The Big Race 2023 – part 1

2023 was my 9th year racing in Baja.  A Connecticut guy racing in the desert – so unexpected.  But so many incredible shared experiences have come from it, why stop now?

Most of that time I’ve been racing a motorcycle.  I still race motorcycles, having done a 500-mile race in August.  But this year for the Baja race season I decided to race a UTV (side-by-side) four-wheel vehicle for the entire four-race season to see if I could win the championship in our class.  

The first race was 270 miles. We lost the Electronic Control Module.  Freaky.  Lost four hours.  We finished fourth.

The second race was 500 miles.  We nearly won, finishing second 13 minutes behind the leader even though we got two flat tires.

The third race was 400 miles.  We were leading for 120 miles, and then a new alternate driver I had on the team lost the lead and broke an axle.  We finished fourth.

Now the big one.  The longest non-stop off-road race in the world – the Baja 1000.  This year 1311 miles.  The same distance from New York to Miami.  Far.  Very far.

I had to assemble a great team.  You can’t do all the driving by yourself – it’s too much.  The chase team and mechanics I had.  Great guys who I knew well by now.  I decided to bring Mark Daconto, my great friend of 30+ years.  I had brought other friends over these years, but never Mark.  Who knows if it will be your last race, so I asked him. 

Then I asked him to be in the passenger seat, or “Navigator”.  The job is to look at the GPS screen and call the turns.  “45 right, 30 left by 20 right, hard left to virtual checkpoint…”  I didn’t know if he could do it.  Some people get motion sickness, and some are claustrophobic.  But we were going to find out.

Dustin Gebers does the codriver’s job very well, but I had to give him up to Victor, my friend from Mexico who could drive well.  Then we had Javier Gonzalez who I have known since 2015.  He was a mechanic for a living AND taught the special forces how to drive off-road vehicles fast.  Nobody is more qualified than Javi.  

The race started in LaPaz, on the south end of the Baja peninsula and ran north (for the first time) to Ensenada.

CBS News called our team and wanted to do a story on the race.  I wound up giving Jeff Glor, a CBS news anchor, a ride in our race car.  He got the full treatment – handing our race team stickers to the crowd from the car, and something rather rare. 

When we got to the dirt on the course that they had been prerunning for weeks, the course was blocked with an old couch and four large men standing in the way.  We stop.  I knew what was happening.  It was a shakedown.  A fifth guy types something into his phone into the Google translate app.  He shows me the message.  “This is private property and you can’t come through”. 

I smiled and said “Come on amigo” and some other amiable words that he could get my meaning without understanding the language from my tone of voice.  He shook his head and wrote another message about how much it cost them to maintain the roads.  But they weren’t roads.  They were not used by any civilian vehicles.  Only off-road vehicles could make it up the steep hill ahead with vertical rock ledges.

I dug out $20.  That would usually do it.  This was not this guy’s land.  He was a thug who was hustling us.  CBS News witnessing this whole thing.  He had a front-row seat to a shakedown.  He said “It’s ok if we turn around, I’ve seen enough.”  I said “No you haven’t”, because I knew the rough part of the course was ahead, and he had only seen a couple miles of relatively smooth course with some turns.  I wanted to show him how brutal this race really is.

I dug out ten more dollars and two stickers and offered them to the guy.  He shook his head like it wasn’t about the money and he cared about “his” land.  He typed another BS message, showed me and waited.  I waited too.  If I was with my team it may have been different.  But I dug another $20 out to make a total of $50 and took an “Aww shucks, come one brother” attitude. 

He typed another message.  “$100”.

Dang.  The sun was going down and I had to get moving if I was to get some good footage for the four GoPros that were on my car.  I gave him the $100 and the posse moved the couch and stepped out of the way.

In all my years this has only happened twice.  Baja has been very safe for us, and the people are really nice.  I don’t want to give the impression that they aren’t.  

I sped up the course.  I banged along the rough terrain and it wasn’t long before the CBS guy was cussing and saying “OK, I quit”.  “There’s no quit here,” I told him and pressed the gas pedal down even more.  I’m, laughing in my helmet.

To be continued…