My Baja 500 started Friday morning with a drive down from Phoenix. Got to the team "camp" around 1:30PM. Both cars (TT & CL1) arrived about 15 minutes after we arrived. Headed to contingency for some tacos, beers and gawking. Returned back to camp and loaded up truck, milled around to BS with the team. The cars were prepped. Team was calm and there was nothing to do until 9PM…for some reason (or non reason), they knew that had an outer boot issue and the CL1 car, but decided to wait until night to start changing it. We got the CV pulled, outer boot changed & back together around midnight. Time for bed…
My pit was south of San Vicente (~RM295), we left way early and got there around 11:30AM. Waited…waited…waited…4x & 1x passed…waited…waited…waited…BJ came through a good 4-5 minutes ahead of #19 Herbst. The section between us and the coast was pretty bad, as a lot of the cars that passed us, didn’t make it to our visual pit around 30 miles away on the coast.
Our cars were kicking @ss! The TT started 20th off the line was within 150 miles was running 6th on the road, the CL1 started 40th and was up to 24th on the road. Somewhere within the first part of the race, our TT and the #17, Mike Julson, got into it. Julson ran into the front/right of the truck only causing fiberglass damage (we through…later in the race proved disastrous). The first “panic” moment came at our drivers change. Radio was asking for a transmission to be placed into a chase truck and head over to the pit (~RM200). We have had tranny issues in the past, so this was bad news. We then hear that the TT is on its way and they changed out the driveline! What a relief!!! CL1 car comes into the drivers changes, fuel and on it’s way…
First bit of bad news comes via IRC tracking in the states…TT is stopped around RM278, not sure why…soon after that CL1 reports they have lost all rear brakes. We finally hear that the lower front/right a-arm is damaged and the TT is done. The CL1 car is getting a left rear caliper replaced, so the TT is waiting on the CL1 to clear before we can send a welder out to the truck. The plan was to get the CL1 car moving, weld the TT enough to drive it out to the road at San Vicente and trailer it back.
We got the CL1 around 6PMish (I wasn’t paying too much attention to time). We had another caliper, so we planned on fueling the car and changing the other caliper. Once the car arrived, we discovered that we did not have the correct parts. We fuel the car and send it on its way. Our visual pit called and says they have the correct parts, so the car will stop and get a new caliper about 30 miles from us. The course was knarly from 295 to the coast and heading north. Tony Miglini (the CL1 driver) decided that he was use to the handling and declined the new caliper. I was already en-route to RM370 to splash fuel into the car for the finish.
We arrive just north of Santo Thomas with just enough time to setup a pit for the car. We splash fuel, give the driver an energy bar, eat some tacos & head back toward Ensenada. We start hearing reports that only two CL1 cars have crossed, when we are 20-30 miles out from finishing. Awesome news! As it turns out, the CL1 car finished 6th in class (12:35:32).
TT arrives back to camp on the trailer…bummer! The a-arm is destroyed…we had a spare arm, but the problem was the tire pushed the headers back ~2 inches and ripped them out of the block. This is why we couldn’t repair the TT to get it back racing.
Another Baja 500 in the books and another great time! HUGE thanks goes out to All German Motorsports (
http://allgermanmotorsports.com ) for allowing me to participate in the race. They are a great team!!! Congrats to all the race/support down in Mexico. If you haven’t been, your missing out on one of the greatest places to race…hope to see ya’ll at the Baja 1000!!!