Everyone who goes to Baja comes home with a story, we come home with one every time. For this year’s SCORE International Baja 500, we didn’t expect that we would be chasing thieves that had just stolen our chase truck, race trailer and race car, but that is what happened. It was like a scene in a cops and robbers movie, and the Cognito boys are playing the cops. This is a long Baja 500 recap but I gather you will want to know how cops and robbers played out. We almost did not get to race the Baja 500.
Mitchell Alsup and I (Justin Lambert) were taking on the section of the race from race mile 200 to the finish, with chase support Jim and Brandon. Victor and David were taking on the start to RM200 with chase support Victor Senior. Jim, Brandon, Mitchell and I were pre running the east section of the course Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday while staying in San Felipe, we had our Cognito chase truck with flatbed trailer and our RZR pre runner. After pre running Wednesday we headed back to Ensenada to meet up with Victor and crew. Greg and Ryan were driving down from home in Mitchells chase truck on a red eye early Thursday morning with the race trailer and race car in tow, decked out with spares and tools, went straight to chassis tech inspection on the beach Thursday morning. Around 11am on Thursday, Mitchell and I pre ran the start of the race to make some notes on the GPS, and when we arrived back in Ensenada at our meet point down town, our team told us a story that I simply couldn’t believe was true, jaw dropping. I have now heard the story from the angle of every one of my team mates, so I feel like I was actually there, I wasn’t but I will give you the play by play.
Jim, Brandon, Victor, David, Victor Sr., Greg, and Ryan parked the 2 chase trucks and trailers on the main street that is parallel to the beach, both facing north, and right across the street from the restaurant they sat down at to eat lunch. This spot is ¼ mile south of the street party that was about to happen on Friday for Baja 500 tech and contingency. Victor’s pickup was parked around the corner and down the street a bit, no trailer or anything, just the pickup. The guys sat down for lunch, placed their order, and David realized he left his phone in Victor’s pickup, while a parking spot opened up right in front of the restaurant. So David went to get his phone and Victor asked him to go ahead and move the pickup to the spot right in front of them outside the restaurant. There are a lot of open air taco shacks there, but this is a walk in and sit down type restaurant. Greg and Ryan are watching the chase trucks and trailers, as we have had some theft before out of the back of trucks. The traffic got a little thick and Greg lost visual on Mitchells chase truck for a few moments, then Greg, Ryan and Jim all saw the chase truck with enclosed race trailer and race car in it, driving North past the restaurant and they were very confused for a brief moment when Ryan yelled ‘the keys are in my pocket!’ All the guys jumped up, chairs scattered across the floor, and everyone else in the restaurant had their attention on 6 guys running out the front door. Pretty sure most thought it was some sort of dine and dash, but there were 6 cell phones sitting on the table still as well as Victor Sr. assuring the waiter who was bringing the food out that the guys were chasing our livelihood and intended to pay for the food. The rig took a right turn and starting heading into town, as Ryan and Greg are running down the street after it trying to keep eyes on where it is going. Brandon hangs a right out of the restaurant and runs down the main drag heading south, anticipating the trailer has to turn that way since north is congested due to the event. Thankfully Victor’s truck was just moved to the front of the restaurant, Victor and David jumped inside as Jim jumped in the bed and they tore off south and hung a left. Greg running, ran out of gas before Ryan, but then Ryan is running out of gas a ¼ mile later but can still see our rig up ahead, he tries to flag down a car to hitch a ride. Now Ryan does not speak Spanish, he is 6’3” and a big ol boy and very worked up at this point. Ryan jumps out in the middle of the street and is waiving like crazy at this Hispanic lady in the car he wants a ride from, she waves him to go ahead as if she thinks he is just trying to cross the street. He yells at her ‘I need a ride! My truck was stolen and is up ahead!’ the lady had to be scared to death as Ryan grabbed for the passenger door handle, she pinned it and left Ryan gasping for air. Ryan starts to flag down the next car, it is a truck coming up which slams on the brakes and they say ‘get in!!’ It was Victor and David inside, and Jim in the bed, Ryan jumps in the bed and they took off after our rig that they could barely see in the distance. Victor is honking and driving on the wrong side of the road, running thru red lights, and they catch up to our rig, pull alongside and there is this Hispanic guy driving along like he owned it. The guy quickly realizes what is going on and starts to look really worried, Victor pulls in front of our rig and starts to try and slow him down. In the middle of a 4 way intersection, the guy throws the chase truck into park before it had even stopped and bails out of the truck and starts to run back away from Victor’s truck. Victor heard the noise of it going into park, throws his truck into park as Ryan and Jim jump out of the back of the pickup to chase this guy, but Jims leg hits Ryan’s arm so Jim lands on his back on the ground and Ryan is chasing this guy but doesn’t have much left in the gas tank from all the running he had done a minute earlier. Victor runs past Ryan like he is standing still, followed by David. It looked as if this guy was going to get tackled, as all of a sudden a minivan is pulling up in a hurry with the slider door open. As the van slams on the brakes to come to a stop the slider door shuts, and Victor is about ready to lay into this guy, then the passenger door flies open, Victor throws an elbow which grazes the guy’s head as he jumps in the passenger seat and tries to shut the door, Victor slams into the side of the van and falls down partially under the van. David grabs the passenger door opens it and there are 3 guys in this van that look scared to death. David grabs the guy by the shirt as Victor rolls out from under the van and it drives away barely missing Victor, and leaving behind one of the bad guy’s shoes and part of his ripped shirt that David had a hold of. In shock, but relieved, they realized they were blocking this 4 way intersection with our rig and Victors pickup, so they gather themselves and head back to the restaurant where the patrons were in awe as these guys rolled in and sat down to eat their lunch like heroes. Unbelievable story, it seems like a scene out of a Bad Boys movie or something, but it happened in real life. All it took was a screw driver, a pair of vise grips, and 10 seconds to get in and start the truck and drive away.
Friday was contingency and tech day, it’s a long one and we told that story a couple dozen times. We got back to our house and ran across a few last minute items that needed attention on the race car, when we looked at the time and realized we were going to be late to the drivers meeting, we were 25 minutes late but still feeling lucky that we got our stuff back and were going to get to race! Honestly that chase took a lot out of the guys, I think they could have gone home instead, but we all were feeling lucky and wanted to carry it over to the race.
Saturday we were set to start the race around 11:30am, a tragic accident stalled the race for about an hour, then we were under way with the first 200 miles in the hands of Victor and David in the RZR making good time. Note, we did enter the PRO UTV FI (forced induction) class which is the turbo class, but we were racing our naturally aspirated RZR since in SCORE we are allowed to race up, and since we are not in the SCORE series for points, we figured we would go for the glory in what we felt was the most competitive class in SCORE. We were making great time when all that hard work came to a halt at a bottleneck 24 miles into the race where apparently a 2wd buggy was stuck up a silty hill. Obstacles like this are no match for a 4wd RZR, so most of the UTV class was looking for a way around the stuck vehicle, while someone (Alan Ampudia) threw a tantrum in his class 8 truck that couldn’t make it around the obstacle, and started ramming several UTV’s, and Victor and David took a nasty hit to the rear of the car caving in the bumper and bending the rear sub frame over to the right. This is a subject that is a double edged sword, on one edge you can sit and wait even though your UTV is capable of going around, or on the other edge you can go around and piss off some people that are in vehicles that are the ones getting stuck mostly because they are 2wd. We made our way around the bottleneck finally and the race is on, first stop at RM 74 to assess the damage and take some fuel, and we were 5th UTV on course driving out of pit. Our pit support would not see our car again until after the summit around RM 160 and we were 1st UTV on course at that point by a couple minutes. Victor and David delivered Mitchell and me a good car at the next pit which was RM200 