BLUE WATER DESERT CHALLENGE
OCTOBER 15-16, 2010
PARKER, ARIZONA

Casey Folks of Best in the Desert has created another desert classic with the new Blue Water Desert Challenge. This was two days of exhilarating short course racing. Qualifying took place on Thursday in 92 degree sunny weather, with all the classes being able to participate in the qualifying as each class grouping got to run their own race in the Challenge. Team Margarita was ecstatic to find that once again Sam Berri won the fastest qualifying time to win the Team Ford pole award. This is Sam Berri's 7th pole award. There was a presentation at the driver's meeting on Friday night after a day of Tech and Registration.

Sam's race day began with him starting in the 1st place spot and the 2nd and 3rd place cars lined behind him starting 15 seconds later. He took off with a beautiful flying jump at the start of the race, the car running strong with his new LS 1 motor. His first lap was to be his look-see lap because he wasn't able to see the track ahead of time like most of his competitors who had raced in the slower classes in the morning. After Sam's first lap, and passing through the hot pits, Lou and Alex had Sam's time approximately 30 seconds on the cars behind him. Sam was in good shape at this point, but as Sam passed them they noticed a little smoke coming from the rear of the motor and alerted the rest of the team to their concern. The main pit said they would try and get a better look at the car as they were four miles from the hot pit. Sam entered the Parker Python and was tearing it up, as he passed the main pit the motor burst into flames. Team Margarita tried to raise Sam on the radio which he had turned down at the beginning of the race and could not hear us frantically trying to get him to stop at our pit. He was still tearing it up when he hit a straight away and was going so fast it put the fire out. Bob sat down and watched as Sam headed out into the desert knowing that he was going to get a call soon. Sam did call about 2 or 3 minutes later saying "I'm done; I lost the harmonic balancer off the front of the motor." Bob said "Yeah, we knew something wasn't right when we saw the motor on fire."

Team Margarita discussed the possibilities to run the race the next day, but due to what had happened to the engine we decided not to take any chances with the new motor and dropped out. This would enable Sam to go home and take the motor apart and make sure he didn't have any other problems.

We were really excited about this race. If not for the engine problem this would have been Sam's race to bring home the first place trophy. But as we all know, that's racing!

Thanks go out to all our sponsors for making it possible for us to enjoy this sport and to all the Team Margarita crew who donates their time in helping Sam.

See you all at the Halloween race at Prairie City with VORRA and in December at Henderson, NV with BITD.