Mitchell Mas­ters Margate

John Mitchell

Team ATV World Yamaha’s John Mitchell dis­played incred­i­ble strength and sta­mina to win all six of his Pro Quad races over two days at the QRA’s Mar­gate Big Sky Beachcross. He also took part in the six-race solo bike event, fin­ish­ing fourth over­all, despite not going out to con­test the final race.

With very strong winds and near freez­ing con­di­tions, John was get­ting good starts near the front and his YamahaYFZ450 was run­ning per­fectly. It only had an oil change since John rode it to sec­ond place at the Weston Beach race the pre­vi­ous month.
John won all six of the quad races, win­ning by half a lap in the first race! He even won one of the five solo events tak­ing him to a total of five hours rac­ing in one weekend.

Once John had found time to change out of his MX gear for his more tra­di­tional kilt, he said “Rid­ing for five hours was phys­i­cally demand­ing, espe­cially in those weather con­di­tions. Drink­ing Hi5 energy drinks helped between motos, as did the total reli­a­bil­ity of the Yamaha YFZ450. Also, big thanks to Gaynor and Tony Nash for organ­is­ing such a great event!”

Thanks again for all the sup­port from spon­sors who along with their out­stand­ing prod­ucts have helped develop a Cham­pi­onship win­ning team for the 2008 season.

BIG SKY BEACH-CROSS

Mar­gate, Kent (QRA)
Pro Quad: 1 John Mitchell (450 ATV World Yamaha) 150 points, 2 Giles Davis (450 Suzuki) 126, 3 Oli San­som (450 Cromwell Trucks Yamaha) 106, 4 Geoff Sharp (450 Honda) 101, 5 Pete Gal­lagher (450 Honda) 89, 6 Julian Maw­bey (450 Suzuki).

Honda Off-Road rac­ers claimed two class vic­to­ries and four podi­ums at Ermelo Toy­ota 400

Ermelo Toy­ota 400, 31 Octo­ber – 1 Novem­ber 2008
Final Round of the SA National Off-road Motor­cy­cle and Quad Championships

Off-road race infor­ma­tion :
Route : 420 kilo­me­tres (60km time-trail; 2x 120km loop + 2x 30km loop + 1x 60km loop)
Ter­rain : Rocky, hard with some fast sec­tions
Weather : Rainy at first, humid and windy.

hot Quad Cat­e­gory
In the national quad cat­e­gory, Honda Race Nation Quad Rev­o­lu­tion scored a class vic­tory and three podium positions.

It was the first Open Class vic­tory for the new Honda TRX 700XX in the national off-road quad cham­pi­onship with Paulo Costa tak­ing the lau­rels. Costa started the main race in 18th place over­all after a 60 kilo­me­tre time-trail and fin­ished 5th over­all with the Honda with Elka inde­pen­dent rear-suspension that brought him home after a trouble-free 360 kilo­me­tres on Saturday.

There were more podium posi­tions when the young Juan Coet­zee fin­ished third over­all with the Honda TRX450 after start­ing the race in 8th place. Coet­zee lost time with two flat tyres. He claimed the 3rd place in the com­pet­i­tive Pro 450 Class and unof­fi­cial scor­ing saw him fin­ish­ing the 2008 sea­son in third place over­all and fourth in the Pro 450 Class championship.

The national quad cat­e­gory was won by Brian Barag­wanath with Vin­cent Loub­ser second.

Rider Nr L13 Juan Coet­zee – Honda Race Nation Quad Rev­o­lu­tion Elka
It was the sec­ond national off-road rac­ing sea­son for Juan Coet­zee, the scholar from Kin­ross and son of one of South Africa’s quad rac­ing pio­neers, Billy Coet­zee, who proved the impor­tance of con­sis­tency. He fin­ished six of the eight national events this year and brought his trusty Race Nation Quad Rev­o­lu­tion Honda TRX450 home time after time to bag valu­able points towards the Pro 450 Class cham­pi­onship and the over­all stand­ings. His results dur­ing 2008 include a fourth place at the Quad Roof of Africa and the Cale­don 400.

