KOH 2016
Many of you don't know about us because we are new to the world of racing! We aren't new however to dirt, rocks, and offroad trails! Many of us started out driving a Jeep and still love driving jeeps. We also have evolved to loving anything with a motor wheels that can kill us at 2mph or 200mph! I guess thats what happens when you start out loving something so simple as a Hotwheels! I can remember my favorite one still! It was a green concept car from the 90's that changed color to a bright yellow when it was cold or put in water. Im sure many of you can reflect on your first true first car love...!
Sorry... getting off subject. We are Gear Monkey Racing! We are normal everyday people that have a love for cars, particularly ones with big tires! We started in December of 2016, well thats when I (Daniel) gave my friends a copy of a unfinished business plan I had been writing for months. I wanted to get it to them before the 2017 King of the Hammers. (Google it if you don't know what it is.) Because in this proposal, I laid out our plan to race in the 2018 King of the Hammers, with a never done before project for the 4600 Stock class. I wanted to build a Jeep Cherokee in 10 days just weeks before the race with a mind set to actually be competitive! Now before I get into more on that Ill tell you how this all started!
In 2012 I had my two favorite friends fly out to visit me at my parents house in Poulsbo WA over Thanksgiving I think. I rambled for hours about how it would be so cool to make a rig for KOH! They both listened to my crazy idea as they often do. Knowing that my mouth moves faster than my brain and most of my ideas end up somewhere between "could have" and "if only"! Little did they know I had already been contemplating over this race for years prior! So that conversation ended but the idea never did. Then in 2016 I asked those same two friends to go to KOH with me for the first time. It was amazing... I flew from NYC to CO and we drove from Colorado straight through till we hit the lake bed to watch the EMC and the main race! During that drive we also brought up an old conversation of what if we built a race vehicle and start a project! There was a lot of "well maybe" "who has the money" "what car to use" so needless to say the conversation was me wanting to do it and my friends saying Daniel is losing touch with reality! So, I had to regrouped, after seeing and experiencing that thrill and passion that KOH brought to the lake bed I was determined to set up a plan that all my friends could be part of and experience this race together. So thats where this project really began!
Now, it wasnt always a Cherokee that we were going build. At first I thought it would be cool to rent a Jeep (full coverage of course) and flip it in 10 days to race in the EMC then right after the race return it back to stock as possible and return it... I did some research and made some calls and determined that I would find myself in a lawsuit very quickly! Apparently, removing any items such as wheels or racing a rental car breaks the rental contract. I also found out that this isnt a new idea! Hertz placed a clause in their rental agreement because in the 60s when they began renting Ford Mustangs and people would pull the good motors and swap in a crappy one or they would race them on the weekend and return them beat to shit! So that idea of renting a car left quickly!
But the idea to race was still there, it boiled down to lets race what we know! (The Jeep Cherokee)....