Over the past two months we have been out nearly every weekend testing the bug. If it is going to break we want to know about it and if we are going to encounter it we may as well have a plan to try to tackle it. So we have been putting a lot of miles on the car and it has been teaching us what it needs to stay together.

We have an offroad park nearby that is very convenient to go to. Colorado Offroad Extremeis a great park with a variety of terrain and it is an easy tow and low cost. We have headed out and bounced the car around a lot and most recently we headed out for “rally day.” when a ton of Rally cars were out there showing us what a ton of horsepower can do.

We have also explored the mountains in Colorado. We have tons of trails that range from easy to very difficult and we have tackled a lot of them. Of course most of these start well above 8000ft in elevation so the little bug is struggling to find power when we head out there. The great thing about these trails is we can run them day and night, night testing is important for us since we have been dialing in our Baja Designs lights and even adding a bit more after we discovered we hadn’t quite given ourselves much in the way of turning lights. We are very happy with the setup now and have tons of light for the night time. 28,000 Lumins all directed in the right places, We are pretty psyched with the setup.

In addition to testing the car we have been testing the crew. Everyone needs to know all the crazy stuff we did to the car, so this weekend we pulled the motor so everyone had their hands on the job. It gave us a great excuse to check everything over as well and what we found was a lot of broken welds on our stock exhaust. So we took the time to put all of that back together again and now the car is solid again and our crew is educated.

We have been fortunate to have the Wilson family taking us under their wing as well. Gina has been handling logistics and she has been really been doing a great job. With all the odds and ends we are working on with the car it has been great to have someone whos focus is the details of the trip. Ed Wilson has been tackling a lot of our chase, transport and organization, wow, we knew it would be a lot of work but really I can’t imagine where we would be if we hadn’t had these folks step up.

We have also been fortunate to have met Kristen and Erin Flaherty. Both have a ton of experience in Baja and they have been so willing to offer information and guidance as we get closer to the race. With that being said, We can not say thank you enough to all the folks that have come out of the woodwork to help us out!

Updates to come! In the mean time Check out some photos from our build!