SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/958557
Forty-two years of testing and development in Baja says something about a tire company, especially one that has a history of the most race wins and championships in SCORE International desert racing. Within that time, BFGoodrich has accumulated 29 overall wins at the SCORE Baja 1000, and 88 overall wins on the Baja peninsula. Over the years, BFGoodrich’s relationship and history with SCORE International have been much more than a means to test tires. The company’s engineers, marketing team, and many employees have helped hundreds of people become addicted to desert racing, resulting in the development of numerous SCORE champions along the way. Welcome To Baja The close relationship between SCORE and BFGoodrich began at a time when Baja racing was attracting serious competitors who were building faster vehicles with more capable suspension systems. In 1975, at the suggestion of then SCORE owner, Sal Fish, BFGoodrich engineers first set foot on the Mexican Baja Penninsula to see if this race venue would make for good testing grounds. “At that point, we were developing the BFGoodrich Radial All-Terrain T/A when we got hooked up with Sal who invited us to Baja,” said Dan Newsome, who started with BFG in 1978 and is now the Marketing Manager at Michelin Tire. “We learned a lot from the experience so we went back to do more development. A year later in 1976, BFGoodrich had its first entry at the SCORE Baja 1000 with Fritz Kroyer in a Class 6 Oldsmobile Starfire. Although the company’s first entry into the SCORE Baja 1000 resulted in a DNF, it sparked an enthusiasm within the company, creating the goal of winning the 1000, one they needed to achieve. At that time, only bias-ply tires were suited for off-road racing and were widely used by teams. According to Frank DeAngelo, who started with BFGoodrich 40 years ago, and is now the Executive Director, Motorsports at Jackson Motorsports Group, BFGoodrich was the first to try a Department Of Transportation, D.O.T., approved radial tire in off-road racing. “After that initial SCORE entry in 1976, the company did more testing with the help of Frank “Scoop” Vessels and his team,” said DeAngelo. “The original tire was two-ply, and the company found out that it was not strong enough. So they developed a three-ply tire. It was a lot stronger, and in 1977, Vessels went racing on it.” During the same year, at the SCORE Baja 500, Ivan Stewart, won his class in a Chenoweth buggy equipped with Radial All-Terrain T/A tires. BFGoodrich tires continued with two more victories the following year, winning the 1978 SCORE Baja 500 and SCORE Baja 1000 in Class 8. The launch of a radial off-road tire was big news at the time, as radial tires were thought of as “street” tires, not suitable for any racing application. “The BFGoodrich Radial All-Terrain T/A was the industry’s first off-road recreational tire,” said Chris Baker, Motorsports Director at BFGoodrich Tires and Michelin North America. “Most will tell you that this single product created a general type of tire within the tire business. But it was intentionally focused on off-roading. It was with the involvement in desert racing with SCORE from that time in the mid-seventies, that became the mechanism through which BFGoodrich learned about soft soil mobility, endurance, and off-road traction in general. After 40-plus years, we’ve gotten a lot better at it.” Despite the wins by Vessels, Stewart, and other racers, it was a slow process to get teams to try racing on radial tires. In fact, according to Newsome, it was difficult just to get Vessels to sign off on using the tires in the first place. “It was a very slow process,” said Newsome. “Initially, it was a challenge to get Scoop into trying these tires. When he did finally say okay, he bought off on it. As he began to win, he partnered with Bob Gordon which helped get more teams to notice.” With Vessels and Gordon entering a variety of races, other teams had begun realizing that the BFGoodrich Radial All-Terrain T/A was holding up to serious punishment. With more development going into making the tires successful, BFGoodrich developed and successfully launched its Radial Mud-Terrain T/A in 1980, offering a more aggressive tire for racers and off-road enthusiasts. “The Radial Mud-Terrain T/A was also D.O.T. approved, and was very successful,” said DeAngelo. “Racers now had the option to race on all-terrain or mud-terrain tires.” At this time, several teams had already begun running SCORE races on BFGoodrich tires. This resulted in the company’s first overall win in 1981, at the SCORE Baja 500, with Malcolm Smith and Bill Newbury. This lead several teams wanting to use the tire