After returning home from Mexico, within a couple weeks I was back down south of the border in Baja California for the 2012 Baja 1000.

My family has been involved in off-road racing for many years now and the Baja 1000 is the Grand Daddy of races. Once a year tens of millions of dollars in equipment and thousands of people head to Ensenada, Baja California where the Baja 1000 starts. My first experience was 2003, co-riding with my dad in his class 1-2 1600 Mirage. We rolled the car, got stuck and blew reverse but still managed to hand it over to Scott in second on the road after starting 18th. The car went on to finish 4th in class after losing the brakes as well.

This year was to be a peninsula run, meaning it treks from Ensenada all the way to La Paz. In addition to our own vehicles, my family is occasionally asked to drive for other teams, and this year it was my dad Brady Wisdom and uncle Scott Wisdom who would be taking the Rigsby Racing class 1 unlimited Penhall for about 300 miles of the race.

We came to Baja early so that we could do some pre-running of the course…basically a “test run” so that the drivers are aware of any notable dangers or quicker lines.

Because their segment was over 300 miles, they aren’t able to memorize every nook and cranny like some of the circuit races. Certainly though, seeing it once or twice goes a very long way on race day.

While on the pre-run we came across a DuneBuggy.com 4 seat pre-runner that had broken a rear trailing arm (the welds on the hub flange had failed due to poor penetration).

In order to extract the buggy we were forced to use a combination of McGiver-esque fixes as well as two trucks to drag the thing out on it’s belly pan. It was no simple feat and by the end the driver still needed to figure a way to get the buggy onto a trailer (well first they had to find one. There’s was not in San Felipe where they had broken)

After extracting the 4 seater out to the highway, one of our crew members got his Sprinter van stuck. This was a much easier fix.

Before the race, all the cars are walked through tech by their crew. Racers, especially drivers, tend to be local heroes down in Mexico, signing autographs and taking photos with fans.

Race day found my brother, our friend Jose Arriaga and myself chasing the San Felipe side of the race…meaning that we would follow the car until it reached somewhere around Gonzaga Bay south of San Felipe.

At this point the course cut back across the peninsula to the Pacific side, and we would not be able to travel quickly enough to follow it, so our chasing duties would be over. We would head back to San Felipe for the night.

Our day was mostly uneventful, but through the night and into the morning the team would face many difficulties. The new LED lighting setup proved to be highly inadequate during the high speed sections of the race causing Scott to under-drive the car or face a likely prospect of getting caught by a “gotcha”. Not only were the output of the lights not up to the task but the primary 40″ lightbar decided to fall off the car at one point…duct tape got it re-attached. Later, the batteries lost their charge forcing a chase truck to drive in when the car got stuck in a silt pit and stalled. The car would also get some tweaked suspension components from over-zealous encounters with the Earth, and finally the engine would quit on the last leg of the race causing team owner Josh Rigsby to pull the plug on the effort.

The view of San Felipe, Mexico

In order to make it back across a bridge we were forced to thwart this ferocious guard chihuahua.

As always it was a fun race to take part in and I’m thankful that the Rigsby crew always invites us down for a good time. At one point we had the car tracked at 3rd place in class 1 with Tony Murray at the helm, but it wasn’t meant to be this time.