Baja ‘08

This is the first installment of my 08′ Baja adventure!

Legend to help you get through reading a Quad75 story.

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Tecate-Pronounced Tec 8, Jorie Williams went to school in Long View Washington and they evidently taught him how to sound out his words.  Jorie was a major asset when trying to communicate with the locals in Baja.-Ba Jaw

The Vision

Where does one start when telling the story of this race?  It can’t be at the starting line – which most of the team isn’t within a couple hundred miles of.  Nor can you start off with your section which may be several hundred miles into the race.  So would it be best to start with contingency and sign up, or perhaps pre-running?  Well for me, this was my 3rd year racing the 1000, and all I know is that I am thinking about this race from the time I get off the bike on my last section of the year until I get back on for my first section the following year.  Sure I spend time thinking about other things in between, like work and racing the WORCS series.  But in reality I only do those trivial things to eat up some time to get me through to the next Baja 1000…Just kidding….Ok, no I’m not.

So, there we were sitting just out side of Todos Santos tossing back several Tec 8‘s, reminiscing about the race that was far from being over, and waiting for the bike to come through so that we could help pit it then chase it the rest of the way to Cabo.  The aforementioned “We”, consisted of myself, my dad and his good friend Skip, (both of which got suckered into driving and chasing for me in this race), my new friend of several hours Nick Nelson and his wife Paulina.  Oh did I mention this was during the 2007 Baja 1000.  Any how, Nick and I were discussing how bitchen the bike in the back of my truck was and how we would be in the money if we had only been racing on something similar in that particular race.  Some where in there I’m pretty sure that there was a reference to “Next Year” and it was on.

The Planing

One thing about this Baja 1000, is that it is so much more than just a race, it is a state of mind and not so different than some life consuming diseases.  For some it’s more like a bug, and a person gets it once and then they’re over it.  For me it’s a malady that quickly took over my mind and body.   There doesn’t seem to be a cure, but I’m learning to deal with it.

So Nick and I kept in touch over the next several months, and maybe talked a bit about the 1000 from time to time.  Then at the beginning of the summer we started getting serious about it.  One might think that June to November is plenty of time to plan for a race.  However logistics alone could sink a lot of peoples’ ships.  For every rider on the team, you need to have another person and a chase vehicle. Sure it can and has been done with a lot less, but to be competitive in Class 25 (The Real Pro Quad Class), a bit of overkill is a good idea.  So line up all the people you know that are in, then go find about five more, because several of them are surely going to flake out on you before November comes along.  Then you have to consider riders, and not just any knuckleheads will do.  In order to put a good team together you need a group of guys that are a bit diverse.  You see, there are fast fly-by-the-seat-of-your- *Klim-riding-pants sections,  skid plate destroying technical rocky sections,  beat-the-holy-hell-out-of-you endless sand whoops sections, sketchy fly-off-a-6-hundred-foot-cliff-to-your-death-if-you-screw-up sections.  And there are generally a couple of sections that you pass by really good taco stands and believe me when I say this, a rider needs some serious will power to keep from stopping and throwing down on cinco queso tacos and a Tec 8!

So basically, when you’re looking for people to put team a together you’re looking for certain criteria for the team as a whole.  Select riders that have a good track record of getting the bike in.  Generally a bit of mechanical aptitude is a good attribute due to the fact that you may be stranded in the middle of Baja, and have to make some track side repairs.  Of course everyone is going to have their strong points as a rider, and as you pick and choose riders you decide where you can use there skills most effectively.

In addition to rider ability, it’s a good idea to have some skills behind the wheel of the chase trucks as well.  You can bet the members of the chase crew are every bit as important as any rider on the team.  Ideally these guys should be able to get the riders from pit to pit safely & efficiently as well as have the ability to field dress a TRX 450 in under 10 minutes flat.  Unfortunately they’re asked to do this on some of the nastiest roads you could possibly imagine. These said roads are filled with more raving lunatics per mile than the 405 in LA during rush hour.  These lunatics are the rest of the chase drivers of course.  This being said, we generally just have to deal with getting  there efficiently.

Nick and I tossed some names around and each of us talked to some people.  We actually had a pretty good base to go from between to two of us.  Him living next door to the Mecca of desert racing, as well as being a magazine guy, Nick tends to know just about every body in the world, and if not, he knows a friend of theirs.  I’ve been racing in the Northwest for about 10 years now, and racing WORCS since it’s infancy, so I’ve met several fellers along the way myself.  After talking to some riders and industry people we know, we came up with a team that really had some potential.

The Riders

• Nick Nelson:  The team captain, I guess you could say.  Nick has about 10 years experience in Baja and his wife Paulina is actually from down there.  They both know the language(she a bit better than him), and are very familiar with all the highways, byways and any little side roads that you could possibly need to use for chase vehicles.  Not to mention Nick has raced local series’ down there in addition to all the SCORE races, so he has seen nearly every piece of course that Sal (Fish) could dream of using.  The team of him and his wife are a genuine asset when racing in Mexico.