at about 6:45pm, complaining only of the heat as the car had to be babied in the 115-120 degree temps to avoid overheating. Mitchell and I were off to go survive the San Felipe whoops, we did so and it got dark before we made our way past San Felipe where we noticed some locals pointing us in what we thought was the wrong direction, a different direction than what we had done in our pre running. It turns out that we missed some important changes to the course in the first 20 minutes of the drivers meeting since we were late, missed a check point and was assessed a 10 minute penalty, which we would not find out until after we got home. We were still first UTV on course, it was dark, but hot, still a good 100 degrees out and we were still having to watch our coolant temperatures from sending us into limp mode, which we could not avoid a couple times. The next section was a 20 mile long sandy wash slightly uphill, and things did not get any cooler, we got out to the dry Diablo Lake bed, seemed hot as hell even in the dark, still having to hold the machine back due to temps. We had to make an unplanned pit stop at RM325 as we seemed to be having some battery voltage issues and wanted to make sure we still had coolant in the radiator, we spent a minute and didn’t figure anything out on the voltage so we went ahead and pushed on, with Matlock closing in a minute or 2 behind us. We kept a steady but safe pace, the course was tore up and we knew the priority was to finish this race and there are still over 150 miles to go. We get on the highway section and then off back in the dirt on Rancho Mike’s Rd unfortunately behind a buggy and we could not get close enough to him in the dust to make a pass for clean air. We took fuel at RM360 and a good inspection on the car, the dry break stuck open on the dump can when retracting it from the car and dumped a couple gallons of fuel on the car accidentally. We did not want to start the car with all that fuel and fumes, so we had to get out the ice chest and dump water on it as Matlock passed us and got onto the Valle de Trinidad highway section before the goat trail. We got started and headed up to the speed limit on the highway section as Matlock was pulling out of pit 100 yards in front of us, he got up to speed and we were on his bumper doing the 60mph highway speed limit (severe time penalties for going faster), we both shot off the highway onto the goat trail and the dust cloud he created for us made us back off the pace. Matlock started the race 3.5 minutes in front of us, so this meant he had to beat us to the finish by more than 3.5 minutes to win. We figured we would have to let him get a minute in front of us so we would have clean air to drive in and keep up a race pace, but the fine dust just floats in the air when there is no breeze, and our visibility was only about 60 feet for the next 30 miles. At RM395 there was another highway section that was over 5 miles long, again at a limit of 60mph, we could see Matlock’s flashing blue light up ahead and we were 2 miles into the highway section, so we figured he was 2 miles in front of us. Then a class 10 car pulls onto the highway a half mile in front of us, and when the course went back out into the dirt, we were dusted out by this class 10 buggy and could not get close enough to pass, very frustrating since this next 5 miles was one of our fastest sections during the pre run. We drove in this dust for over 50 miles until we finally were able to get the 10 car in sights and had to nerf him so he would move over, we finally made the pass for clean air at about RM 460 which was only about 10 miles before the finish. We figured Matlock was long gone but we ran the last 10 miles like it was the first, came across the finish line for second place and it turns out Matlock beat us by less than 1 minute after corrected time, but we had also a 10 minute penalty on top of that. We placed second overall UTV, second place in the Pro UTV Turbo class, racing in a naturally aspirated Polaris RZR 4 XP1000. The next turbo UTV was over an hour behind us, and the winner of the naturally aspirated class was over 2 hours behind us, so we feel pretty good about where we stack up in the class obviously!
Our condolences to those down there on and off the race course who lost their lives and their loved ones.
Special thank you to the Cognito team who comes down here to Baja to race. I know I am the face of the team but this is not Justin Lambert’s team, this is the Cognito Motorsports team. This race it was myself, Mitchell Alsup, Victor Herrera, David Lytle, Jim Neasbitt, Brandon Hong of Sparks Performance Products, Victor Herrera Sr., Greg Hauser, and Ryan Hauser.
