It’s not often that one gets to have their cake and eat it too. A few thousand lucky members of the Off-Road Nation got their chance today at the 2007 SCORE Terrible’s Cup III. Usually, you have to choose between seeing your favorite Trophy Trucks racing in the desert or seeing more limited trucks race head-to-head on a short course. Here, you get both.

After two rounds of racing for all the truck and buggy classes earlier in the night, the last hoorah for the evening took the form of a semi-main event for the Trophy Trucks, consisting of a full field of 14 competitors. If it were not for seven competitors whose trucks didn’t make it through the first two heats, the field would have been even larger.

The Semi started with Travis Coyne in the #77 truck in the lead followed closely by #38 Garron Cadiente, and #82 Ryan Arciero with #40 Jerry Whelchel filling the fourth spot. The first two laps have this run order until Mark Post in the Riviera Racing #3 truck bombed over a burm and ended up passing three trucks to take second from Cadiente, who then found himself in seventh place by the end of the event.

The fourth lap was exciting as Coyne switched spots with Arciero on entry into the infield. This left the running order with #28 Alan Phlueger in first place while Coyne and #1 B.J. Baldwin took two and three.

During the fifth lap, Arciero spun going into the “fishhook” taking him all the way to last place, making it all that much easier for the front-runners. With Arciero out of the way the order was still Phlueger in front with Coyne following a few turns behind and B.J. Baldwin a distant third.

The last two laps saw Phlueger flying over the dirt as if he was hovering but he slipped up a bit in the whoops section, letting Coyne catch up to him. Travis gave Alan a good run for his money, but Phlueger pulled it out by about half of a car length in the final turn of the night.