Quotes
Quad com­peti­tor Nr L58 – Paulo Costa : “If you’ve fin­ished the 2008 Ermelo Toy­ota 400, you and your machine are strong. It was a tough event, but my Honda TRX 700XX did not give any prob­lems. The quad was per­fectly tuned and with the long-range fuel tank, we could skip fuel point. And the amount of rocks and rough ter­rain suited the  Elka inde­pen­dent rear sus­pen­sion perfectly.”

Holy cow what a race!!
For Desert Toyz Rhino Race Team this was the most impor­tant race of the sea­son. Due to a com­puter mal­func­tion we were stripped of our sec­ond place points posi­tion and moved to third. The first place points posi­tion was out of reach, but we still had a chance at sec­ond place. To accom­plish that, we would have to fin­ish ahead of Team 1905. Team 1905 had drawn the pole posi­tion which made it even more dif­fi­cult to beat them. The start­ing for­mat for this race was dif­fer­ent from all the oth­ers. The for­mat was, two UTV’s start­ing off the line side by side every thirty sec­onds. We started in the sec­ond row, on the out­side next to Team 1944. We pulled the hole shot on 1944 and the race was on!!

Each lap was 50 miles and our race was three laps. It was smooth sail­ing until race mile nine, when we hit a series of whoops, used up our 8 inches of rear wheel travel and did four nose wheel­ies in a row!! My wife was white-knuckling the grab bar and yelled “set­tle down Cow­boy, we got a long ways to go”. At around rm 13 Team 1946 passed us ‚in the rough, like we were stand­ing still. Then at rm 17 Team 1919 passed us. After about a mile we caught 1919 and passed them back. We only went one more mile and 1919 passed us back. Only a few miles later we started see­ing dust and spot­ted Team 1905, the team we had to beat. My heart was pound­ing and I couldn’t believe we were catch­ing them so soon. Within a mile or two we had caught them and were right on their bumper. We were in a very rocky sec­tion and there was really no place for them to pull over, so we fol­lowed them for 6 miles. Finally the course opened up, so we ran up on them and gave them a lit­tle “nerf”, and they imme­di­ately pulled over and let us pass. We only went 2 miles before they caught us and passed us back. They stayed about a quar­ter mile ahead of us all the way into the pits. They had to stop for gas and we didn’t. We passed them in the pits and never saw them again. The rest of lap two we ran hard and fast, we were deter­mined to stay ahead of 1905. We start­ing Lap 3, our last lap, and were so excited that 1905 had not caught us. We still had a shot at the sec­ond place points posi­tion. I told my as we left the pits “all we have to do is run a clean lap with no mis­takes”. At race mile 3 our pit crew called us on the radio telling us we were in third place and that the sec­ond place team had lost a rear axle nut and were stopped on the course. We soon passed them on the side of the course and they were still try­ing to fix it. Now in sec­ond place for the race and the points cham­pi­onship we were thrilled!! We raced the last lap clean with the excep­tion of one more nose wheelie only a thou­sand feet from the fin­ish line and my wife scolded me for that as we crossed the line.

I have to say thank you to my wife for great nav­i­ga­tion, my brother Dar­ren for his help, my pit crew for great ser­vice, and “But­tons” my race prep helper for work­ing late nights. Thanks to all the UTV rac­ers that made this a great event. Thank you to my spon­sors: Yamaha Motor Corp., Maxxis Tires, Elka Shocks, Black Rhino, OMF Wheels, Web Cams, PWR Radi­a­tors, Powroll, Yoshimura Exhaust, PCI Race Radios, ACRO Lights, Full Bore Plas­tic, JP Pre­ci­sion Brake lines, Fat Katz skid plates and Desert Toyz. What a great 2008 series!!

