Quinn on 2009 Baja 500

I was super excited to head down to Ensenada and start pre-running for this year’s Baja 500. For one thing, I couldn’t wait to get to my favorite taco stand and fill up on some amazing quaso-tocos. The other reason I was stoked was that I was riding on the Honda A-team again with my good buddies Kendall Norman and Timmy Weigand, everything was set to have a great 10-day trip to Mexico with a big race in there somewhere.

I started pre-running on Saturday morning the week before the race with my driver Big Tickets (we call him that because he’s a motor cop from Santa Barbara). We headed out to the beginning of my section simply known as the Summit. The only way to explain the summit is it’s the rockiest, nastiest, most dreaded place in Baja, so I wasn’t surprised when Johnny Campbell called me and told me I was riding the Summit. Once you make it over the actual summit you drop about 5000 vertical feet to the second worst place in Baja, Laguna Salada, where temperatures reach 115 degrees. The course heads south to Borrego over miles of cross-grain truck whoops and huge rocks.

This is probably the worst part of the whole racecourse but for some bizarre reason that I’m still trying to figure out, I love it??? I would ride this section once or twice a day in 100+ degree heat, stopping to dig out hidden rocks that would nearly kill me. One day while riding with my buddies Jeff Kaplan and Brent Hardin, I blew through a bush and poked a big hole in my radiator hose. We sat there scratching our heads; with everything from all three of our tool bags laid out on the ground trying to figure out how we were going to MacGuyver this one and ride the next 60-mi back to the truck. Duct tape? No. Tire patches and duct tape? No. Beer can, tire patches, duct tape, and hose clamps? NO! Then Jeff had a brilliant moment of Baja engineering and came up with the idea of using a Honda spark plug wrench as a coupling to extend one of the longer hoses, then we could use the excess to replace the torn hose. It was amazing and worked perfectly, I probably could have ridden all week like that.  We wrapped up our pre running on Thursday and tried to get some rest before the race started on Saturday morning.

Race day was the usual 4:00 am wake up with minimal sleep mostly because of nerves. We made it out to race mile 99 where I was set to take the bike over from Kendall. I had some breakfast and went for a short ride on my pre runner bike to warm up and shake off some of the nerves. I had heard over the radio that Kendall had passed Mike Childress, was now in the lead and pulling away. I was stoked to hear that as it took some of the pressure off of me knowing that I would have clean air and a good lead. Just before 8:00 am we spotted the Honda helicopter over the lead bike, I was up. The bike came in we changed riders, got a splash of gas and I headed over the Summit. I just relaxed and rode smooth through the rocky stuff and made it over the Summit clean and fast. By the time I made it to the next Honda pit on Laguna Salada I had a 7 min lead and our Honda B- team had moved into second.

About 10 miles past the Honda pit I was crossing a soft, silty section, with some big rocks in it. I was going about 60 mph when I clipped a rock with my rear tire and it kicked me over the bars. I flew through the air and rolled a few times before I came to a stop, all I could think of was is the bike OK?  I ran back to the bike picked it up and checked everything out. I’m so lucky the bike is fine, now am I Ok? I didn’t really care! I started the bike and took off, while giving the Helo the thumbs up to let them know everything was good and the race was on again. Everything was going well until about 3⁄4 of a mile before the end of my section when I nearly hit a huge rock dead on. I almost got around it, but it hit on the left side case and cracked a huge hole. The bike lost all the oil almost instantly! I didn’t know it at the time and rode the bike into the next pit and rider change.  At this point I had pulled out a 10 min lead so we went to work on the bike. Eric and Hedaie changed front and rear tires, then started working on the side case luckily they had all the parts to replace the case. The whole stop took about 12min so we lost our lead to the B team, but the bike was up and running again. Timmy Weigand was now onboard and chasing the B team bike.
At this point all we could do is head back towards the finish and listen to the race unfold over the radio. We heard that Timmy had caught the B team bike and was right in their dust. Then Kendall took the bike back for the last 100+ miles to the finish, Kendall was right on them but he couldn’t push through their dust to make the pass. Then we heard a scratchy report over the radio that Kendall had taken the lead back, that was great but we still had to worry about the adjusted time. Kendall needed to pull 3min on them for us to win but there was only 35 miles left in the race. I was so nervous driving back to the finish I knew the bikes were going to beat us to the finish line by a few minutes. When we made it within sight of the finish I could see the Honda helicopter following Kendall across the line. We parked the van and ran down to the finish line when I got there both bikes were sitting there. I looked at Kendall’s face to try to read his expression and I couldn’t tell if we had won or lost. As I got closer someone showed me some numbers written on a clipboard with the number 1:05 circled in the center of the page. I said what’s that? And he told me that’s how much you won by, 1min 05sec! I was so stoked Kendall had pulled of an amazing ride. I picked him up off the ground and we celebrated our win.

The 500 this year was a great race and an amazing team effort to get both JCR bikes to the finish 1-2. I need to thank all the pit crews that made this happen for us, without them there is no way that we could make it to the finish—let alone race as hard as we do and win! ~  Quinn Cody