Nacho Cheeze was built as a family fun play car, not a race car, so after the NORRA race I thought it would be retired from racing.
Then I came across this thread on Race-Dezert.com:
http://www.race-dezert.com/forum/thread ... 16.123331/
Which lead me to this:
http://www.sonorarally.com/
The Sonora Rally is a race that is in its second year, (last year it was the Cortez Rally which was combined with NORRA), and it put on by Darren Skilton and Scott Whitney as a Dakar style rally. Their aim was to create a cross-country stage rally in North America and they chose the Sonoran Desert in Mexico just below Arizona. This years event was four days of racing covering the san dunes between San Luis Colorado and El Golfo and then down to the beaches and deserts of Puerto Penasco.
A rally is different from traditional off road racing as there are no gps maps or course marking to follow and you need to rely on the map books provided and their directions to find waypoints which lead you to more waypoints.
After following the thread on Race-Dezert and watching the Sonora Rally site for updates, I decided with my team that we should give the rally a try with Nacho Cheeze. We figured the location and the terrain would suit my car very well. In January I started prepping the car and added back in all of the racing safety equipment left over from NORRA race (along with some better air cleaners).
We arrived in San Luis Colorado at the host hotel for registration and scutineering (tech inspection) on Sunday morning 4/3.
The inside of the car ended up looking like the space shuttle with all of the rally computers, gps, radio and intercom.
Tech Inspection
The rally had a limit of 40 entries this year and about 30 of them where bikes, but here are a couple of the other four wheel vehicles.