Off-Road Racing Baja Style

It's that time of the year when Baja starts calling and every hard core off-road racer makes his or her way to the Baja 500. Some call it the warm up for the big one, The Baja 1000. This is a great time to work out any issues you may have in Baja and fix them. I have the job of making sure our dersert racing teams have the proper tires to take on the most grueling terrain in the world.

Once you get past the dicey boarder and out of Tijuana, Baja welcomes you back every time with friendly faces, cold beers and tacos, not always in that order. We go down to Baja for the entire week leading up to the race. This is when the hard work begins. Everyone jumps into an empty seat of a sand buggy and holds on for dear life as the leader of the gang leads the way into the middle of nowhere.

With the group prerunning is Cameron Steel and Heidi Steele, Class 1 racer Josh Daniel, class 16 class driver Bean and all the supporting cast of the DA (Desert Assassins) crew. The more prerunning the team can do the more they get to know the course and mark it for safety and speed warnings. This is where doing that little extra homework and studying the course can pay off in dividends in the end. With over twenty years of experience racing in Baja Cameron still gets challenged everytime he races here. The course changes from year to year and the terrain changes from week to week. It will definitlely keep you on your toes as a road that was there last month or last week will now lead you over a 40 foot cliff. We had logged over 500 miles prerunning and it was time to cool off at Mikes Sky Ranch and get all dolled up for the annual party on the Wednesday before the Baja 500.

Here is Tim Sanchez of DirtNewz showing how to properly execute a belly flop.


This is Bellyflopping Baja style.






After cooling off and washing up it was time to hit the town, or this case the tiniest bar on top of a Baja mountain that you have ever seen. Inside the bar were some of the best off road racers in the world. No, you won't see Robby Gordon, Ivan Stewart, or Parnelli Jones here. Inside this bar every year on the Wednesday night before the Baja 500 is a group of racers who embrace their feminine sides and put on their best dress for the annual Mike's Sky Ranch Off-Road racing beauty contest.

This was one of those parties that you just could not wait for it to be over. It was wrong on all accounts. But at the end of the night the winner was chosen and it was trophy truck driver and mullet and chops wearing Pistol Pete Soren


Pistol's combo of a pink dress and high heels and mutton chops earned him the $1000 prize which was the money raised durring the night to be given to the local orphanage. It wasn't a pretty scene but the cause was good and there might be some sponsorships on the line after these pictures are shown.

Oh yeah, after a long week in Baja there was a race. For the Trophy Truck the race started at 10 am on Saturday. The first twenty miles was slow going for the team as trucks and buggys were bottled up after someone tried to make a line into a ditch which then ingnited a demolition derby in the middle of the race coure. After the mess was sorted out the truck was so far behind that it was hard to make up time due to all the dust in the air from everyone that was ahead. This day went from the chance of winning the race to then testing and aquiring data from the new Geolandar A/T-S R project tire on the truck. We have put in countless hours of testing into this specially designed Baja racing tire. The tires did extremely well besides the occasional kissing of a boulder, but that is just a given in baja.

After a long day of getting stuck behind slower traffic and digging out of the sand the #16 Trophy Truck crossed the finish line in the top 20. Not the win we were hoping for but still a good finish considering the circumstances.

We'll regroup for the next SCORE race, The Terrible's Primm 300, September 11th-13th. Look for more adventures to come from the Yokohama Off-Road racing team.