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It’s a familiar setting at every Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series event in Lake Elsinore, California: the sun is shining, the ground is muddy from water trucks dispensing H2O all over the area, the food vendors are happily churning out lemonade and hot dogs and burgers, and the fans are out in force to see trucks and buggies go hog-wild on a short-course track.
The track features the same turns and jumps that racers have grown accustomed to… or have they? To the unseeing eye of the average spectator, Lake Elsinore always has the same layout – a double jump straightaway, a wide Turn One, a short jump heading to “Matterhorn” (the highest jump on the course), into Turn Two and then a long tabletop into Turn Three, then a washboard into Turn Four, and the cycle repeats.
A look at Rob Mac's setup in the pits section. In between races, the crew examine everything that MacCachren detected (or broke) and get it ready to be thrown back into the fracas.
Yet before each and every race, LOORRS staff make ever-so-slight changes to the layout that can really throw racers for a loop, whether it’s with unremarkable dropoffs in a turn or minute increases on jump angles to make the truck soar just a little farther. These are the types of alterations that all of the racers pick up on, and it makes for some very interesting commentary when explained by them.
Our first interview was with Rob MacCachren, conducted after the qualifying contest during Round 13. “I think I can find different parts of the track that I missed,” he said, referring to areas of improvement for his upcoming race in Pro4. “There were a couple of corners that I didn’t have figured out. Turn Four is one, because it gets rutted up there from so many trucks carving into the mud over and over. In the outer ‘lane,’ you get into the fluffy stuff and it causes the trucks to bounce around a little bit.”
MacCachren won the championship in Pro 2 after Round 14. "It's great to be the champion again, and I can't wait for next year," he said. He also thanked the sponsors, fans, family, and Lucas Oil staff for making everything possible.
To close it out, MacCachren talked about how the track changes states over the course of a 14-lap race. “You have to figure out where the best place to be is,” he said. As four-wheelers, we all know that picking lines is a key skill to master; most of the time, we can rely on common sense to figure out which one is the safest and surest way to make it through, but other times, we have to counter our instincts and take the word of a spotter as the gospel truth.
These situations are hard enough when rockcrawling at 5 mph. Imagining having to do it at twelve times that speed (or more) against multiple other drivers, all running their own mental calculations in a closed course, can really make us appreciate what short-course racers do for a living.
