Pondella keeps on trucking

“What’s the most intense adrenaline rush you’ve ever had?” George Pondella asks during a busy night of last-minute race preparation in his bustling garage on a corner of Sunview Dr. in Glendale.

Without hesitation, Pondella’s own answer to that question would be getting behind the wheel of his armor reinforced 800-horsepower trophy truck and hitting the rough off-road terrain of the dusty California desert for a grueling endurance race.

And, for a man who’s spent the better part of his 51 years racing off-road vehicles, speed boats and sports cars and even hurtling down cliffsides as an accomplished competitive mountain bike rider, it’s a telling testimonial to the thrill that his current preoccupation of desert racing packs.

But then again, soaring airborne over dips the size of Volkswagen Bugs at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour is pretty extreme by anyone’s standards.

“Imagine going 100 mph over four-foot holes and bumps and rocks,” says Dennis McCarthy, one of several drivers for Pondella Motorsports, which made a name for itself in the Mojave Desert Racing (MDR) and SCORE International Off-Road Racing Desert series this season, despite being fairly new on the scene and having virtually no major corporate sponsorship. “It’s like being in a fast offshore boat. It’s the same deal, where you’re just on top and kind of floating across the rough stuff.”

Pondella Motorsports really began to come into its own this season in the MDR series, in which it won two races — the Wild Wash 250 in Barstow on Feb. 7 and the Lucerne 250 in Lucerne Valley on Sept. 26 — and entered the seventh and final race of the season with a healthy points lead in the Class 100 standings.

All Pondella had to do was finish the nine-lap 225-mile race to take the series’ first-place trophy, but in an environment where every race is an adventure unto itself and McCarthy pegs the finishing rate at about 55% across the board, that proved to be no easy task.

A transmission fire that broke out less than 15 miles into the race ended Pondella’s day almost as soon as it had started and allowed Mike Bilek to nab the first-place trophy.

“That’s the way off-road goes, it’s about minimizing your problems out there,” Bilek crew chief Grant Kimbrel says. “It’s a bummer how the race went [for Pondella], but we’ve had seasons like that, as well.”