The Strange Story of a Strange Isuzu

It's 9 PM. The harmonic balancer pulley bolt is stripped. The thermostat housing bolt has snapped off. Half the front of the engine is sitting on my garage floor. The water pump replacement I thought would take a Saturday afternoon has somehow become a front-end restoration project. What kind of lunatic willingly spends their nights tracking down a crankshaft bolt for a 35-year-old Isuzu? Someone who owns an Isuzu.

The problem seems to be in this area...

What is an Isuzu?

Today Isuzu has fallen out of the public eye. I went to the junkyard recently to look for parts for my 91 Amigo 2.6. Naturally the gate worker asked me what kind of car I was parts hunting for and when I mentioned Isuzu they said they had never even heard of that brand before. Which turned out to be funny because I found at least five of them scattered in with other import trucks.

The few people who do know of Isuzu today seem to only have impressions of SUVs from the '90s, but their history and impact on the automotive world is so much greater than that. Isuzu wasn't just another Japanese automaker. Its roots reach back to the very beginning of Japan's automobile industry. Isuzu helped pave the way for the Japanese manufacturers that followed and eventually established deep partnerships with American automakers.

Isuzu is Bigger Than You Think

Isuzu’s history stretches back to 1914, making it one of the oldest names in the Japanese auto industry. The company began when Tokyo Ishikawajima Shipbuilding set out to build automobiles domestically. They initially partnered with Britain’s Wolseley to manufacture cars and trucks in Japan. By the 1930s the company was developing vehicles of its own, including a new government-standardized heavy truck introduced in 1934 and given the name “Isuzu.” The name came from the Isuzu River near Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine, which eventually became the identity of the company itself. Long before Isuzu became known internationally for compact SUVs, pickups, and diesels, it was helping establish Japan’s domestic automotive industry, building Japanese-designed trucks at a time when the country still relied heavily on foreign manufacturers and licensed designs.

General Motors and Isuzu began their partnership in 1971, when GM purchased roughly a third of the Japanese automaker. The deal gave Isuzu something it desperately needed to break into America: GM’s massive dealer network. Before Isuzu had U.S. dealerships of its own, Americans were already buying Isuzus. The 1972 Chevy LUV (Light Utility Vehicle) was widely popular and actually a rebadged Isuzu "Faster" pickup. Isuzu began selling vehicles under its own name in America in 1981, and by then the partnership had become a two-way street. In Japan, Isuzu dealers sold imported GM products including the Chevrolet Camaro and Corvette. Meanwhile, Isuzu platforms, engines, trucks, and engineering were finding their way into GM brands around the world, including Chevrolet, Geo, Buick, Opel, Vauxhall, Holden, and GMC. Isuzu’s truck and diesel expertise eventually led to joint commercial-vehicle programs and DMAX diesel engines. What started as a convenient way for Isuzu to reach American buyers ultimately became a decades-long partnership that left Isuzu DNA everywhere, scattered throughout the GM family.

JDM Camaro

JDM Camaros

Chevrolet LUV

Diesel engineering became one of Isuzu’s specialties remarkably early. In 1936, the company developed the DA4 and DA6, Japan’s first air-cooled automotive diesel engines, beginning decades of innovation in direct injection, turbocharging, cold-start technology, and electronic engine controls. Isuzu would go on to introduce pioneering direct-injection diesels for smaller trucks and become a major supplier of diesel engines for everything from passenger vehicles to heavy trucks and industrial equipment. Its expertise became so valuable that GM eventually put Isuzu in a leading role for diesel development across the GM family, with the two companies forming DMAX in 1998 to build diesel engines in the United States. The partnership had effectively come full circle: Isuzu once needed GM to reach the American market; decades later, GM needed Isuzu to help build its diesels.

That contradiction is what makes Isuzu interesting. Their vehicles earned a reputation for durability, simplicity, low operating costs, and yet the company behind them was anything but technologically conservative. My Amigo wasn't Isuzu's greatest achievement. Passenger cars and SUVs were simply one strange, memorable chapter in a much larger story.

