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.