Five on Four – part 2

The team of five – 

This year the race was 828 miles vs last year’s 1124.  I decided we needed only 5 teammates.  I’d do most of the driving.  My wife Marie would be in the passenger seat when I was driving.  I needed two more to fill in for us when we took a break (this would be at least a 24-hour race) and one alternate in case a codriver got car sick (a common thing) or one of us could not perform for any reason).  

I chose my friend Kevin Koval from New York who could drive or co-drive.  My friend Dustin Gebers from Tennessee had never raced there before, but he raced cars for a lot of years.  Lastly, my friend Victor Abitia was a Baja local who knew lots of people and spoke the language and could drive or co-drive.  Kevin and Victor were on the team last year and provided some continuity.  

Team is important.  You need your team to mesh well together – to get along and not compete with each other.  They have to have skills and competence, but humility and good judgment too.  It turns out we’d need the mechanical skills of Dustin and Kevin.

Besides the team IN the car, there was the chase team out of the car.  Six of them.  Then there was the team even before that who built the car months earlier.  We’d be relying heavily on their work and they weren’t even there!  This 1000-cc Honda Talon was stripped down to its frame and rebuilt for racing in extreme conditions.  Besides the stock engine, it was completely customized and partially experimental.  What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, my son Tanner, who has now moved to Hurricane Utah decided he would solo to Baja 1000 on a motorcycle for the fourth time.  He finished the Baja 1000 twice, and DNF’d once due to, of all things, a peanut allergy.  His best finish – 2nd place in 2019.  He hadn’t raced it since.  It takes a while to forget the pain and suffering.

This time he was going for a win.  That was until he saw the competition.  Because of our movies, riders showed up from all over the world to enter the Baja 1000 Ironman class (solo).  It’s perhaps the hardest feat in motorsports just to finish.  22 riders entered, and one got hurt in pre-running the course and was out.  The remaining riders included the best in the world.  A roster of previous winners and finishers and some talented first-timers.  Still, getting on the podium and doing his absolute best was his goal.  He simply didn’t not want to come back to do this yet again.  

Little did anyone know what would happen to him…