Rock crawl and rock racing competitor Clay Egan held a demonstration at the Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 9. The 36-year-old Egan, a quadriplegic with near legendary gusto for life, put on quite a show in his Clay Egan Racing/ Wyotech/Tuff Shed rock buggy before a large crowd of enthusiastic fans.

“Our local arena football team, the Utah Blaze, hired me to come down and put on this demonstration with Tuff Shed, which is one of my sponsors,” Egan said. “The way our demonstration works is that I drive over the two Tuff Sheds and then drop onto a competitor’s tin shed and crash the rig through it, which destroys it.”

However, Egan got a bit of a thrill himself during this particular demonstration.

“The crowd was so pumped up that I decided to go around and do it again,” Egan said. “I had them move the tin shed out of the way, and I decided that I would just drop straight off the second Tuff Shed and onto the ground. Normally when you go over a dropoff like that, you stab the gas to pull the front end out from under you and keep the back end from coming over. But we didn’t have a bunch of fuel in the buggy, so just when I stabbed the throttle to drop the 6 and a half feet to the ground, the buggy ran out of gas. I landed on the front bumper, and I was just balancing on it. My guys had to put the wheels back under me. It was crazy.”

Egan said that he enjoys putting on the Tuff Shed demonstrations whenever he can, and he is amazed at the ability of the sheds to stand up to the stress placed on them by his buggy.

“Those sheds are not modified at all, dude,” Egan said. “We just build them according to the instructions. They don’t have any special bracing in them to handle what we are putting them through with the buggy. I’m absolutely impressed with Tuff Shed’s product.”

Egan’s next competitive outing will be the XRRA rock racing event in Cortez, Colorado, on August 2.

“We’re getting ready to go to Cortez for the last XRRA race before the finals,” Egan said. “We have not been having the greatest year. We are sitting in 21st in the points, and you have to be in top 20 to make the national finals. We’re going to be going for it at Cortez. and hopefully my new buggy will be done for that event.

“Other than that, we’re actually putting a plan together to race the Championship Off-Road Racing series in 2009,” Egan added. “It’s a totally different program that I can’t really discuss right now, but I will let you know as soon as I can. I can tell you that we are planning to run Pro Spec because that is an up-and-coming class and it is really the only class besides Pro 2 that will allow me to run an automatic transmission.”