Baja 1000 Race - Dirt Rider Magazine Online

Common sense says you don't race a BMW in Baja. (But who with common sense is racing Baja in the first place?) It was nothing new really, as former 125cc World Champion and Dakar rally winner Gaston Rahier and a few others took some Beemers to Baja in the mid-'80s. However, upon finishing behind an ATC three-wheeler Rahier was incensed, "I got beat by one of those!"Jump forward 20-odd years and we're doing the same thing. See, it's sort of an addiction I've acquired from my days as a factory rally racer. There is something about a 90-horsepower dirt bike that boils inside, a burning desire for more. It is a thirst for power that really can't be quenched except by further exposure. So when some of my friends from the former BMW rally team said they'd built a 100-horsepower dirt bike, I asked if I could race it. Without thinking, of course.In June 2004 I received a big box with a motorcycle inside. Cylinders were hanging out in the air, and man, was it an interesting contraption. What the guys at HPN (the small shop that built the factory rally bikes) had done was take a standard BMW GS1200 fuel-injected flat-twin and put the rally frame and suspension on top of it-creating sort of a stripped-down rally bike. Instead of the usual 12 gallons of fuel capacity, this bike has a tiny 3-gallon tank. The hand-built frame was nothing compared to the CNC-machined single-sided swingarm. Wearing a lot of one-off trinkets, it wasn't as works as the titanium-clad rally bike, but it was still really trick.To shake out the bugs, my buddy "Big Air" Tod Sciacqua and I raced the Best in the Desert Vegas to Reno on it. With a spare set of wheels and a trusty group of pit support guys, we succeeded in finishing the 500-mile event, bike intact, even staying in the top 20 and finishing second in the Vet Pro class. But Sciacqua was scratching his head at the finish line, pointing at the quad that had passed him a mile before the finish, "We got beat by one of those!?!"So I decided to attempt the Baja 1000. Mostly to see if we could get the BMW to finish. The longest single-day off-road race, this year the extended version reached down to La Paz. It'd be a good run for the mighty Boxer and its 130-mph off-road top speed. Riding it is truly like riding two XR650Rs at once-in power and size. Sure, it was going to be great on the long and fast roads, but as soon as the course was announced, we realized the rough and tumble of Baja was still alive and overused in this year's course.My friends from Germany were excited and had 20 sets of wheels built up. Metzeler was behind us with 40 special desert tires, Karoos and Pirelli MT18 HDs, and heavy tubes designed to take the weight and excessive power this bike puts out. We started lining up pit support people and prerun drivers. It was getting to be a pretty big effort. Lining up the nut cases to ride the bike was the next chore.My Baja team consisted of Jonah Street, Tim Morton and Dave Donatoni. All of us have either won or finished second or third overall in the Baja 1000. But Donatoni was a natural choice as he'd even been crazy enough to race the Baja 500 with me on an XR100R a few years back. Morton leads tours week in and week out down there, and Street was looking for a way to prove me wrong and show me that I should have picked him for the KTM Dakar team. People thought we were going to try and win! They figured we were nuts. At least they were half right.Our team headed south for a week of prerunning prior to the race. Morton and his company, Baja Bound, handled the logistics of our pits with a combination of his guys and remote assistance from a pitting group called Mag 7. Our spare sets of wheels were spread out the length of the peninsula with gas stops about every 70 miles, with some stretches nearing 100. BMW of Mexico was super-stoked we were racing and even offered two standard GS1200s for use as spare parts donors (which ended up being a really good thing). Race day was approaching, and we seemed dialed. Our plan called for Street to ride from the start in Ensenada to near Puertecitos, 200 miles into the race over on the gulf side. From here, Donatoni would get on for the high-speed section across the middle of the peninsula to San Ignacio, where I would be waiting. Here we would mount the lights and then Tim and I would share the night-riding duties for the last 500 miles.No problemo! See, everything was about finishing. We never intended to win; crossing the finish line would be victory for us. Things were looking great. With my teammates all having less than 20 minutes on the bike prior to racing the monster, they were a little apprehensive about going full speed on it. Street took off and had a smooth ride all the way through his incredibly rough section. He got passed by a few guys and passed a few himself, actually running ahead of our estimated pit schedule.Donatoni got on the bike, second place in Class 30 (Vet), and raced back and forth for third through his whole section, bringing the bike to me right on time as the sun set on the highway above San Ignacio. Here we shut off the bike, threw it on the stand and, in a matter of minutes, changed both wheels and put on our good lights. Dave wished me luck and I hit the starter button only to be greeted with silence. Followed immediately by a collective groan from our support team. No problem, it might have been something simple, such as a clutch switch or a loose battery connection, but everything checked out. It didn't bump-start, and that's when things became interesting.See, the BMW GS1200 motor is nearly as complicated as your late-model emissions-friendly car. It has a host of electronic features that range from heated grips to servo-assisted ABS-linked brakes. None of those features were on our race bike, but we were using the same engine-management system and computer as a bike equipped with all those features. And along with this fine luxury package comes theft protection, symbolized by three letters, EWS, flashing on the instrument cluster. I don't know what the letters stand for, but it means the bike thinks it has been stolen and will refuse to start. No electric starter, no fuel, no spark! How's that-halfway through the Baja 1000, our bike "realized" we were riding it as if we had ripped it off and it wouldn't start again.Evidently what happened was when we moved the key from its proper location (to make room for the frame-mounted light), the chip-equipped key sent fault codes to the computer telling the bike it has been tampered with. After all this