two to change it. I guess I was driving faster than I thought because we came around in second place after lap one.

When I came into the main pits for my first fuel stop it was discovered that we had a torn outer CV boot, not good! After about 10 minutes of trying to repair the boot and add grease I decided it was a long race and that we should change it now instead of later. This cost us a total of 45 minutes but there was still a lot of positives to look forward to, as always!

Lap three and four went fairly well however we had a flat on each of those laps. Both flats happened in virtually the same spot on the loop but for unknown reasons? Jake and I are pretty quick at changing a flat and I would bet it wasn’t longer than three minutes each time. Also during these two laps we started scratching our way up through the field passing many cars on and off the track. There were a ton of broken cars out there!

At the start of lap five and after some Tylenol Gel Caps taken during the pit stop we were back up to third place and in the groove with every bad spot marked on our acute radar screen. We had a very clean last lap only having to pass a half dozen cars or so and brought the car home in second place in class 10 nineteen minutes behind the winner.

It was a long day with 9 hours and 51 minutes logged behind the wheel and I am very proud of the accomplishments made by whole team. We came from way back to finish strong!

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