Testing out some brand new tires

The Front End Refresh

I got my Isuzu Amigo as a fun project vehicle. Mechanically this thing is extremely simple and easy to work on. With its short wheelbase, 4WD, and minimal platform it absolutely eats off-road. I've taken this thing to amazing places and up some pretty extreme grades. Isuzu basically marketed this as a goofing around vehicle. Not a practical grocery-getter or utility vehicle. It was built for fun and it delivers in spades. The MU (Mysterious Utility) as it was known in Japan, went by many names. For Europe and Austrialia it was known as the Frontera Sport and sold under the Opel and Holden badges respectively. Here in America they introduced it to us as a friend, the Amigo.

This goofy little truck provided a lot of fun with very minimal maintenance for about a year. Then it started needing some help in the garage, and I was happy to pay it back. Parts for this thing are still around for the most part... (I'll talk more about that later) and really cheap.

First the starter motor gave me some trouble, and I kept it alive until the replacement from Rock Auto arrived by using a bit of "percussive maintenance". The starter motor was an easy install; take a wheel off, get in there, swap them around.

Then about a week later the water pump started getting really weepy. Like-a-lot weepy. I thought to myself "Okay well while I'm in there I might as well replace the radiator (it was munted from the previous owner and I'm surprised it wasn't leaking too), all the belts, get a bigger alternator, thermostat, and delete all the A/C equipment at the same time." We're only talking about 400ish bucks for all that stuff from Rock Auto anyway. Sensible and responsible, should be easy... right?

I love getting new parts

To get to the water pump everything else I mentioned replacing had to come out anyway, so I dug into it. Over the next few nights, the front of the engine slowly came apart until only the harmonic balancer pulley bolt stood in my way. This is an important big-ass bolt. To loosen it I had to turn it without turning the entire motor. So I put the truck in high gear, transfer case set to 4WD, and parking brake firmly engaged. Now all of those components would act like a big spring to keep the motor from turning while I turned the bolt. That also meant that to get it to turn would require an enormous amount of force since the whole vehicle was basically a spring against the motor. I grabbed a big breaker bar, added a cheater bar, and got my buddy "Luck Lucid" from the Roadster Club to give me a hand. With a bit of PB B'laster and lots of elbow grease, we backed it out, the entire car fighting against us the whole way. Once we got it out I was able to remove the broken water pump that started all of this, but now there was a new problem. The bolt we just removed had eaten itself on the way out and mangled some of the threads inside of the crankshaft. It was completely messed up.

To put the truck back together I would need a new bolt. This is not something you can just find on the shelves, and you can't casually substitute using a bolt from the hardware store. Its strength and dimensions matter, especially that unusually thick 10mm flange. The garage would have to wait before proceeding. Let the search begin.

First stop was my local Isuzu dealer. They don't touch the old consumer vehicles anymore (the consumer market is something Isuzu has largely abandoned worldwide), so I did my homework beforehand and tracked down the exact part number for the bolt: 8-94108479-0 before calling the service center.. Surely they had one, nope. Next up was Honda, since the '90s Passport used the same Isuzu 4ZE1 engine. No luck there either. A few sketchy websites claimed they might maybe be able to import one from Japan, but that meant 15 bucks plus shipping and a minimum three-month wait. No thanks. McMaster-Carr had nothing remotely like it, and neither did Ace Hardware.

I was starting to feel a bit nervous about this easy little front end refresh project. Bryan from the Roadster Club mentioned I should try Pick-n-Pull. My hopes were low, especially when the gate worker told me they don't have any Isuzus, but I went in and hunted anyway. Well there actually were Isuzus tucked in there and they had the same bolt! Turns out Isuzu used this bolt on a ton of stuff. Why design a bunch of different bolts when one crank pulley bolt for all occasions and applications works just as well? The first donor I walked up to was an automatic, so without getting some special tool to hold the pulley in place I wouldn't be able to extract the bolt from that one. Same issue with the second Isuzu I looked at while there. But then I walked up to a white Isuzu Trooper from the same era as my Amigo. It even used the same 4ZE1 motor. "Score!" I thought. As I walked around the side of the vehicle up toward the engine bay I could see it had already been molested though. Most of the motor was missing, pulleys all gone or scattered around, the deck and pistons clearly exposed. Someone got into this one already. But that didn't mean they took the bolt I was hunting. The crank pulley was already gone, so they had to have taken that special, big-ass important bolt off already. The search moved to the gravel under the car. A spark plug, some other bolts, a washer, a fuse... no crank pulley bolt. Then, looking back into the engine bay, there it was. The crank pulley bolt, exactly like mine, was in good health just resting on the frame! Didn't even need my tools for this. I grabbed that up real quick and skipped my happy ass all the way back to the gates to pay for my bolt, 3 bucks.