time, the bike finally realized in its cyborg mind that we'd jacked with it and it wasn't going to have it anymore.Nearly four hours later we got the bike started. Through the combination of my German friends, with their knowledge of the bike's computer, a guy at the pits who was a Lexus or Acura mechanic and had dealt with security keys, the spare BMW of Mexico GS1200 off of which we'd cut the key and computer with a die grinder and a Sawzall (since it was security bolted onto the spare bike) and finally a Terminator-like extraction of security chips from various keys, we were officially banditos in Baja. And now we were going to ride it as if we'd stolen it and pray it didn't leave us out in the dark, Baja night with the coyotes.My first section went smoothly except for a flat front tire and all of the truck and buggy dust. We were well into the pack of the fast, silt-spewing cars. I handed the bike off to Morton with very specific instructions not to touch the key or kill the motor. We had no idea if it would start again. He rode his first 120 miles right on schedule, and I got the bike back for a treacherous pass through a 100-mile section that included a 40-mile nonstop sand whoop zone. Not the place to take a 500-pound dirt bike since trophy trucks and buggies literally fly through this stuff and it just happens to be lined with 100 percent cactus. And it was foggy!But I made it through and in quite good shape, passing more cars and trucks than passed me, never mind they were stopped with blown trannys, missing wheels or just plain broken. As the sun just began to rise, I handed the bike back to Morton. Mission accomplished in just 100 miles. Satisfied with my job, I couldn't decide if it was too early or too late to have a beer. It wasn't until we were looking in a cooler to find one that I bothered to ask who'd put gas in the bike.In our triumphant early-morning stupor (our chase trucks had been driving now for more than 28 hours) no one had filled the bike's tank. There was a chance Morton would make the next pit, but we weren't going to risk it. So we unloaded my XR650R prerunner and filled the 6-gallon tank, and I took off after him, just in case. About 60 miles later I pulled into the Mag 7 pit and asked if Morton had been through. They replied, "He was here a minute ago; we put in 4 gallons and he took off!"Good thing 'cause it was only a 3-gallon tank.Morton roosted into the finish and proceeded to pass another Class 30 team along the way, moving us into third position in class and 100th overall. We were pretty excited to finish and realized how close we'd come to not making it, because if the computer/key thing had happened at any other pit-where we didn't have the spare bike or the guys with the knowledge to fix it-it would have been race over. With an almost-perfect bike sitting there, laughing at us. Computers, gotta love 'em. Our next bike is going to have a kill button and no HAL 2000 mind-of-its-own computer with EWS!Overall, we'd accomplished what we set out to do, finish the Baja on a BMW. But I know you have to ask: Did we get it going 130 mph? No, most likely not. Come on now, that wouldn't be using common sense.How Legends Do It: Malcolm Smith's BajaMalcolm Smith crossed the 2004 Baja 1000 finish line in La Paz at around 3:30 a.m. as a class winner. It was exactly 20 hours 14 minutes 4 seconds after his teammate, Jack Johnson, left the starting line 1016 miles away in Ensenada-a finish similar to that in which Smith notched his first class win, along with the overall victory, in the very first Baja 1000. In that race he and teammate J.N. Roberts finished nearly seven hours ahead of the next vehicle, a Meyers Manx VW driven by Vic Wilson and Ted Mangels.Smith added six more class wins and four more overall wins in his next 38 years of racing the fabled course.That amount of racing and countless weeks spent exploring the roads, trails and trackless backcountry of the peninsula have yielded an almost supernatural knowledge of Baja.You don't build that foundation without accumulating a library of racing records. Smith, 63, and his 2004 "Dream Team" members in Class 50 (motorcycle riders older than 50), Jack Johnson, 52, and Chris Haines, 53, now have 29 class wins among them. Haines, with 11; Johnson, with 10 (four overalls); and Smith, with eight (five overalls), represent perhaps the most-formidable reservoir of Baja racing knowledge ever assembled on a single team.Haines, in an interview during the race, mentioned the importance of knowing your position in your class. "I've seen so many young guys who have been leading their class only to crash trying to pass other racers ahead of them, throwing away their class win in the process." He added with a grin that it took him "lots of leads and lots of crashes" to learn this lesson.Johnson was running in the top 10 overall during his first segment when he was hampered by two flats. Before he had to slow for the tire trouble, he had passed nearly all the competitors who had started earlier, including dozens of younger riders. After completing the second segment of his 600-plus-mile effort, he commented, "It's just like watching a movie of the prerun unwind in my head. I see it all before me; it passes by, and then it's gone."While driving to the pit location at which he would mount the team's Honda XR650R, Smith commented about his change in perspective on racing. "I used to look for the fastest line. Now I look for the line where I'm least likely to get hurt. My reaction time, eyesight, strength and courage are not as good as they used to be. I just had to keep reminding myself of my age, and it took a while for it to sink in. Jack was the real hero of this team, he still hauls!"He later related his thoughts as, "'What's an old man like me doing out here?' Once I'd gotten on the bike and ridden a few turns, I said to myself, 'Oh yeah, now I remember.'"In the more than 50 years he has been in and around Baja, much has changed. On the way home from his first win in 1967, Smith ended up sitting three days on top of a load of live sea turtles to get back to Ensenada after his van broke down at the Bay of Los Angeles. He has given back much to the place he loves by building an orphanage funded entirely by motorcycle riders, located only a short distance from the dirt roads he's raced on for years.However, even with all the changes both Smith and Baja have seen in those 50 years, one thing has remained constant. As he said good-bye to his teammates after their historic victory, Smith noted, "It's a lot more fun when you win!" -Douglas Hackney