from that point forward. “By 1982, we had four to five good-sized teams running on our tires, including Ivan Stewart, Bill Stroppe, Rod Hall, Don Adams, Malcolm Smith, and Johnny Johnson to name a few,” said Newsome. Desert Racing Was In The Pits Although several teams were now running on BFGoodrich tires, there was yet another element to the company’s involvement and success in SCORE that occurred in 1982. The company’s Pit Program was developed out of a necessity to keep track of teams utilizing the company’s tires. But it also became important to many SCORE racers, who at the time couldn’t afford to run their own pit crew. “Bob Bower was the new manager of BFGoodrich’s off-road program in 1982,” said Newsome. “He started the annual task of tracking teams and soon realized that with the size of the budget he was given, it was very overwhelming. He felt that the best way to accomplish all this, and to offset the expenses involved, was to help the racers by providing pit support.” Bower’s first recruit was Frank DeAngelo, who at the time was the driver of BFGoodrich’s tractor trailer. “We came up with the idea and thought we should start pitting with the tractor trailer,” said DeAngelo. “To make the program work in the beginning, we pulled people together from BFGoodrich, as well as other teams.” Bower and DeAngelo were able to get two people from each of their sponsored race teams in a number of pits along the routes of SCORE races. The two began establishing a network of pit support using anything and anyone they could get. “At one point, we had a truck from racer Don Adams, Scoop Vessel’s trailer and a bunch of other vehicles all hobbled together,” said Newsome. “By the end of the year, it had grown to be something that really worked. It was driven by a business need, but it created something for BFGoodrich internally that we never forgot. We made a lot of teams happy. We quickly realized that If you can enable people to do what they really love to do, your circle of friends gets big really quick.” DeAngelo moved from driving the tractor trailer to managing the pit program in 1983. “Some of our top teams joined the program and helped us put together a network of pits every 100 miles along the course,” said DeAngelo. “Later on, Dan Newsome took over the pit program, but by that time, some of those original teams that helped out thought the pits were becoming more competitive. So we began contracting other groups to provide pits for us. We ended up contracting with organizations like Spirit Racing to help us out, but we also had lots of people who wanted to volunteer. The program grew to the point where we had lots of trucks, trailers and teams, including Gary Johnson, father of NASCAR driver Jimmy Johnson. We eventually had to move away from teams participating and gathered people who were more specialized in pitting so that it could be done quickly, efficiently, safely, and without any bias. To this day, BFGoodrich continues to use two or three of its own trailers and have three pit-teams that we contract with, to run a pit for us. We plan about 20 people in the pits, welders, fabricators tire changers, mechanics, cooks, medics, and even bi-lingual workers to manage communications. What’s amazing is that 90 percent of all those people are volunteers. They take their vacations to come down and support the pit program, and many have been doing this for 15 to 25 years!” Needless to say, the pit program was very successful not only for racers but for BFGoodrich as well, as the only requirement to utilize them was to run the company’s tires. Over the years, many racers, teams, and champions have utilized BFGoodrich’s Pit Program, including now SCORE International owner Roger Norman, who won the overall SCORE Baja 1000 in 2008. “My first involvement with the BFG pit program was with my Class 12 car in 1996,”said Norman. “I purchased BFG tires and got free pit service. My wife Elise was driving a truck with a trailer, and only had a few parts, not even any spares for the vehicle.” For those racers who were first getting involved with SCORE, utilization of the BFGoodrich pits was a great way for them to stay in competition. “The development of the BFGoodrich Pit Program was key for SCORE and many teams,” said Norman. “When you’re starting out in desert racing, you don’t know what you’re doing. BFG’s pit program to this day makes it easy and affordable.” Time For A Full-Race Only Tire As the pit program grew from its beginnings in the early ‘80s, BFGoodrich’s line of off-road tires also grew. The Sport Truck T/A debuted in the mid ‘80’s, which was the same tire used in Baja racing, with a three-ply design, but had a different tread. With more teams running BFGoodrich tires, it