Back at the garage with an entire can of WD-40, and a lot of patience, I retapped the threads inside the crankshaft and began the reassembly with my fresh new parts. The thermostat housing needed to have a bolt extracted too, but it was undramatic. The truck went back together quickly and ran without issues for a little bit.

Spinning the new water pump

Installing the new alternator

Of course, later that day it developed a misfire. All I had to do to sort that out was clean the fuel injectors and install a new fuel filter. Problem solved and the vehicle was running way better than it ever had in the past. Without the parasitic loss to the A/C, nice clean injectors, and fresh parts sprinkled all over the front it was pulling harder than it ever had before. I wonder what all that extra power might lead to...

It's impossible to own one of these vehicles without becoming slightly more mechanical than you were before. Thirty-five years later, I rebuilt the entire front of this engine in my garage with ordinary hand tools. Whatever Isuzu's engineers intended in 1991, the result is a vehicle simple and stout enough that an enthusiast can reasonably keep it alive almost indefinitely.

So what happened to the Isuzu brand?

Consumer vehicles were never Isuzu's foundation. Commercial trucks, buses, and diesel engines were its bread and butter long before Americans associated the name with Geo, Troopers, Rodeos, and Amigos. That's the side of the business that rewarded exactly what Isuzu was good at: durable engines, dependable platforms, low operating costs, and vehicles designed to spend years working. The quirky little 4x4s Americans remember made a name for Isuzu, but they were never the center of Isuzu's universe.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. consumer side was struggling. Sales were falling, passenger cars were gone, and an increasingly thin SUV lineup was competing against Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, and Jeep. Isuzu leaned more heavily on GM to fill the gaps, eventually selling rebadged vehicles like the Ascender and i-Series pickups before leaving the U.S. consumer market entirely in 2009.

From a business perspective, imagine being an Isuzu executive around 2005. You have two choices:
Option A) Spend billions developing...

• New SUVs
• New sedans
• New powertrains
• Crash testing programs
• Global emissions compliance
• Dealer networks
• Marketing campaigns

...so you can fight for a small slice of the consumer market.
Or option B)

• Continue being one of the world's premier commercial truck and diesel manufacturers with extremely loyal customers and strong global demand.

That's not a particularly difficult boardroom discussion. But while they were here they made some pretty sick whips.

Isuzu Pickup

Isuzu/Holden 117

Isuzu ELF

Isuzu Trooper

Isuzu Piazza

Clean Amigo

The repairs continue on...

After rebuilding the front end of my Amigo it was acting like it had a brand new motor. Anyway, a week later the oil turned into chocolate milk. All that extra power resulted in it finding the next worn out component. It was billowing clouds of white vapor out of the tailpipe and all the oil turned into a brown gross mixture of oil and coolant. The head gasket was the first thing that came to my mind.

If I was going to tear down the entire top of the motor's components:

• intake assembly
• exhaust manifold
• upper timing gear
• various harnesses and vacuum tubes
• replace all the fluids again

...so that I could remove the head to see the deck of my block and inspect that gasket...

It was time for me to deep dive into what Isuzu did when they designed and serviced the 4ZE1 back in the day. Thankfully I found an amazing HTML-based database of incredibly detailed service manuals. Just look for LEMON Manuals, they even let you use what you find offline. A couple of weeks spent searching both versions of what they had on file for a 1991 Isuzu Amigo 2.6 4WD S was an education. I found the tightening diagram and staged torque specs. With this information I was confident I could put it back together safely. It was time to round up some tools and dig into it.

Info from Lemon manuals

Kinda sounds like ingredients for a magic potion: I would need to get a timing gear wrench, 12-point sockets, and hex sockets. Joining the iron block to the aluminum head and creating a good combustion chamber means this gasket undergoes a ton of stress. It was more likely the gasket had failed before the head.

