2017 BAJA
The 50th running of the Baja in 2017
kicked off in style with a midnight start
from Ensenada for the motorcycles and the
trophy trucks would start 10 hours later. A
team decision was made that I would start
the race and do the first 230 miles through
to San Felipe. This year I had the chance
to pre-run the track twice before the start,
which was great as in 2012 we only had the
time to do it the once.
My start time was 12:47am, so by the time I
left I was pretty wired not having been able
to sleep beforehand. I started as 38th bike
off the line and had to ride through blinding
dust for the first 150 miles, passing a lot of
bikes and finally catching up to the leader of
our class at around the 150 mile mark.
We’d scheduled pit stops every fifty miles
and when I pulled into the third re-fuelling
stop number 549, the eventual winner of our
class was still refuelling. I ended up following
him for the rest of my race. It can get pretty
crazy racing a cross country in the middle
of the night and one of the highlights of my
ride was riding across a dry lake bed called
the ‘Dobolo’ for 16 miles (25.7km) as fast as
the bike would go, which was 96 miles per
hour (154.5km/h) flat-out at 4:00am in the
morning.
At the end of my stint I handed the bike
over to Peter Herd and jumped in the chase
truck with Tim to follow the race to the end.
KIWI RIDER 55