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Member Trent Kendall heads BACK to Baja!
Posted by Jeremy on 2009-11-14What's better than getting to do Baja once? Doing Baja twice!
Trent is doing the Baja 1000 coming up and sent us a link to his story about heading down to pre-run the course. Check out Trent's story:
The www.kendallrace.com team consisting of Adam, Noah, Dave (DGP Photography)
and I went down to pre run for the Baja 1000 on Friday. Since I will be
racing at night I wanted to pre run at night so we left Avondale at 9pm
and hit the trail at about 3:30am. My pre running plans looked like
they were drawn up by a strung out crackhead. I tried to sleep in the
truck but I only got about 3 hours of sleep. We unloaded under the
moonlight and hit the trail by 4am. I had spent all week getting my
quad prepped and fixing stuff that broke during the previous weekend’s
race so I was looking forward to riding.
The single 8" HID was putting out plenty of light although I could use more of a flood beam. The first twenty miles from RM390-410 were brutal. Nothing but big whoops without a break...made me want to cry. We met up with the chase truck at RM 410 at the highway and made our way up the wash. The wash section was fun but there are quite a few big rocks exposed. Then suddenly my light went out. I waited for the others and followed behind them to get up to the truck. Turns out the light was fine but the switch was having problems. So we waited for dawn and hit the trail again. A few miles onto the dirt road to mike's sky ranch I noticed a crew of army guys on the side of the road and they had a rope across the road. They waved me through and I ducked under the rope. I guess they put the rope down when they want to stop a vehicle. Noah who is 6 foot 3 almost got clotheslined by it, LMAO.
I was hauling ass in 5th gear about 7 miles into the dirt road when my quad fell out of gear. Basically 5th gear was gone. I used 4th for a while then slowed down to wait for Adam and Noah. Going down through the gears I heard the familiar crunching sounds of metal on metal contact in 1st, 2nd and 3rd. So I decided to use the cut over at RM433 to cut up to Valle T where my chase truck was waiting. Along the way I had more bad luck, first my rear brake locked up for no good reason and started smoking. A few miles later my rear shock reservoir broke off its mounts and starting banging into the swing arm and chain. The hose didn't break but the reservoir is all beat up. I zip tied it up and made it back to the truck without blowing anything else up."
Read the full story, photos and video at KendallRace.com
