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23-year-old Luke McMillin and 63-year-old Larry Roeseler traded driving duties for 19 hours and almost 900 miles.
Roeseler took the first stint, 430 miles long starting in the Pacific Coast port city of Ensenada, and, knowing that to finish first, first you have to finish, handed the Ford F-150 Trophy Truck over to McMillin in good shape and in a close third place.
“Larry did an amazing job,” McMillin said. “He just kept it in line and had no downtime, which is exactly what you need to do in the first half of the Baja 1000. No one knows it more than Larry, he’s won this thing 13 times (14 now!). He brought me a clean truck, we were third and were right up there with the top leaders when I got in. We were just waiting for them to make a mistake.”
“The race was really good until it wasn’t,” said Ampudia. “We were battling with Luke, Pat Dean and Dan (McMillin), we were the four guys up front, pulling away from everybody else. Luke caught us at the end and we were pushing really hard and trying to catch his dust, but unfortunately we hit a rock a little too hard. It buckled pretty badly and tore everything in the front. That was our race, basically. Until that happened we were right there with Luke, it was going to be a photo finish for sure and that was just unfortunate.”
“I was just trailing my brother,” Luke said. “I made a run for it and he let me go as the great teammate he is.”
Well, he may be a great teammate, but Dan McMillin was also having troubles of his own, unbeknownst to brother Luke. So many troubles that he soon had to drop out of the race. That left nothing but wide-open desert for the younger McMillin, though victory was far from assured.
“We got some gnarly silt and some tough bumps out there. Part of the portion I drove was also part of the course of the SCORE Baja 500, so it was just rough. It’s hard to pick up your pace in a 1,000-mile race and not beat up the truck too much, so we tried to be strategic on that. It was a tough course, but a great course.”
The youngest McMillin held it together and crossed the finish line in 19 hours, 10 minutes and 25 seconds for the win. That time was just 10 minutes ahead of another veteran racer—four-time Baja 1000 champion Rob MacCachren (55 years old) and his teammate Josh Daniel driving another Ford F-150-shaped Trophy Truck. Bryce Menzies and Luke’s cousin Andy McMillin finished third in another Trophy Truck, this one with Ford Raptor cues.
This year the motorcycles finished second to the four-wheelers, though overall the bikes have won the race more times than the four-wheelers. The Pro Moto Unlimited class went to, in this order: Honda, Husqvarna and KTM, a nice distribution among top bike makers. Mark Samuels, Justin Morgan and Justin Jones shared riding duties on the winning Honda CRF450X, finishing in 20.50:30.
The big loop race course began and ended in Ensenada this year, with spectators banned from the start/finish line due to Covid-19 restrictions. Fans could line the race course pretty much anywhere else they wanted, though, and many did. 185 starters took the green flag and a remarkable 111 finished, for an impressive 60-percent finishing rate, high for such a tough course that crossed the mountains from the Pacific Ocean over to the Sea of Cortez and back again.
Image: cyclenews.com
Three bike riders did the whole thing solo, riding all 898.4 miles themselves. The fastest of the three, Juan Carlos Salvatierra from Bolivia, summed up the experience of Baja, “It’s been a difficult year for all of us and I’m happy to bring some happiness to my people. It’s also my first SCORE Baja 1000 victory and I still can’t understand all that happened in the last 33 hours.”
Few ever do.
This year featured only two of what would have been four races in any non-COVID year. The schedule for 2021 is optimistically normal, with four races: the San Felipe 250, Baja 500, the second running of the Baja 400 and finishing up with the Baja 1000. Let’s hope the organizers are right about all of that. Until then, Hasta la vista, amigos!
Source: autoweek.com