This year, Jordan Pellegrino and co-driver Gunnar Velasquez drove the #98 GenRight/Mickey Thompson racecar in Saturday’s 4400 unlimited class main race, the Race of Kings. The car, named the “LamBROghini,” boasts front and rear independent suspension and portals that give the car an extra 4 plus inches of ground clearance over the other competitor vehicles. The “LamBROghini” was designed and built by hand from the ground up in the GenRight garage in Simi Valley, CA.
Jordan drove a clean and fast qualifying run on the Hammers short course, a 2-mile condensed version of the brutal conditions of the race course. He completed the short course in 2 minutes and 41 seconds and started the main race in 15th position for Saturday morning in the Race of Kings.
4400 Race Day- With having all of 2022 to test and work bugs out of this car, the crew and Jordan felt super confident going into this race. Jordan and Gunnar were running a fast but conservative pace through the desert and went through the entire lap 1 and back through main pit with no problems. They stopped for fuel and a quick look over before heading into lap 2.
Lap 2 took racers into the rock trails. The car was still running great and was yet to have any mechanicals. After getting through over 10 of some of the roughest rock trails in Johnson Valley, a weld on the transmission cooler would crack, and let the fluid slowly leak out. The team did not skip a beat, and immediately sent people back to main pit to get the spare transmission cooler and parts to get the car back moving again. Jordan’s co-driver Gunnar started walking back to pits to get a couple of AN lines and more ATF to bypass the cooler. He ended up walking about 10 miles round trip to get the parts necessary to get the car back up and running. They were able to get the car back to pit 2, where the crew would put the spare transmission cooler in. From the time the car broke to leaving pit 2 the whole operation took about 3 hours to get the car back to 100% and get back in the race.
As the car got through lap 2 and headed onto lap 3, they had a lot of time to make up and had to deal with a lot of traffic from other mobile and immobile race cars. They ran into a couple of problems on lap 3 including overheating due to the ATF leaking into the radiator caused the engine coolant radiator to get plugged and not properly cool the engine then not being able to restart the car on the top of lap 3 trail “Legit” Jordan and Gunnar unplugged most of the electrical components on the car and used a jump box to get the car started again and headed back to pit 2 for the final time. As they came into the pits for the final time the car caught on fire. After pulling Jordan and Gunnar out of the car, Gunnar was dealing with exhaustion and dehydration. We decided to put Cole (Jordan’s right hand man) in the car to finish the remainder of the race. With no GPS, radios, and very little lights, Jordan and Cole were on a time crunch to make it to the finish. With only 5 minutes before the official time cut off, they would make it to the finish in the official 28th position.
After a long hard fought day, the team was super excited to see their hard work pay off. It was not the finish they were hoping for, but a finish in the Race of Kings is a huge accomplishment. It takes an army to pull off this feat, and team GenRight made it happen!
Our team as always stands out like no other We had over 50 people wearing our sponsor branded jackets and team apparel throughout the week.
As always, we had our full media team out there to get over 10,000 photos and over 12TB of video footage during the week. Unlike most race teams, we are not done with KOH. We do plan on getting to the other races and other events to create content for ourselves and our partners to use throughout the year to keep the ball rolling. In addition to other ultra4 and potentially some Best in the Desert series races, we are still putting out content weekly from the race division via YouTube, Instagram and Facebook as well as through the twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday @4pm) GenRight Off Road Facebook live “Tech Talk” video series which has been reaching millions of followers.
We can’t thank everyone enough for their support, and we look forward to doing more races and events this coming year. We have lots of pictures that you will have access to from the race, so please contact us if you are looking for something in particular. Our next race is still to be determined as we still have to pull the car apart, evaluate it, and prep it before the next event. We are hoping to do a desert race in the next few months.
