As planned, the Rock Bug spent the entire Tuesday with ace photographer Boyd Jaynes to become the latest addition to Dirt Sports Master Piece in Metal.  With virtually no time behind the wheel, immediate after the 12 hour shoot Tracy headed straight for Johnson Valley, CA to get some practice in for Fridays 2009 King of the Hammers competition.

Today, Wednesday the 25th of February, marked Tracy’s first solid day behind the wheel and our first chance to study the Rock Bug in action.  First thing in the morning, Tracy spent time tuning shocks with King which went fast but proved effective.  Right after shock tuning, Tracy and his co-pilot Eddie Casanueva, Co-founder & Owner of Spidertrax, took the Rock Bug out for some real world high speed testing.  So far everything is looking fantastic, with the exception of two smaller issues related to the transmission.

The torque converter stall speed is set higher then we wanted and the transmission is running about 15 degrees hotter then Tracy would like.  Changing the torque converter would kill the entire Thursday for testing so Tracy decided to leave the torque converter in place but installed an auxiliary cooler to lower the operating transmission temperature.  This way, we can spend all day Thursday testing the Rock Bug at both racing and crawling speeds, hoping the stall speed on the torque converter will be suitable enough for rock crawling.

The video below was taken tonight at approximately 7:00 pm PST and the photos just below that were shot earlier today during the preliminary Rock Bug testing described above.  We will make a point to post again tomorrow so be sure to check back in for more King of the Hammers updates!