It sure feels great to be the 2008 Best In The Desert points cham­pion runner-up. Many “long travel” Rhi­nos came out and tryed to beat us. In the end, it was the com­bi­na­tion of Elka Shocks, stock Yamaha a-rms, great dri­ving, an awsome pit crew, a fast, reli­able engine and the best spon­sors that brought us our 2nd place posi­tion in the points championship!!

Hello Elka guys,

My name is Robin Stover. I am the Fea­ture Edi­tor of Four Wheeler Mag­a­zine. I did a story in Side­BySource mag­a­zine recently that fea­tured your adjustable remote reser­voir Rhino shocks paired up with Pure Performance’s mid-travel sus­pen­sion system.

I am so impressed with your shocks that I wanted to per­son­ally write you and say thanks and also con­vey how well they have per­formed thus far. The owner of the Rhino we used in the story typ­i­cally dri­ves it dur­ing reg­u­lar hunt­ing trips and the occa­sional week­end sand dune run. He tells me all the time how awe­some the shocks are and how much nicer his Rhino rides thanks to them. I though I should share this with you and let you know that I am seri­ously con­sid­er­ing Elka shocks for another UTV build up.

As you might expect I test a whole lot of prod­ucts for the off-road indus­try, and I can tell you very few come close to the qual­ity of your shocks. I’m not sure if you actu­ally got a chance to see the mag­a­zine arti­cle or not. Side­BySource is bound inside Off-Road mag­a­zine each month. It is cur­rently on newsstands.

Thanks again for build­ing such a high qual­ity product.

Yours truly,
Robin Stover

Win­ning the over­all ATV and Class 25 vic­tory was the #8A team of Wayne Mat­lock, El Cajon, Calif./Harold Good­man, Brown­stown, Mich./Marc Spaeth, Ramona, Calif./West Miller, Fall­brook, Calif., with a cham­pi­onship time of 14:47:25, aver­ag­ing 42.69mph in a Honda TRX700XX. Mat­lock started and rode to RM 120, Good­man rode to RM 294, Spaeth rode to RM 350, Mat­lock rode to 400, Good­man rode to RM 460, Miller rode to RM 600 and Mat­lock fin­ished. The tal­ented team swept all three SCORE Baja races this sea­son to earn the sea­son point title in their class.
Mat­lock said: “We didn’t have too many prob­lems – we had lit­tle hic­cups here and there but all in all, every­body rode ter­rific today. We’d get sec­tions where we’d make up a lot of time and then we’d had a lit­tle issue and set us back and we kept com­ing through it. Every­one did a ter­rific job and I can’t believe it. We were sec­onds apart from 1A (Danny Prather) all day long.”

Pro ATVs Top 5
1. Wayne Mat­lock, El Cajon, Calif./Harold Good­man, Brown­stown, Mich./Marc Spaeth, Ramona, Calif./Wes Miller, Fall­brook, Calif., Honda TRX700XX, 14:47:25 (42.69 mph) (Class 25)

2. Danny Prather, Ramona, Calif./Mike Cafro, Bon­sall, Calif./Chad Prull, Laveen, Ariz./Levi Marana, Hemet, Calif., Honda TRX700XX, 14:56:24 (42.26 mph) (Class 25)

3. Ste­fano Caputo, San Felipe, Mex­ico (Italy)/Felipe Velez, San Felipe, Mexico/Heriberto Mar­quez, Ense­nada, Mexico/Nick Destaut, San Felipe, Mexico/Alfonso Alonzo, Vicente Guer­rero, Mex­ico, Honda TRX450R, 16:14:27 (138.87 mph) (Class 25)

4. Greg Row, Alpine, Calif./Travis Dil­lon, San­tee, Calif./Tony Baker, Alpine, Calif./Rich Kap­pel, Rem­sen­burg, N.Y., Bom­bardier DS650, 16:30:15 (38.25 mph) (Class 25)

5. Craig Christy, Bur­bank, Calif./ Steve Abrego, Cov­ina, Calif./David Scott, Belen, N.M., Honda TRX450R, 16:57:53 (37.22 mph) (Class 24)