Little by little each night I worked my way down into the motor. Draining fluids, setting things aside I had just replaced weeks before, nibbling at the bolts. Poop water everywhere. Eventually I was able to lift the intake manifold and head, with the cams still intact, and set that to the side. There it was, the deck of my motor, top of the block. Time to inspect what happened down here.

Top of the block

poop water

The head sat lazily on its side as fluids drained out to a towel on the garage floor without crushing any harness connectors or sensors. First priority was making sure the block wasn't cracked. A flashlight inspection of every millimeter of the bores revealed no obvious damage, but it did turn up a clue: the top of the piston in cylinder 2 was exceptionally clean compared to the others. It looked steam-cleaned. The bottom of the head showed nothing visually alarming either.

Draining the head

Bottom of the head

The head gasket had immediately visible damage. The fire rings looked smashed around cylinders 2 and 3. There were also two spots around coolant passages where the damaged gasket had created a direct route into the combustion chamber for cylinder 2. My diagnosis was confirmed: When the head gasket blew it allowed coolant into all the places it's not supposed to be. It mixed with the oil, steam-cleaned the top of cylinder 2, then exited as large clouds of vapor. That explains every symptom and means all I had to do now was replace the gasket and reassemble.

A very sad headgasket

A good Fel-Pro gasket for the 4ZE1 costs about 60 dollars in 2026, sold. Reassembly went slowly and deliberately, each stage punctuated by the satisfying click of the torque wrench. I had gotten as far as the exhaust manifold and just needed help wrestling it into place. Luck Lucid came back to help me get things back together. That led to a tangent with his FC RX-7 and we got both vehicles sorted in an evening.

Luck Lucid

The following morning it had been a month and it was finally time to look and listen to the motor. After cleaning the battery contacts as a final step, it was time to carefully start up the Amigo again.  It started and was smoother than it ever had been. Steady and deep, it hummed in the garage blowing out the last of pooled coolant from the exhaust. This repair was a cautious success.

Isuzu never really left

Today, Isuzu specializes in commercial vehicles and diesel engines. That's the business the company was built around, and it's still at the heart of what Isuzu does. Isuzu trucks are one of those vehicles that are everywhere once you start looking for them. They just start popping up at intersections and throughout industrial areas. Tomorrow, start counting how many Isuzu box trucks you see on your commute. You'll probably stop counting after 5.

Most people don't realize how successful the company still is because they aren't looking in the commercial vehicle market. Isuzu is investing heavily in autonomous commercial vehicles, connected fleet services, battery electric trucks, and carbon-neutral transportation solutions. Their stated goal isn't to become a passenger car company again, it's to become a "commercial mobility solutions company" by 2030.

Closing

Every stripped bolt, every obscure part number, and every late-night trip to the parts store has taught me something about this little Japanese LUV sitting in my garage. It belongs to a company that spent over a century quietly building reliable machines while the rest of the automotive world chased trends and market share.

Keeping a 35-year-old Isuzu alive is a labor of love. My Amigo isn't the last survivor of a dead company. It's a relic from a strange era, the period when one of the world's most influential commercial vehicle manufacturers briefly decided to build some wonderfully odd vehicles for people like us.

RIP in peace =P

2026 Nevada Open Road Challenge

The desert is silent except for the wind. My comm radios rest against my chest as heat rolls off the sun-baked pavement of Highway 318. For a moment everything is still, and then it comes. Faint at first, the distant roar of a V8 somewhere beyond the horizon. Pistons hammer in rhythm, tires rapidly claw at the asphalt. Air rips across the body of a machine built for one purpose: speed. In seconds the car tears past my position at well over 165 mph, off into the distant horizon quickly as it came. One heartbeat later all that’s left is the sound of the motor fading into the Nevada desert.

Prestige

The Nevada Open Road Challenge (NORC) serves as the more experimental sibling of the Silver State Classic Challenge (SSCC). Many teams use it as an opportunity to test new equipment, dial in their cars, and refine their strategies before returning for the marquee event in September. It is what happens when you shut down miles of Nevada highway and hand the keys over to people who think triple digit speeds are just a warm-up. It's full-send blast across open desert where precision matters just as much as guts. There is no wheel-to-wheel racing and instead a high-speed time trial where drivers pick a target average speed, often pushing well north of 150 mph, and then rocket through the hills as fast as possible on an unforgiving stretch of public road turned into a temporary racetrack. Out here there are no barriers, no runoff, and no room for sloppy driving. Just you, your co-driver, the math, and a whole lot of throttle. It’s fast, it’s technical, and it’s just a little unhinged. In other words, pure Nevada.

