Only 6 days old, my wife and I take our neighbor and his son and our Project Desert RZR to Little Dumont for its first taste of sand. My wife and I took it out first, getting used to the feel of the sand.
Then it was time for our neighbor and his boy to take it out. Now our neighbor has been flying through the dunes at Dumont for years and has a ton of experience, but no amount of experience can change the laws of physics.
First we have some shots of them having fun, rounding dunes and throwing roosts.
Here we see how the difference in their weight is affecting how the RZR handles. You can see the passenger front wheel lift in this turn.
My wife and I are atop another dune shooting all these pictures. We see them come over another dune and start a hard right turn that lead to the roll-over. I have the camera set on continueous shutter so I can grab a series of shots of the action, and after the fourth closing of the camera’s shutter, I hear my wife scream and take off running. That is when I realized they were going over.
When we finally made it to them we were out of breath, damn zoom lens, and they were upside down hanging from the seatbelts. After getting them out, they were both fine, with my neighbor having a small scrape on his forehead we think from when he released his seatbelt to attend to his son. After the initial shock was over, we flipped the RZR right-side up and discovered the passenger side rear tire became unseated and our day was over.
I think if I were shotting action at an event I would have got more pics, but seeing how our RZR started rolling and our best friends were inside, I simply reacted and ran to their rescue.
If you visited our Prerunner Blog you would have seen these pictures of the damage.
All in all the damage was very minimal considering the speed of the impact. We already ordered new plastic and this week we are getting a complete custom cage fabbed up by Woolworth Motorsports. Along with the cage Robby Woolworth is also fabbing up a custom spare tire carrier with an integrated cooler and gas can carrier. Look for a complete report of this build in a future issue.
We are already looking into a long travel kit or possible some wheel spacers to get a little more width to our RZR, but in the meantime we just have to be more cautious out on the dunes.
