Racing in Baja is only partly about winning and mostly about surviving.
Veteran Las Vegas off-road racer Bryce Menzies overcame one flat tire, one bent steering rod, a bent right rear wheel, but only two guys in front of him to win his fourth overall BFGoodrich Tires SCORE Baja 500 last weekend in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico.
In its 55-year history the race has been won by everyone from Parnelli Jones, to Ivan Stewart, to Robby Gordon and his dad Bob Gordon. The first Baja 500 in 1969 was won by Hollywood stuntman Bud Ekins (he did the Steve McQueen motorcycle jump in The Great Escape) driving the original Oldsmobile-powered Baja Boot.
The next 500 was won by Parnelli Jones, who came back and won it again in 1973 (in addition to winning the Baja 1000 twice). The great Ivan Stewart won it eight times, his first coming in 1975 in a Funco VW, long before he won so many times in Toyota trucks. Motorcycle great Malcolm Smith, whom you remember from the Bruce Brown documentary On Any Sunday starring Steve McQueen, won it twice, first in a Funco VW and next in a Chenowth Chevy.
This year the 500 started and finished in the Pacific Ocean port city of Ensenada 70 miles south of the U.S./Mexican border and ran 473.67 miles east across the Baja peninsula, looping over the mountains, across dry lake beds, down into San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez and over long, flat stretches of beaches before circling back to Ensenada.
Menzies won what he calls his “favorite race” in 9:06:38, after starting in third place behind season-opening San Felipe 250 winner Luke McMillin and hometown Ensenada favorite Papa’s Y Beer Racing’s Alan Ampudia, both of whom would have mechanical trouble. Menzies drove the entire 473.67-mile course solo, with no relief driver.
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“It started out pretty good and then I earned myself a flat,” Menzies said at the start/finish line back in Ensenada. “It set ourselves back a little and then we had to put a little charge on, which was fun at the beginning. We caught back up to Alan and he had an issue, he was pulled over, and Luke was about two and a half minutes ahead, so I knew I had a long way to catch him. I ran up in his dust up and over the Summit (race mile 100) and then he started to slow down a little bit, I think he had an issue. When I went to go around him, I clipped a rock and bent my steering, so it was off all day. Once we got by him, we were very confident, and we just put on a good charge.”
Ampudia eventually dropped out of the race with mechanical issues and McMillin took a long while to limp to his pit and get a new power steering pump swapped into his Chevy 1500.
“It was a rough day, definitely not our best one,” said McMillin, who has won the last three Baja 1000s, the last two San Felipe 250s, and numerous other SCORE desert contests. “We were up front, just cruising along and doing our thing. Bryce was coming after us and, going down the Summit, our power steering pump just went down and that was it.”
By the time the new pump was in, McMillan was “in the very back of the pack.” Regardless, he carried on to a sixth-place finish.
“We just started charging through the desert and made up a lot of time, but then I hit a rock. We did the rest of the race on three brakes and ended up losing fourth and fifth gears. We had a little bit of everything (go wrong), but the power steering pump issue was extremely disappointing. It’s just a reoccurring issue for many of us. Every race is a learning experience, so we’ll try and take what we learned and apply it in the next race. I really wanted to win the SCORE Baja 500 today and earn the Triple Crown (Bajas 250, 500 and 1000), but it didn’t happen, Baja won this time. We’ll just go back, get back to work and try again.”
A KTM 450CFX kind of like this one was the winning motorcycle in the Baja 500.
On motorcycles it was Arturo Salas Jr. and Clayton Roberts who won, sharing riding duties on a KTM 450XCF.
“The race was awesome, full of competition,” said Salas. “We battled 9x (Connor Eddy), 3x (Ciaran Naran) and 1x (Juan Carlos Salvatierra) until the very last mile and I want to give them props for a great race and for keeping it fun. We had a perfect bike the entire race, I bet it could still run another 500 miles if we had to. I have no complaints at all and am very happy.”
Brock Heger was the Overall UTV and Pro UTV Open winner with a corrected time of 10:35:28 in his Polaris RZR Pro R.
In all, 176 entries finished among all classes out of 240 starters. Next up is the Baja 400 Sept. 12-17, followed by BFGoodrich SCORE Baja 1000 Nov. 18-23.
Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed Ford, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
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