A brief history

What started in 1988 as a scrappy last-minute idea to show off a few vintage race cars on a closed stretch of Highway 318 near Ely NV, has grown into one of the most unapologetically wild motorsports traditions on the planet. An event so unique it dragged open-road racing out of a 50-year hiatus and straight into the Guinness World Records. Back when the event was just getting started organizers had barely two months to convince counties, law enforcement, and insurers that letting people rip down a public highway at full tilt was a good idea. Somehow, it worked. The early days were equal parts chaos and ambition: Ferraris, Porsches, muscle cars, blown engines, and a whole lot of figuring it out as they went. In time the formula evolved. Speed classes based on target averages, tighter safety rules, international drivers, and eventually two flagship events: the September Silver State Classic Challenge and the springtime Nevada Open Road Challenge. Along the way came record runs faster than 200 mph, NASCAR-bodied land missiles, and a steady climb from a niche experiment to a bucket-list event with global reach. Today it’s a polished operation backed by volunteers, sponsors, and a surprisingly serious infrastructure. At its core it is still the same slightly insane idea: shut down a highway, point fast cars at the horizon; see who’s brave, and precise enough, to chase perfection at speeds most people will never experience.

Arrival

This year I was able to attend NORC as a Safety Officer. I blasted from Reno to Ely in my RWD Lexus GS350 via old Highway 50, the Loneliest Road in America, making the trip in a little over four hours. During the week of the event, Ely transforms into a perpetual car show with exotic sports cars parked all over town, on every street and around every corner.

HWY 50 speeds

My Lexus GS350 RWD

Parking lots look nice

Factory5 Daytona

I stayed in a hotel and casino called the Jailhouse. It earned its name because it sits on the site of Ely's original jail, where some of the West's toughest criminals were once held. The hotel itself refers to the rooms by cell number.

Jailhouse historical marker

This hotel specifically is great because it is right across the street from all administrative NORC related activities, the Bristlecone Convention center. My cell had a direct view of the convention center. Also, the hotel owners must know one of the racing teams because in the main halls you will find the awards won by the "Old Fart Racing Team" over the years.

The Bristlecone from my cell

"Old Fart" wall

After getting settled into my cell I made my way to the other side of town to meet the drivers and cars. They were all meeting by the local high school to stage themselves for the parade. Yup that's right, the town of Ely loves this event so much they host a literal parade for all the competitor cars. Ely relies on the tourism revenue generated by the SSCC and NORC every year. Check out this page dedicated to the pictures I captured in the staging area and during the parade itself: 2026 NORC Parade Photos.

2026 NORC Parade

Once the parade was over everyone met up at the Bristlecone convention center for the opening banquet. This was a catered event with introductions to members of the administrative staff, MC'd by the charismatic Chairman, Blue Offutt.

Blue Offutt

The following day, Saturday, was going to be busy with classes for Safety Officers, Navigators, and Drivers, along with last-minute adjustments to the cars.

Prep Day

I enjoyed a pancake and sausage breakfast provided by the local Lions Club and spent some time talking with Event Director, Frank McKinnon, while cars underwent their final tech inspections. Before long my coffee cup was empty and it was time to get down to business, so I trekked back to the Bristlecone Convention Center.

Safety officer training proved to be a comprehensive and worthwhile experience. Assistant Event Director, John Bigley, covered a wide variety of topics relevant to the safety officers in his slide deck, complete with audio and video examples to supplement the pictures and text on display. He talked about how the event operates and what our priorities as safety officers are. We were shown how to use the flags, radios, and other gear provided to us by the event organizers. One of the most important tasks for a safety officer working this event is simply to make sure no one enters the roadway between the hours of the race. When a driver is going down this road at 165 miles per hour or more, it is literally impossible to react in time to unexpected obstacles on the road. Bigley provided a few recorded examples of how quickly things can go wrong on this road when the stakes and the speeds are this high, blink and you'd miss it.

