Day 1
After months of planning, we began the Wrangler Runaround in Parker, Arizona, with the assistance of the Parker 4 Wheelers. Due to the extreme heat, we were all up and ready to roll by the early morning for a quick meeting and introduction of everyone. Not only would this program test these JK suspensions, it would also be testing all our participants as they were put into the extreme 100+ degree heat along the California-Arizona border.
At Bob Longo's Bob's Toybarn we put the Jeeps up on a rack for initial inspections before everything was covered in dirt, and we started to run these JKs through their paces. Shortly after inspection, our first day would lead us into Rice, California. Rice is a town that does not even qualify as a ghost town, as its only remnant is a burned-out gas station that has been long since nonfunctional. From here we launched our fleet of JKs with 25 psi in the tires, one after another, onto the highway for some short-lived highway driving. We have to imagine that most JKs will be driven on the street for most of the time in their first few years, but we felt that only minimal highway testing was necessary, and we didn't want to eat into the time we'd need to spend off road. As one JK would come back, another would launch onto the highway. We had every single tester driving each of the eight JK Wranglers.
When the road time was finished we broke for a quick lunch provided by our one-girl support crew and points tally official, Jayne Nichols. Lunch does not take long when you're eating outside in 105-degree heat and the vehicles you're testing in have nice, cool air conditioning. Everyone was only too happy to hop back in and start running the fire-roads portion of the program. The fire-road testing created quite a dust storm as the JKs bombed down a semismooth dirt road at 60 mph, but we had not counted on eating up fuel so quickly and had to stop part of the way through to let the JKs replenish their gas tanks. These new six-cylinder engines were definitely no less fuel-hungry than their predecessors.
Day 2
We knew the highway and fire-road testing would be rather easy on the JKs, and therefore we put it first, hoping to keep all participating JK Wranglers alive as long as possible. But our Day 2 we were not so sure about. It was reserved for rockcrawling through some of the sharpest rocks that any of us have encountered. With the help of the Parker 4 Wheelers, we picked a trail that was difficult enough to create a real challenge for the Wranglers, while not absolutely requiring the use of lockers since we were running open differentials through the entire program. It would, however, put all of our "minimum requirement" items to use. Our Mac's straps did a good job of popping our JKs up and over the last climb of the trail, though we had quite a few laps done without having to offer pull assistance to anyone. These were skilled drivers indeed, and the JKs and their suspensions were performing remarkably. But the sharpness of the rocks plagued us, and it was lucky that we had our Ringers Gloves to protect our hands. Our tires and wheels were not so lucky, though. In total, we lost five tires running 12 pounds of pressure due to these treacherous edges. And these were triple-ply sidewall MTZs-tires known for outstanding durability and extreme resistance to punctures! There were even some places in the trail where aluminum shavings had built up due to the wheels being literally shaved down by the unforgiving rocks during tire spin. Nevertheless, the group helped each other, pushed on, changed tires, and got more chances to use their SOG multitools to open crushed valve stems and grab backing nuts of folded control arms.
Even with all our mishaps during Day 2, we still managed to finish at a decent hour and make it to the Nellie E. Saloon, also known as the Desert Bar, a famous refresher stop a few miles off the paved highway, and a definite recommendation for anyone visiting Parker on a weekend.
It had been a tough day, but by the end of it, all eight JK Wranglers were up and running again.