ODO: 302,839
What can I say, our team won its class in the Baja 1000! It was insanity, driving up and down our section of the peninsula so many times I have every tree, chase road turn off, and taco stand memorized. Which I guess is the point of pre-running. I don’t normally drive our tiny home, so all that seat time, plus getting to drive some dirt and sand and rocky roads was an adventure in itself for me.
Pre-running is always fun because you never know what you’ll find. Like a couple of locals stuck in the middle of a sandy hill on the race course. We were able to get them unstuck, and safely out of the way, and they were super excited to get help from an actual race team. We explored 3 new camp spots, and one new hotel that has the best water pressure in Baja, and preformed some parking lot and mid race course repairs.
Race day was madness. The anxiety waiting for the car to reach us, hoping the car reaches us in one piece. The chaos of swapping drive teams and checking the car in the middle of a crowd of excited locals who want to touch everything is serious. Now the hard part starts…..following the car back up the peninsula for 1000 miles. You get to: try and find towns that haven’t run out of gas, watch out for other chase teams driving like maniacs, keep up on the team radio chatter, hope as hard as you can nothing goes wrong with the car, and stay awake for 36 hours.
We got off to an early lead. All of our teams were fast, coming into their driver changes hours ahead of schedule. They also made smart decisions on the race course. The hardest, and smartest being the final drive team slowing down their pace to keep from breaking the car and losing the lead. And it paid off, WE WON!!
Was this a crazy, hard and exhausting day? Yes, yes, and yes. Was it worth it? 1000% (see what I did there?) Being part of a winning Baja 1000 race team is a crazy and rare thing that everyone worked together for months to make happen. I did some casual math, and 20ish people gave up a significant portion of their precious yearly vacation to make just the race part possible. It’s pretty amazing being in the middle of a group of people that passionate and focused towards a shared goal. I feel really grateful to have been included.
