Early into the race, driver, Chris Lucas, lost power steering in the Baja Pro Truck. Man handling the 4,000 pound behemoth of a race truck to pit number one became a monumental task that Lucas was up to through the twisty and rough Nevada desert. After a quick stop to fix the problem, Lucas and his co-driver Eric Place were soon back in the hunt. “We were steadily picking off car after car that had passed us while we were stopped in the pits,” said Lucas.

In one such pass the team strayed off the narrow race course to get a clear view of the best way around another competitor. “The silt brought visibility down to about 50 feet when you were behind someone so you didn’t want to stay back there too long. You have to make quite a mental effort to keep you foot on the gas pedal and trust your co-pilot to guide you with the GPS when visibility is that low,” said Lucas. The Castrol Truck got around the competition in this case by passing off to the right side of the course where a cactus got tangled in a rear brake line and sheared it off. With the brakes virtually non-existent on the truck, driving styles were adjusted accordingly to make sure that the truck would make it to the next pit stop for another set of repairs.

“I began calling out hazards and turns a tenth of a mile sooner on the course and Chris did an exceptional job of compensating for our lack of brakes. It was also pretty apropos that we were running on the only part of this Best in the Desert course that was up on a mountain ridge with no brakes,” said Place Again, thanks to the Castrol pit crew, the Baja Pro Truck was back on its way within minutes after capping off the rear brakes. Racing with only front brakes did not slow the team at all. Lucas said, “naturally the rear end of the truck had a tendency to want to come around on us when I used the brakes from this point forward because all of the bias was set to the front. Running with only front brakes seemed like a luxury compared to racing with no brakes at all.”