I’ve heard it said all my life that you can’t keep a good man down. If that’s the case, then desert racers must be some of the best out there. They can fix almost anything, and whatever can’t be repaired with zip ties or arc-welded rebar will just have to suck it up until the stage is over. Jonathan Dawes proved that recently as he limped his Ultra4 racer to the finish line after driving seven and a half miles in reverse at Best In The Desert’s Laughlin Desert Classic.
I spoke to Dawes over the phone after watching a clip of his backward finish on Facebook. He gave me the full rundown of his race weekend, which featured plenty of other broken parts beforehand.
“Sunday, we got kind of a bad start,” Dawes explained. “I don’t know if I was asleep or what, but the guy got a jump on me. When he did, he made that first left turn and just totally tried to wipe me out. He went straight for the berm and I was still there. I had to stop, and then that got me behind the other three cars.
“We fought dust for the first three and a half laps, and we came around and saw [driver] Paul Horschel was broke. They had flags out. It was right at the full 180-degree turn, so we slowed down for him. When I took back off, I was in second gear. I went to go to third gear, it made a real loud bang, and I had five neutrals.”
Dawes’ Ultra4 rig runs an LS V8 with a GM 4L80E transmission. Generally speaking, it’s a mighty reliable combo, but even the sturdiest parts tend to fail after repeated heat cycles and big revs. The trans just so happened to let go while Dawes and his co-driver Cory Day were in the hunt for second place in national series points.
Because of their position in the points standings, nobody was lining up to give them a tow across the finish line. That’s when they decided to give it a shot driving in reverse with a little more than seven miles to go.
“We started out with full gear on, window nets up and everything,” Dawes said. “We got over the hill and decided that that was not going to work; we would never make it because I couldn’t see. So we pulled our window nets down and my co-driver watched forward for cars while I watched in my mirror for reverse, which is just a 4-inch concave mirror.”
Dawes stayed far off the racing line, way out of the ruts where they estimated no one would try to run. He also had his headlights on so other racers could see him. “We didn’t have any problems, and there was only two real fast guys that passed us.” Watching them go by at 75 mph was a treat, I’m sure, since his live tracker pegged his top speed in reverse at 27 mph.
In the end, Dawes credited his co-driver Day for knowing the course inside and out, keeping them safe to the end. “He has a photographic memory,” Dawes bragged. “Even in the dust, he was like, ‘Hard right turn. Don’t go left because there’s a big berm.'”
The Dawes and Day duo finished the event 10th in class, which helped them land third place in the Ultra4 USA Championship. That’s mega considering the competition. Running a small budget in the wide-open 4400 class puts you at a disadvantage straight away. According to him, they have about a fifth of the money in their solid-axle car as some of the series’ top spenders do in their IFS builds, not to mention the millions they spend each year.
Taking the checkered flag in reverse feels like a fitting end to a Cinderella story, then.
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