Camburg Engineering and Camburg Racing:

The Suspension Wizards of Huntington Beach

These are great times we live in, particularly if you’re a desert racing/running enthusiast. Companies like Ford have made serious pre-running trucks accessible and affordable (relatively) with the Raptor. But, for many even the Raptor isn’t capable enough and that’s where guys like Jerry Zaiden and Jason Campbell come in. Jerry and Jason started Camburg Engineering back in 1997 as a response to the lack of quality suspension components available for purchase by anyone but professional race teams. They got their start welding components up in a garage but the response from the Southern California desert racing community was so positive that they quickly had to transition into a real shop. The rest, as they say, is history.

Camburg makes suspension components for nearly all of the popular platforms being used today. These range from Jeep JKs to Ford Rangers and Raptors, Toyotas, Chevys and many others. They also offer drivetrain components like billet hub kits and custom rear ends. They also go to great lengths to keep as much production in-house as possible and this includes their Kinetik race truck program. Camburg has built a reputation of offering extremely high quality parts that have been thoroughly developed through the Camburg Racing program.

Camburg Racing was born out of Jerry and Jason’s mutual love of racing, but it also served as the perfect tool for product development. If a given component will last for an entire race at 100+ mph then it stands a pretty good chance of surviving indefinitely on someone’s project truck. Racing has also proven to be a boon in terms of marketing. Camburg has had no small measure of success in various off-road events such as the legendary Mint 400, Baja 500, and the grandaddy of them all, the Baja 1000. The racing program started with a 1600 buggy, moved through several permutations of Ranger, and now all of their racing is done with their in-house, built-to-purpose Kinetik trophy truck.

The Kinetik series of trucks has been a big success for Camburg and are available as essentially turn-key rigs, complete with drivetrain, that allow the purchaser to go out and almost immediately be competitive with just about anyone in the dirt. Each truck is hand-built by Camburg and comes with top of the line everything, including a custom MagnaFlow exhaust system. “We run MagnaFlow because of the quality of the product, and the engineering and support behind it. We’ve run MagnaFlow on every race truck we’ve ever built.” says Camburg co-founder Jerry Zaiden. The trucks also run the full compliment of Camburg suspension and driveline components, and engines start with a spec LS3 motor and range up from there. The Kinetic trucks are truly a sight to behold. When asked why they decided to roll the dice on getting into manufacturing vehicles, Jerry said, “We’re building the race trucks because they’re the pinnacle of our sport and we race to prove our product line.”

Desert racing attracts a certain kind of person. You need to be tough, smart, and more than a little crazy to fling yourself down a dirt path at 100+ miles an hour and then hit jumps. You have to be a bit of a masochist to want to do this for over a thousand miles at times. Jason and Jerry at Camburg are 100% these kinds of guys. They managed to turn their passion into a business while also elevating their sport. Keep your eye out at all the Best In The Desert events and the SCORE Baja events for Camburg trucks, they’ll be easy to spot because they’ll be way out in front!

Photo Credit to Race-Dezert.com