Our cameras were smokin' today (so were a few tires) as we entered Day 2 of Four Wheeler of the Year.  For the record, the dude pictured here with the camera is our art director Greg Smith.   

We began by hitting the car wash to get the previous day's Johnson Valley dust removed from our 5 truck field.  Head Honcho McColloch used the downtime to throw a few signs.

Then it was off to the dragway in Fontana for acceleration and brake testing.  This meant unloading the vehicles of all of our personal and recovery items so the rigs had no cargo weight.

Holman does the driving, Stover runs the computer and Brubaker pretends to be busy taking photos.  This year several of the rigs in our group didn't have permanent all-wheel-drive, so big 2WD smoky burnouts were the order of the day.  To warm up the tires for the acceleration testing of course.

Our Web guru Jason Gonderman is with us all week and he was creatively placing a video camera and recording lots of Krappy Kam footage of the testing that'll soon appear on fourwheeler.com.  

Late in the day we finally got to hit the trail.  Very soon a few of the rigs would be wearing scars from the trail.

After a run in our super-secret canyon we met to share thoughts and notes on everything from traction control systems to tire performance to the annoyance of little ground clearance and low-hanging running boards.  Then it was back to the motel for dinner.    

Tomorrow is the last full day of testing and it will be the most intense day of the trip with sand and trail action galore.  We'll have an update Thursday night.