Once the training session wrapped up it was almost noon and I decided to grab a bite at Racks, a local bar. I was delighted to discover a familiar sight from back home in Reno. My eyes could barely believe it: they served the "Awful Awful".

AWFUL AWFUL

Naturally, there was no way I was leaving without ordering one. I settled in with a cold beer and tried my luck at the blackjack machine built into the bar, while the kitchen worked its magic. After polishing off a burger large enough to live up to its name, awfully big and awfully good, I figured I had better walk it off. With that in mind I made my way to the town's largest park for the competitor car show. Follow this link to check out pictures from the 2026 NORC Competitor Car Show.

2026 NORC Show

The afternoon at the Bristlecone Convention Center was devoted to navigator training and the driver's meeting. Although neither session was required for my role, I attended both out of curiosity, and they turned out to be some of the most informative parts of the weekend. The presentations offered a behind-the-scenes look at how the event is coordinated, from timing procedures to communications between checkpoints spread across the course. Better yet, the radio frequencies were shared openly, giving me the perfect excuse to load them into my scanner for race day. One topic that came up in every meeting was the weather. There was a chance of snow for the race day in Ely, and the general consensus was that we would race rain or shine. The highway was scheduled to close at 5AM on Sunday morning, which meant my day would begin at 3AM to give me enough time to collect my gear, locate the gates I was responsible for, and get set up before the first cars arrived. Knowing race day would start long before sunrise, I decided an early night was in order once the driver's meeting wrapped up.

Cellblock Steakhouse

I grabbed a surprisingly great steak dinner at the Cellblock Steakhouse before making the short drive to Lund NV, where the starting line for the following day's race would be located. To save myself a predawn drive from Ely, I had already reserved a room at the All-in-One Motel, Grocery, Diner, Gas Station and Truck Stop. It wasn't fancy, but it put me exactly where I needed to be when the alarm clock went off a few hours later.

All In One Truck Stop

Race Morning

Three in the morning is very early for me on Sunday. Heck, that is early for me any day. A short walk from the motel led to the truck stop where a much-needed cup of coffee helped shake off the last traces of sleep. I happened to be the first safety officer to show up for gear pickup which gave me the opportunity to spend some time talking to the HAM operators before heading out to my gate. I wish I had gotten pictures of the HAM operator vehicles, they looked like rolling RF shacks, but my mind was too busy waiting for the caffeine to hit.

My assignment placed me roughly 45 miles south of the starting line. Highway 318 stretched into the darkness ahead, its mile markers illuminated only by my high beams. Anticipation of the race to come, knowing that the drivers would be flying down the same stretch of highway, just a few hours from now was a strange feeling. There was something surreal about driving that lonely stretch of road knowing that the competitors would be hurtling down the same pavement at more than twice the speed limit. Eventually mile markers NY5 and NY6 emerged from the darkness. Somewhere between them were my gates. A few passes up and down this mile stretch in the dark eventually revealed my gates, set back from the road by a couple hundred feet on either side.

As I locked down my gates, set up my chairs, cooler, cameras, radios, and flags; the sun slowly crept over the horizon and swept the high desert in a bath of golden light and much welcomed warmth. I shed my gloves and beanie and took a moment to soak in the natural beauty of Nevada as the birds sang their morning chorus.

Watching the clouds for a bit, I felt comfortable that the weather would hold for the day. After a few crackly comm checks over the radio, from each checkpoint to every safety officer, it was time to get the race started.

The 2026 Nevada Open Road Challenge

SSCC and NORC are both time-speed-distance events, not traditional races where the fastest car wins. Instead, the winners are those who finish closest to "on time" for their speed class. Being early is just as much of a penalty as being late. Competitive times are thousandths of a second away from the target time. Even being hundredths of a second off is considered good, but not on the level of the highest performing drivers here. The race is two parted, a southbound run, quick break, and then a northbound run back up the same stretch. One hundred and fifty-one miles in total.

Southbound

My radio scanner crackled as it picked up a message from the start line announcing that the first car had begun its southbound run. Before long I could hear that very car roaring somewhere on the other side of the horizon. Just moments later it tore past me and off into the distance again.

The variety of cars at this event is astonishing, Euro exotics, American classics, and even a handful of JDM offerings. Over the past few days, I got plenty of opportunity to talk to drivers about their cars. Here are the ones which stood out most to me.

