It's been a soggy winter in Southern California. Hillsides have liquefied into mudslides. Highways have been blocked, roads have been flooded, and tame streams have swollen into angry rivers. A few weeks before the MDR Lucerne 250, Team Off-Road visited the Johnson Valley Off-Highway Vehicle area for our first annual cleanup and was fortunate to escape the seemingly constant downpour while we attended the event. Still, the OHV area had received its ration of rain. Much of normally dry Soggy Dry Lake was inundated with muddied waters.
Only a few weeks separated the cleanup from the MDR Lucerne 250. Lucerne's main pit area and the Start/Finish line are on the edge of Soggy Dry Lake, and the racecourse crosses the normally parched playa on its way to the whoops and sand washes that make up the rest of the course. Would the water subside in time?
When race day arrived, conditions couldn't have been better - the rainy weather served to bind the desert floor, bringing traction to a maximum and dust to a minimum. Cool weather meant that denser, oxygen-rich air would be pulled into racing engines, and radiators would be able to do their collective jobs proficiently. If anyone overheated at Lucerne, it would be due to a complete lack of coolant in the system.
The final tally after the last checkered flag waved was 63 entries, 53 starters, and 33 finishers. Of the 63 entries, a whopping 26 belonged to the ever-growing Sportsman Prerunner class. Even with overheating a nonissue, the desert was still treacherous enough to serve up several DNFs.
One racer fortunate to escape the DNF list was Class 8 contender Josh Klenske. Josh's Dalton Trucking Ford had been sidelined the previous season after a rod vented itself through the block during MDR's Ridgecrest round. Josh's new motor is a formidable foe. Beginning with a 351 Windsor-type block, the cast iron was bored and stroked to 446ci. Mild porting was done to the old heads, which were fit with the previous season's rocker arms and cam followers. "The new motor will do 92 uphill through sand whoops on 91-octane pump gas." Josh found that the newfound ponies made for a smoother ride, too. "When you go through the whoops at 70 to 75 mph, you're rolling through the bottoms and it's rougher. At 90, the truck just skips off the tops, so it's actually smoother over the rougher terrain. The flip side is that if something breaks, you're done. You'll wad the truck up and be lucky to walk away from the crash." Josh not only convincingly clinched the Class 8 victory, but he was in contention for the overall race win. "Lucerne was the best race I've had. I got lucky. Nothing went wrong. My Yokohama tires hooked up great. I didn't even get a flat."