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.