12 Hours of ATV America - Race Report

The 12 Hours of ATV America is now in its third year, and the race is centrally located in the state of Iowa, which puts it almost in the middle of the country for racers traveling from either the east coast or the west coast.

The terrain in the central part of the country east of the Rocky Mountains is primarily flat land with fields of corn as far as you can see.

As we headed to the track Friday Evening, the temps were in the 80’s and conditions were awesome for racing, but a storm was brewing to the west and heading east.

Finally we arrived in Fort Doge, IA, the home of the 12 Hours of America race.

The location of the track was on the west side of the river last year, but the location was moved to the east side of the river this year to a temporary site for this year.

Next year, the track will be moved once again to new location just a mile north of this year’s temporary location.

As we arrived at the track around 6PM, the storms from the west came roaring through with wind gust upwards of 50 MPH with heavy rain. Luckily the storm was a quick mover, but it still easily dropped nearly an 1" of rain on the track.

When the storm passed the temps quickly dropped into the 50's and winds remained steady in the 20 MPH range as a rainbow formed to the east.

As the skies cleared, riders began emerging from their trailers to begin preparations for Saturday morning.

John Blanton, updog Industries , kept busy Friday selling colored backgrounds and numbers to many of the over 100 participating teams.

Rausch Creek Motorsports , Quinn Lickman, was found making some final track prepartions. Quinn is no stranger to building tracks considering his involvement in one the nations best ATV Parks located in Tremont, PA.

With over 100 entries, the riders pitted on both sides of the starting area.

Many teams decided to make some last minutes changes to their ATV setups to deal with the muddy conditions they were going to encountered in atleast the first lap of Saturday's race.

Team #31 (On the Gas with Team GasGas & Wachs Racing)grabbed their hacksaw and decided to cut the end of their handlebars off to save weight, lol. No, actually, they needed to cut off the throttle spacer to allow room to install their Powermadd hand quards for added mud protection.

#408 Emu Racing(Jerome Rewerts, James McNaul, and Ryan Jiminez) worked on their machine into the dark as many teams.