Mexican Madness
| 07/20/2012 | Posted by under Carburetor Parts |
The lure of adventure is what quite often draws one into the mystique of the famed Baja 1000 desert race, perhaps the most famous off-road race in the US but ironically held in a foreign country: Mexico. Combine that with the obvious recreational motor sport dangers and the unseen demons that lurk shrouded in the darkness under a black sombrero from Hell and you have a recipe for some fine storytelling. The Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 takes place on Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula in late November, usually on the third Friday. The race also has two little brothers, the Baja 500 and the San Felipe 250.
The iconic race, however, is the Baja Mil, mil being Spanish for one thousand. Since the first race in 1967, people from all around the world have flocked to Mexlcoin search of a dream to finish the gruelling race that has sent many into Liquid fame filmed the 2003 race.
That’s because when you go down into Mexico, all bets are off. Mexico has enough of the “wild west” mentality on a daily basis, but during a race weekend the upper peninsula goes into full cowboy-town mode. The media do their fair share of reverse-tourism, spreading the dirty truth before the blood has dried in the alley behind any taco shop. Drug cartelslayings and kidnappings have been known to occur and probably will continue regardless of who’s in town on any given weekend. Corruption in the police force is a world-wide epidemic, but when you get pulled over in a chase truck down in Mexico a few dollars seem to grease the wheels much better than a handful of FMF stickers did back in the day.
The best bike I’ve ever ridden there is the XR650R. It works well everywhere, it was a smooth ride through the rough stuff. You never worried about the power train because they were way overbuilt for the amount of power they put out – just a good overall bike and you never had a problem unless you crashed it. The big KTM was OK but the chassis wasn’t set up for the amount of whoops down there.
Pre-running is the most fun part of racing in Baja. Sometimes we go down about a week before. Sometimes we even make two trips, depends on the race we’re competing in. For the Baja 1000 we’ll go down a month before the race, ride the whole course and map it all out, just have fun with your teammates. We look to see where we want to layout our pits. The week before is awesome; we even try to hook up with someone from another team who’s riding our same section. I like riding with the Over 40, Over 50 guys – they’re classic. They try to miss all the bumps that they can so they know where to go.
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