was inevitable that the company would enjoy its first SCORE Baja 1000 overall win in 1986, with Mark McMillin and Ralph Paxton in a Porsche-powered Chenoweth running on the Radial All-Terrain T/A. Following that overall victory, BFGoodrich had a winning streak with several Class 1 and Class 2 wins which included an overall win with Bob Gordon and Malcolm Smith in 1987, then with Mark McMillin again in 1988. In 1983, Corky and Scott McMillin won the SCORE Baja 500, with a repeat victory in 1988. While these victories proved BFG’s tire technology was successful, engineers realized that many of the vehicles were getting faster, heavier and larger. So the company had to come up with a tougher, more capable tire for SCORE racers. “BFG started developing the Baja T/A, which was going to be its first non DOT tire,” said DeAngelo. “BFG had never built a non DOT tire, simply because the slogan at the time was, ‘We Race What We Sell’.” The development of the Baja T/A would be an extremely tough and durable tire, which according to DeAngelo, had several nicknames including “Rambo” during its testing period. Nevertheless, the Baja T/A tire led to the 1989 SCORE Baja 1000 overall win by Robby Gordon in a two-wheel drive Class 8 Jim Venable Ford F-100 pickup. No Stopping The Momentum At the end of the ‘80’s BFGoodrich went on a winning streak which included a four-wheel overall 1990 SCORE Baja 1000 win with the Gordon family of Bob, Robyn, and Robby Gordon in a Chevy powered Chenoweth. This marked the first time a woman would team to win a SCORE overall victory, and doing so on BFGoodrich tires. The following year, Larry Ragland won the overall four-wheel vehicle in a Chevrolet pickup. In 1993 Ivan Stewart won the overall SCORE Baja 1000 on BFGoodrich Baja T/A radials in a Toyota. In subsequent years, with Baja 1000 overall victories in 1995 and 1999, Larry Ragland had amassed five SCORE Baja 1000 overall victories on BFGoodrich tires. In the year 2000, SCORE International decided to make the race equally as long as the millennium, the longest off-road race in SCORE’s history. While many competitors were already running on BFGoodrich Baja T/A radials, Dan Smith and Dave Ashley won the overall title, marking another milestone for the company and the durability of its tire. In 2002, Rod Hall captured his 17th class victory on BFGoodrich tires. In 2004, Troy Herbst and Larry Roeseler in the Landshark Truggy won the SCORE Baja 1000 overall on BFGoodrich tires. In 2005, teams running on BFGoodrich tires had given the company a total of 20 overall SCORE Baja 1000 wins in a row. Refining The Race Tire As BFGoodrich was winning races and gaining the respect of the SCORE racing community, the company had been working on improving the race tire even further. “BFG had been focusing on a pure racing tire for the ever increasing size, demands and weight of the Trophy Truck and Class 1 vehicles,” said DeAngelo. “The Baja T/A became the Project T/A and then moved into the Baja T/A KR, which was conceived for the pure racer. The Baja T/A KR was the product platform for BFG’s ambition to continue to win the overall SCORE Baja races.” The Baja T/A KR was the preferred racing tire for many SCORE racers and champions for more than 10 years. As improvements in racing vehicles demanded larger diameter tires, tougher sidewalls, and more durable tread compounds, BFG continued modifying and learning more from the teams they worked with. After 10 years, BFGoodrich began testing the Baja T/A KR2, which had major improvements to what teams were already using. “Frankly, we needed to make a change from the decade-plus-old Baja T/A KR,” said Chris Baker. “We had constantly made incremental improvements as we learned more and as new technologies (materials, tire mechanics) could be incorporated. But the design had reached its limit. Trophy Trucks, in particular, had become so fast and so reliable that the amazing toughness of the original KR design was simply not enough. In an era which drivers are actually trail-braking in the desert, driving Trophy Trucks almost like sports cars in some cases, we had to fundamentally change our approach from simple survival to unbreakable, with significantly upgraded performance in handling, braking, driving, and torque capability. To do that, we had to start from scratch.” The time and effort BFGoodrich spent racing and testing within SCORE has changed the way other tire manufacturers look at their product development. This remained consistent in the company’s good times and bad. “Constant development is expensive and you only do as much of that as you have to do in order to stay ahead of the pack,” said Baker. “A terrific anecdote from our past involves Frank DeAngelo, who