Dirt Wheels - December 2016

UTVs keep growing in popularity each year, and this year at DuneFest there was a great showing of the two- and four-seat machines navigating around the dunes.

In the evenings, Can-Am and Quake LED hosted guided night rides for ATVs and UTVs through the sand forests leading into the dark of night.

If you weren’t out shredding sand dunes, you could walk around vendor row to check out all the best products for ATVs and UTVs, like Elka Suspension.

challenging motocross track. Trophy

classes ranged from kids 12-and-un- der 90–150cc to Open 200–300cc and

400-450cc MX competition, which included men’s and women’s Opens, Amateur Grand Prix and Expert Ironman races. Saturday’s MX races were all about SxS competition, with a Last-Man Standing open race, two UTV motocross heats, a barrel race and a timed obstacle-course race.

As a sand drag racer, the Oregon Off-road Racing Association (OORA)

professionally installed and groomed

300-foot sand drag track is my DuneFest stoke and one of the most popular DuneFest events. Open to ATV, UTV and sand car/truck riders of any level of expertise, the OORA track uses an NHRA drag-race starting tree, timing lights and computer program, showing racers’ reaction times at the launch lights, 60-foot times, overall speed and elapsed times. Riders who don’t want to enter the race watch the exciting speedfest parked on their ATVs and UTVs along the track behind protective fencing.

The track opened Wednesday night with a tightly competitive Heads-Up Index race with huge night lights illuminating the track. Index classes were established based on elapsed times during two trial runs. On Thursday an all-day test and tune allowed any rider to make as many passes down the track as they wanted, just having fun launching at the tree and jamming through the gears to see what elapsed times their ATV or UTV could run.

Friday and Saturday were full days of bracket racing on the track, including a Sport Light ATV race; kids’ race;

UTV race; cars, jeeps, buggies and dragsters race; thumper wars ( four-stroke ATVs only), Banshee bash (two-stroke ATVs only); a Pro Light UTV race; and Pro Light ATV race.

Trophies were awarded to first and second place, and a $500 purse was split $350/$150 by first and second place in the Pro Light racing action.

First- and second-place finishers from all the drag races were automatically entered in the final DuneFest race to battle for the 5-foot trophy and the 2016 King of the Dunes title. This year’s king is Darren Bergnach from Gibsons, British Columbia, Canada, who raced his Redline Racing-built Banshee to the title.