I took off out of my second chase truck stop at mile 74 with seven miles to go to have 10% of the race behind me. You think about these things in such a race. Doing math in your helmet is a pastime I developed in Baja, especially in the Baja 1000. If the answer was some difficult fraction, I’d set my sights on what mile marker ahead was a tidy one I could compute. 20% complete, 30%, 33% and so on.
This section was easy. “Easy”, or any adjective is always a relative term in Baja. The sun was high enough now not to be in my eyes and I could see the ground and all the hazards clearly. Time to go fast. Cool wind, strong exhaust notes behind me, and miles passing under me.
I pre-ran this section one extra time four days earlier, and I knew it well. We were out doing some video work with the team and waking up my riding muscles for the week when Kevin noticed steam coming from the front of my race bike that I hadn’t noticed sitting on it. It turns out he had an eagle eye. My radiator cap was missing. It was on there twenty minutes ago and now it was gone. I have never had that happen before. Good thing it wasn’t in the race!
We looked for it but had to give up. We rolled into Ojos and split up to find a radiator cap so we didn’t have to waste two hours or more going back to Ensenada. Ojos Negros did not have an auto parts store – or a department store or much of anything except dusty little places to eat belonging to families trying to survive.
Victor and I saw a Sportsman team support van on the side of the road just as their three-man team of military veteran riders rolled in. They were from North Carolina. It has been my experience that in desolate hostile places on earth, people become more friendly as they instinctively know their life may depend on it. Ok, this wasn’t life and death – this time. They were great guys and I am sure they would have helped us anyway. They gave us one of their own radiator caps. In return, I gave them advice as I was a Baja veteran and they were racing their first race. They knew me from our YouTube movie “Into the Dust”. It turns out they would not finish the race. I do not know what happened to them.
As we proudly screwed the radiator cap on, Kevin and Bobby and Arturo pulled up with another one! They asked a local with an old truck where they could find one. He exited the truck, opened the hood and scalded himself getting the radiator cap off his own truck! Ten bucks and it was a deal! How did they know it would fit a 2010 Honda 450X? Arturo just knew – and it did!
Later that day we were shooting vlogs alongside the Baja 1000 course. I’d ride my bike up to Ted, take my goggles off and do a “Video Think Daily” message. Jesse had the drone up shooting some video of me on the course in the whoops. That’s when the attack occurred.
Falcons and hawks eat other birds. They circle at high altitudes looking for flying prey. When they see one they dive bomb it and pluck it right out of the sky. Apparently, our new $1700 drone looks like a bird.
The blades shredded off the drone and it fell to the desert floor. When they told me I looked up on the ridge and saw the culprit. He was probably wondering what the heck was going on with his food supply these days, and his feet were probably dinged up I am sure.
We couldn’t fix our drone there, but all agreed that we needed one. The race was in four days. Jesse and Ted found a place to buy one in California and we had Javier, who hadn’t come down to Mexico yet pick it up. The images we shot were well worth it.
Ha! I was wondering how you got those shots!