Also special thank you to our sponsors:
-Polaris
-Mystik Lubricants
-Method Race Wheels
-ITP Tires
-Sparks Performance Products
-Fox
Mitchell Alsup and I (Justin Lambert) were taking on the section of the race from race mile 200 to the finish, with chase support Jim and Brandon. Victor and David were taking on the start to RM200 with chase support Victor Senior. Jim, Brandon, Mitchell and I were pre running the east section of the course Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday while staying in San Felipe, we had our Cognito chase truck with flatbed trailer and our RZR pre runner. After pre running Wednesday we headed back to Ensenada to meet up with Victor and crew. Greg and Ryan were driving down from home in Mitchells chase truck on a red eye early Thursday morning with the race trailer and race car in tow, decked out with spares and tools, went straight to chassis tech inspection on the beach Thursday morning. Around 11am on Thursday, Mitchell and I pre ran the start of the race to make some notes on the GPS, and when we arrived back in Ensenada at our meet point down town, our team told us a story that I simply couldn’t believe was true, jaw dropping. I have now heard the story from the angle of every one of my team mates, so I feel like I was actually there, I wasn’t but I will give you the play by play.
Jim, Brandon, Victor, David, Victor Sr., Greg, and Ryan parked the 2 chase trucks and trailers on the main street that is parallel to the beach, both facing north, and right across the street from the restaurant they sat down at to eat lunch. This spot is ¼ mile south of the street party that was about to happen on Friday for Baja 500 tech and contingency. Victor’s pickup was parked around the corner and down the street a bit, no trailer or anything, just the pickup. The guys sat down for lunch, placed their order, and David realized he left his phone in Victor’s pickup, while a parking spot opened up right in front of the restaurant. So David went to get his phone and Victor asked him to go ahead and move the pickup to the spot right in front of them outside the restaurant. There are a lot of open air taco shacks there, but this is a walk in and sit down type restaurant. Greg and Ryan are watching the chase trucks and trailers, as we have had some theft before out of the back of trucks. The traffic got a little thick and Greg lost visual on Mitchells chase truck for a few moments, then Greg, Ryan and Jim all saw the chase truck with enclosed race trailer and race car in it, driving North past the restaurant and they were very confused for a brief moment when Ryan yelled ‘the keys are in my pocket!’ All the guys jumped up, chairs scattered across the floor, and everyone else in the restaurant had their attention on 6 guys running out the front door. Pretty sure most thought it was some sort of dine and dash, but there were 6 cell phones sitting on the table still as well as Victor Sr. assuring the waiter who was bringing the food out that the guys were chasing our livelihood and intended to pay for the food. The rig took a right turn and starting heading into town, as Ryan and Greg are running down the street after it trying to keep eyes on where it is going. Brandon hangs a right out of the restaurant and runs down the main drag heading south, anticipating the trailer has to turn that way since north is congested due to the event. Thankfully Victor’s truck was just moved to the front of the restaurant, Victor and David jumped inside as Jim jumped in the bed and they tore off south and hung a left. Greg running, ran out of gas before Ryan, but then Ryan is running out of gas a ¼ mile later but can still see our rig up ahead, he tries to flag down a car to hitch a ride. Now Ryan does not speak Spanish, he is 6’3” and a big ol boy and very worked up at this point. Ryan jumps out in the middle of the street and is waiving like crazy at this Hispanic lady in the car he wants a ride from, she waves him to go ahead as if she thinks he is just trying to cross the street. He yells at her ‘I need a ride! My truck was stolen and is up ahead!’ the lady had to be scared to death as Ryan grabbed for the passenger door handle, she pinned it and left Ryan gasping for air. Ryan starts to flag down the next car, it is a truck coming up which slams on the brakes and they say ‘get in!!’ It was Victor and David inside, and Jim in the bed, Ryan jumps in the bed and they took off after our rig that they could barely see in the distance. Victor is honking and driving on the wrong side of the road, running thru red lights, and they catch up to our rig, pull alongside and there is this Hispanic guy driving along like he owned it. The guy quickly realizes what is going on and starts to look really worried, Victor pulls in front of our rig and starts to try and slow him down. In the middle of a 4 way intersection, the guy throws the chase truck into park before it had even stopped and bails out of the truck and starts to run back away from Victor’s truck. Victor heard the noise of it going into park, throws his truck into park as Ryan and Jim jump out of the back of the pickup to chase this guy, but Jims leg hits Ryan’s arm so Jim lands on his back on the ground and Ryan is chasing this guy but doesn’t have much left in the gas tank from all the running he had done a minute earlier. Victor runs past Ryan like he is standing still, followed by David. It looked as if this guy was going to get tackled, as all of a sudden a minivan is pulling up in a hurry with the slider door open. As the van slams on the brakes to come to a stop the slider door shuts, and Victor is about ready to lay into this guy, then the passenger door flies open, Victor throws an elbow which grazes the guy’s head as he jumps in the passenger seat and tries to shut the door, Victor slams into the side of the van and falls down partially under the van. David grabs the passenger door opens it and there are 3 guys in this van that look scared to death. David grabs the guy by the shirt as Victor rolls out from under the van and it drives away barely missing Victor, and leaving behind one of the bad guy’s shoes and part of his ripped shirt that David had a hold of. In shock, but relieved, they realized they were blocking this 4 way intersection with our rig and Victors pickup, so they gather themselves and head back to the restaurant where the patrons were in awe as these guys rolled in and sat down to eat their lunch like heroes. Unbelievable story, it seems like a scene out of a Bad Boys movie or something, but it happened in real life. All it took was a screw driver, a pair of vise grips, and 10 seconds to get in and start the truck and drive away.
Friday was contingency and tech day, it’s a long one and we told that story a couple dozen times. We got back to our house and ran across a few last minute items that needed attention on the race car, when we looked at the time and realized we were going to be late to the drivers meeting, we were 25 minutes late but still feeling lucky that we got our stuff back and were going to get to race! Honestly that chase took a lot out of the guys, I think they could have gone home instead, but we all were feeling lucky and wanted to carry it over to the race.
Saturday we were set to start the race around 11:30am, a tragic accident stalled the race for about an hour, then we were under way with the first 200 miles in the hands of Victor and David in the RZR making good time. Note, we did enter the PRO UTV FI (forced induction) class which is the turbo class, but we were racing our naturally aspirated RZR since in SCORE we are allowed to race up, and since we are not in the SCORE series for points, we figured we would go for the glory in what we felt was the most competitive class in SCORE. We were making great time when all that hard work came to a halt at a bottleneck 24 miles into the race where apparently a 2wd buggy was stuck up a silty hill. Obstacles like this are no match for a 4wd RZR, so most of the UTV class was looking for a way around the stuck vehicle, while someone (Alan Ampudia) threw a tantrum in his class 8 truck that couldn’t make it around the obstacle, and started ramming several UTV’s, and Victor and David took a nasty hit to the rear of the car caving in the bumper and bending the rear sub frame over to the right. This is a subject that is a double edged sword, on one edge you can sit and wait even though your UTV is capable of going around, or on the other edge you can go around and piss off some people that are in vehicles that are the ones getting stuck mostly because they are 2wd. We made our way around the bottleneck finally and the race is on, first stop at RM 74 to assess the damage and take some fuel, and we were 5th UTV on course driving out of pit. Our pit support would not see our car again until after the summit around RM 160 and we were 1st UTV on course at that point by a couple minutes. Victor and David delivered Mitchell and me a good car at the next pit which was RM200 at about 6:45pm, complaining only of the heat as the car had to be babied in the 115-120 degree temps to avoid overheating. Mitchell and I were off to go survive the San Felipe whoops, we did so and it got dark