NORC is an American event, and what is more American than a Corvette. Out of the 109 competing cars, 36 of those were Corvettes. But this C3 Corvette stood out to me over all the others. Not only is it the most vintage corvette here, but it had an LS3 swap in it. Ray Maione and Tj Groenenboom were having some trouble with the serpentine belt in the parking lot back when I was checking in to the Jailhouse hotel, looks like they may have gotten that sorted out.

The Nissan 350Z isn't the fastest car in the world, nor the most sophisticated, but give it a big naturally aspirated V6, rear-wheel drive, and a willingness to misbehave, and suddenly you remember why sports cars were invented in the first place. I spent a lot of time talking to these guys, Ken Lindsey and Steve Nesdore were probably the coolest competitors. They also were running a new experimental timing and prediction software using highly accurate positioning systems to calculate target speed. Of all the innovations encountered that weekend, this struck me as one of the smartest. I couldn't help but wonder how useful something similar might be for my own CannonMiner Cannonball-Run software.

In an age where sports cars have become rolling computers with the personality of a tax return, this bright yellow Toyota GR86 arrives like a cheerful hooligan, reminding us that lightness, balance, and rear-wheel drive are still the ingredients that matter. This is the car that gave me hope that my own roadster could compete here one day. The driver and navigator combo, David and Stephanie Zeh, were both really nice and welcoming competitors.

Since the dawn of the automobile, mankind has occasionally produced machines so utterly outrageous that common sense packs its bags and leaves the country, and the V12 Lamborghini Diablo is one of them. According to the stories making the rounds in Ely, Bjoern Flesland journeys from the European Arctic Circle to Los Angeles, collects the car, and drives it across the American West to compete in both NORC and SSCC every year.

The Ferrari SF90 Stradale is what happens when Italy takes over a thousand horsepower, a pair of batteries, and every known law of physics, stuffs them into a purple missile, and then has the audacity to call it a road car. This absurd machine was piloted by William Griffiths who traveled from the UK to New York and then drove to Ely to compete for the first time ever in this event. I think he is a natural foil to Bjoern and his V12 Lambo.

I did my best to snap a picture of every single car that flew by on the southbound run, but at least 3 of them snuck by before being captured on film. Check out this page to see all the photos from the southbound run. After a couple hours of marveling at these wonderful machines the final car passed by, I settled in for a quick lunch and break from the sun in my Lexus. Then it was back out to the field for the second half.

Northbound

Every competitor on the northbound section of the course was captured on video with my DJI Osmo. The long gaps between cars were edited out, condensing the field into a few minutes of uninterrupted speed.

To my dismay I didn't see Ray and TJ in their C3 LS3 Corvette pass by on the northbound run, that belt which was giving them trouble earlier must have given up the ghost on the southbound run. The rest of the field continued through without much drama. As the final car went by again, and the all-clear came across the radio, I started packing up.

The drive back from my gates through to Lund felt different now that the course had gone quiet again. Along the way, I passed a red Ferrari 488 Challenge EVO that had blown a tire on the southbound run and spun off the highway. Another quiet reminder of how quickly things can go wrong out here. Later I found out that the driver of this vehicle and his navigator were unharmed. The weather finally turned when I was between Lund and Ely. Light snow began drifting across the highway and started to pile up softening the edges of the desert, timing that couldn’t have worked out better for the weekend.

Closing Ceremony

Back in Ely at the Bristlecone Convention Center, everyone gathered for the closing ceremony. We ate well, we drank well, and traded stories from the weekend while the award ceremony played out and brought the event to a close. Full results for the 2026 NORC are now posted on the SSCC/NORC website if you want to see how everyone stacked up.

A full house

Driver of the spun-out
Ferrari recounting the experience

By Sunday evening, Highway 318 was just another Nevada highway again. The checkpoints were gone, the timing equipment packed away, and the drivers getting some much-needed rest. If you happened to drive through a few days later, you'd never know that hundreds of volunteers had transformed it into one of the fastest racecourses in North America. The following morning, as I pointed my Lexus west toward Reno, I couldn't help wondering what it would be like to see Highway 318 from the driver's side of the windshield. Maybe next year I'll find out.