made an effort to keep BFG’s R&D corps from backing off the gas in the early days of the KR development. When motorsports research was cut short, Frank was in charge of carefully monitoring all tire testing activity in the desert. He would often ride with drivers who were testing the product. When a substantial improvement in toughness was observed during a given test, Frank would often grab the wheel from the driver and deliberately steer the truck into a rock or ditch that was sure to kill one or more tires. His line upon returning to the testing compound would suggest that the tires seemed better, but they weren’t good enough. So he had the R&D team go back and bring something tougher. This isn’t just urban legend; it actually happened. Who knows how many additional prototype tire builds were executed because Frank didn’t accept that good enough is good enough?” Despite DeAngel’s’ efforts to keep BFG involved in off-road racing, the Baja T/A KR2 was eventually launched in 2013 and garnered 18 overall desert race wins, including the top 10 Trophy Truck finishes. The top seven Class 10 finishers that year were also on the Baja T/A KR2 tires. “We cleaned up for two years in a row,” said Baker. “BFG won 21 of the last 23 substantial races in North America, including the SCORE Baja 1000 and Baja 500 races.” According to Dan Newsome, the KR2 tire originally launched in a 37-inch diameter size, and was initially tested at the 2013 SCORE Baja 500. The 39-inch diameter KR2 was tested at the 2013 SCORE Baja 1000. The KR2 was so successful, that BFGoodrich made specific versions for Trophy Truck and in 2014, a version was designed specifically for Class 1 racing vehicles. Despite the continued victories within SCORE and other race venues, BFGoodrich combined its knowledge of desert racing, with the refinements of the KR2 tire to develop additional tires that SCORE racers utilize to this day. The company’s KO2 tire is a perfect example of a redesigned All-Terrain Radial T/A that has DNA from the KR2, but remains a DOT approved tire that is used in many buggy and OE classes. “The development of the All-Terrain KO2 tire benefitted greatly from our off-road development in an intimate way,” said Baker. “There is very close DNA between the Baja T/A KR and the All-Terrain T/A KO2. We were intentional about using the KR2 as a study platform for the KO2, which has a great reputation based on the racing experience within SCORE.” According to Dan Newsome, The All-Terrain T/A KO2 has its own record of winning races since its debut in 2013, winning SCORE races in 2014 and 2015 in a variety of classes such as the Baja Challenge cars and OE classes. Overall, BFGoodrich has amassed 86 total Overall wins on the Baja Peninsula, won the last 10 consecutive SCORE-sanctioned races, and 20 of the last 21 major North American desert races. UTV Voices Are Heard BFG’s latest milestone is the development of the Baja T/A KR2 for UTV racers. Launched by Jackson Motorsports Group during the 2015 SCORE Baja 500, this UTV version of the KR2 was specifically built for the demands of a growing SCORE class of racers. “The KR2 for UTVs demonstrates BFGoodrich’s dedication to listening to SCORE racers, and developing solutions to their specific needs,” said DeAngelo. This latest tire development allows an entirely new group of SCORE racers the advantages that Trophy Truck and Class 1 vehicles have experienced from BFG’s long-time experience in desert racing. But it also highlights the fact that although the rugged Baja terrain may stay the same, the speed, vehicle dynamics, and changes in classes will always bring forth new requirements for better and more advanced tires that can keep up. To say the least, BFGoodrich has by no means reached its maximum learning curve by winning a bunch of SCORE races. It too is moving forward to the next generation of tire development. “We leaked our hand at the SCORE Baja 1000 last year, in that we placed some prototypes with a few folks,” said Baker. “We placed those tires intentionally and put them with good teams that couldn’t affect the championship outcome. We continue to conduct dedicated test sessions with off-road racing, and find it useful to place stuff that’s not ready for prime time in battle to learn what we’ve have. We’re still learning, and while it is true that KR2 is better than the KR it replaced, the good news is that the successor to KR2 will be measurably better.” With a rich history in Baja, the SCORE International community of racers, fans, and teams wish BFGoodrich continued success in helping the sport of off-road racing succeed to higher levels and help reach new goals that will inevitably be achieved in the next year, or perhaps for 40 more. SJ