before we made our way past San Felipe where we noticed some locals pointing us in what we thought was the wrong direction, a different direction than what we had done in our pre running. It turns out that we missed some important changes to the course in the first 20 minutes of the drivers meeting since we were late, missed a check point and was assessed a 10 minute penalty, which we would not find out until after we got home. We were still first UTV on course, it was dark, but hot, still a good 100 degrees out and we were still having to watch our coolant temperatures from sending us into limp mode, which we could not avoid a couple times. The next section was a 20 mile long sandy wash slightly uphill, and things did not get any cooler, we got out to the dry Diablo Lake bed, seemed hot as hell even in the dark, still having to hold the machine back due to temps. We had to make an unplanned pit stop at RM325 as we seemed to be having some battery voltage issues and wanted to make sure we still had coolant in the radiator, we spent a minute and didn’t figure anything out on the voltage so we went ahead and pushed on, with Matlock closing in a minute or 2 behind us. We kept a steady but safe pace, the course was tore up and we knew the priority was to finish this race and there are still over 150 miles to go. We get on the highway section and then off back in the dirt on Rancho Mike’s Rd unfortunately behind a buggy and we could not get close enough to him in the dust to make a pass for clean air. We took fuel at RM360 and a good inspection on the car, the dry break stuck open on the dump can when retracting it from the car and dumped a couple gallons of fuel on the car accidentally. We did not want to start the car with all that fuel and fumes, so we had to get out the ice chest and dump water on it as Matlock passed us and got onto the Valle de Trinidad highway section before the goat trail. We got started and headed up to the speed limit on the highway section as Matlock was pulling out of pit 100 yards in front of us, he got up to speed and we were on his bumper doing the 60mph highway speed limit (severe time penalties for going faster), we both shot off the highway onto the goat trail and the dust cloud he created for us made us back off the pace. Matlock started the race 3.5 minutes in front of us, so this meant he had to beat us to the finish by more than 3.5 minutes to win. We figured we would have to let him get a minute in front of us so we would have clean air to drive in and keep up a race pace, but the fine dust just floats in the air when there is no breeze, and our visibility was only about 60 feet for the next 30 miles. At RM395 there was another highway section that was over 5 miles long, again at a limit of 60mph, we could see Matlock’s flashing blue light up ahead and we were 2 miles into the highway section, so we figured he was 2 miles in front of us. Then a class 10 car pulls onto the highway a half mile in front of us, and when the course went back out into the dirt, we were dusted out by this class 10 buggy and could not get close enough to pass, very frustrating since this next 5 miles was one of our fastest sections during the pre run. We drove in this dust for over 50 miles until we finally were able to get the 10 car in sights and had to nerf him so he would move over, we finally made the pass for clean air at about RM 460 which was only about 10 miles before the finish. We figured Matlock was long gone but we ran the last 10 miles like it was the first, came across the finish line for second place and it turns out Matlock beat us by less than 1 minute after corrected time, but we had also a 10 minute penalty on top of that. We placed second overall UTV, second place in the Pro UTV Turbo class, racing in a naturally aspirated Polaris RZR 4 XP1000. The next turbo UTV was over an hour behind us, and the winner of the naturally aspirated class was over 2 hours behind us, so we feel pretty good about where we stack up in the class obviously!
Our condolences to those down there on and off the race course who lost their lives and their loved ones.
Special thank you to the Cognito team who comes down here to Baja to race. I know I am the face of the team but this is not Justin Lambert’s team, this is the Cognito Motorsports team. This race it was myself, Mitchell Alsup, Victor Herrera, David Lytle, Jim Neasbitt, Brandon Hong of Sparks Performance Products, Victor Herrera Sr., Greg Hauser, and Ryan Hauser.
Also special thank you to our sponsors:
-Polaris
-Mystik Lubricants
-Method Race Wheels
-ITP Tires
-Sparks Performance Products
-Fox
