Ashcraft Loves a Ride on the Wild Side : Motorsports: Driving for the second-place Herzog Racing Team, the Vista executive is on the right track when he’s off-road.

Danny Ashcraft’s favorite movie is “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and for good reason. Ashcraft is Indiana Jones in an off-road vehicle, kicking up dust from Barstow to Baja in adventures that require a crash helmet instead of a fedora.

A three-sport letterman in college, Ashcraft, 39, a company president from Vista, loves fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants movies and goes for the same thing in real life.

“I like the action-adventure film, the science fiction stuff,” says our reviewer. “Raiders is a great movie. One thing begats another. There’s reaction upon reaction. There’s a lot of spontaneity.”

It’s a lot like Ashcraft’s hobby, climbing into a futuristic 1991 Ford Explorer and seeing how fast man can go under the harshest driving conditions. Like the character Harrison Ford made famous, Ashcraft has to do plenty of winging it.

“We’re not confined on a paved track,” he said. “We’re running a 50-foot corridor through the wilds of Baja or the high deserts of the Southwestern United States with a marker every mile or half-mile.

“You make up a lot of stuff as it goes. A lot of times you’re in real heavy dust and you’ve got to get past the trees, boulders, ditches, stray cattle.”

Stray cattle?

“There’s always a cow getting hit down in Mexico.”

For the past two years, Ashcraft has been very adept--or lucky--at missing the cattle and cacti. Representing the Herzog Racing Team, he is tied for second place in the HDRA/SCORE Point Series, trailing Northern California’s John Swift in Class 6, open production sedans.

Ashcraft would be closer to the leader if the Explorer’s debut had gone better in the third race of the season, the San Felipe 250 in Baja. Instead, an engine malfunction prevented any exploring at all.

Last month, the Explorer was finally broken in at the Baja 500 and the engine built by Oceanside’s Mike Evans provided plenty of optimism.

Ashcraft and on-board mechanic Dave Mason finished second in the class and 17th overall in Baja, the fourth in the eight-race series.

“Class 6 is about fourth on the ladder in terms of speed, but because of new rule changes, we’ve closed the gap to the unlimited cars,” Ashcraft said. “We’re still a tick behind them, but with a good run down in Mexico, we would have finished 10th overall. That’s very good.”

And it was all the more impressive because Ashcraft drove more than half the race with a stuck valve. Running on five cylinders, Herzog Racing lost its class by only six minutes.

“With a fresh motor, there’s no way we would have lost that race,” Ashcraft said.

Ashcraft is typical of a lot of racers at this level. He’s company president of Western CNC, a machine tooling firm in Carlsbad that does nearly $2 million in business annually making parts for the aerospace, medical, electronics and golf industries.

He had been a privateer racer, working his way up from the Challenger class. He was nominated for rookie of the year in 1987 and the following year competed in Class 1, single seat unlimited, the ultimate class.

“For the few races we ran Class 1, we were moderately successful, but you couldn’t see that in the standings,” Ashcraft said. “You can be winning a race for 499 miles, but if you’re not first when you cross the finish line, you might as well not show up.”

That was two years ago.

Then he got lucky at a charity golf tournament in Las Vegas. He didn’t win the hole-in-one contest, but did better. He was paired with brothers Randy and Stan Herzog, owners of Herzog Contracting of St. Joseph, Mo. They own the largest light rail construction firm in the United States and built 75% of the San Diego-to-Tijuana Trolley system in 1981. They are the inventors of the CarTopper material handler, a machine that unloads building materials from railroad cars while moving from car to car.

The brothers also own and operate five major landfills in San Diego County. The firm collects methane gas from the landfills, then sells it to San Diego Gas and Electric.

In 1987, Stan had some time to kill in Las Vegas. He went to one of the off-road events in that area and was on the phone to his brother the next day.

“You have got to see this,” Stan said. “We have to get into this.”

And so they did. Stan and San Diego’s George Wagenblast raced a Class 7 pickup in 1988, but time commitments and business pressures didn’t allow the team to be competitive.

Enter the round of golf with Ashcraft, who attended Carlsbad High School and was a scratch golfer at Southern Oregon College.

“You’ve heard about business being done on a golf course?” Ashcraft asked. “It’s true.

“Herzog Racing has spared no expense in building us the best race car.”

The Explorer that Ashcraft takes to the starting line today for the Soutar Motors/Budweiser Fireworks 250 in Barstow will have more than $100,000 invested in it. Under the hood will be a 5.0-liter NASCAR V-6 engine with more than 400 horsepower. Ashcraft will reach speeds of 110 m.p.h. in the desert terrain. Over 250 miles, he will average 48-50 m.p.h.

“If you were to take a stock car off the showroom and drive it around as quickly as you could without hurting it on the same course, you might average 20-22 m.p.h.,” Ashcraft said. “Any faster than that and you’d start leaving pieces behind, to put it mildly.”

One of the reasons the car can go so fast is the “wheel travel,” the amount of give in the suspension of the vehicle. Stock suspension on a showroom model has about six inches of travel; Ashcraft’s Explorer has 22 inches of travel on the front wheels, 20 in the rear.

“In this car, you could be going over your sidewalk curb at 80 m.p.h. and hardly feel it,” he said. “When you get in a car that goes faster and faster, you look for bigger and bigger things to avoid. The rocks you have to avoid are bigger. The deeper dips are the ones you have to be aware of. With less wheel travel, you have to slow down for the dips and steer around the rocks.

“Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of getting around every little rock.”

Indiana Jones would like it that way. Let the adventure begin.