• Jason Greenhaw:  Our rider of record, Jason has been Nicks partner in the desert for years now, a very versatile rider as well as being very good with a wrench.  Jason was responsible for bike assembly and did a top notch job getting our machine most of the way together.  Unfortunately Jason took a digger a couple of weeks prior to the event and was unable to finish the quad and had to sit this years event out.

• Brandon Brown: (Me)  I have been racing in Mexico for 3 years now. This was my 3rd Baja 1000 and I have competed in the 500 and 250 as well.

• Mike Bender:  Mike is a good friend of mine from Pasco, WA (about 30 min north of me).  We have been racing together for years and have even teamed up for a couple of endurance races in the area.  Mike is a good technical rider and all around off-road racer.

• Jorie Williams: Jorie is an up and coming pro from the NW.  He has been doing quite well as of late in the WORCS series (finishing the 08′ season w/ the #10 plate), and has been showing impressive signs of being a very capable off-road racer.

• Zac Willet: I don’t know a lot about Zac other than he’s an east coast kid that can put it down on an MX track as well as TT.  So he was a good choice to run on the very fast paced Pacific Coast portion of the course.

The Chase Team

• Kenny Sanford: Kenny is a well known ATV mechanic/set up/engine builder guy to people local to the NW.  He has a list of positive attributes a mile long and is as capable as anybody in the business when it comes to making a machine run.

• Bill Nelson: Bill (Nicks dad), has been chasing Nick in Mexico for years, he knows the area and from what I learned on this trip, he has a fairly unsteady throttle foot.

• Dan Guetter: Dan is another magazine guy, and he got suckered into this by Nick.  This was not his first though.  He’s a bad-ass with a camera, is good with direction, and made for a damn good chase truck driver.  Not to mention he can annihilate a Super Burro single handedly in one sitting (believe me, that’s impressive!).

• Frank & Chino: I barely met either one of these guys.  However they are both good friends of Nick, they are both from Baja, and they can and will do what ever takes to get a rider to were he needs to be.  And at least one of them is fairly creative when it comes to making a helmet light work (you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so lets just leave it at that).

Pre Race Rider Adjustment

Ok, its a week from departure time and Nick calls me and lets me know that Jason just wadded it up while pre-running outside of Ojos. And probably wouldn’t be making the trip back down for the race.  However he was in fairly good spirits considering that his shoulder had been completely out of the socket for the past 3+ hours while Nick was getting him to a hospital state side of the boarder.  Did I mention that this stuff ain’t for wimps?!  Obviously this put a bit of a damper on our program.  Fortunately Jason would end up being ok, it was just going to take a minimum of 6-8 weeks to get there.  A couple days later I was finally able to get a hold of Nick to start figuring out what we would do about our dilemma.  As far as the number of riders goes we were still in pretty good shape.  After all, people have iron-manned these events.  We were just planning an approach that kept a fresh rider on the machine as much as possible.  This year the 1000 was actually the Baja 634 (roughly 1000 kilometers).  So why more riders for a shorter race?  Well, when the race gets shorter it usually gets a heck of a lot rougher just to keep it interesting.  There are two ways that SCORE runs this race.  One is a point to point, meaning it starts in Ensenada and ends somewhere near the end of the Baja peninsula.  This format is the longer of the two, mileage-wise and generaly has a few more of the faster sections.  Don’t get me wrong it’s still gnarly, just not as gnarly as the other.  The second way this race is run is as a loop.  Meaning it starts and finishes in Ensenada.  Basically an elongated version of the 500.  However this year was especially short so we were expecting it to be especially brutal as well.  Any how, we all just sucked it up as a team, made some mileage adjustments, and we were looking pretty good with what we came up with.

The Norte Four

Us Northerners took off the Saturday prior to the race.  Bender met me at my shop and we left shortly after 4am.  We headed to Portland and met up with Kenny and Jorie, dropped Kenny’s truck in a secure location and headed South.  We hot-seated it down to Nick’s place in Tahachapi, CA.  By the time we arrived, we had covered 1100 miles for the day.  Not bad for a bunch of slackers.  Speaking of slackers, Nick had left to go pick up Zac at LAX that morning around 9:30.  Roughly a 3 hour round trip.  They were to get back to his place and use the rest of the day to finish getting the race bike together.  However, there were massive wild fires in the Los Angeles area at this time that had the majority of the freeways in the area either grid locked or shut down all together.  This resulted in the four of us actually making an 1100 mile trip and beating him to his place.  We arrived at around 10:30 PM.  Nick and Zac showed up shortly after 11:00.  We let them know that my GPS informed us that our overall moving average was just over 70mph, they didn’t think that they could compete with that so we dropped it.  We then commenced to telling a few lies to one another.  Then Nick finished it off with the notion that we had about a half an hour of work to do on the race bike the next day.  At that point no one could top his effort so we all turned in for the night.

To Be Continued……..

“Look out for the next installment of this story soon, and check back for added pictures.”