Nearing the end of our 12 mile drive to the next pit, we were surprised and confused to witness the two lead motorcycles racing South on the highway towards us. We pulled into the Valle T pit to find a whole new level of confusion. While we had been busy racing / chasing the first third of the race, SCORE had deemed the Summit section impassable due to weather / landslides, and supposedly some sort of machinery blocking the course as well. They had redirected the course south at the highway and were running racers down 40 miles of pavement until they could access more available race course.

The 1A team refuels & swapped out riders before navigating the next leg of the race

Fueling quickly became an issue as the 1A like many other teams were using a pit service for fuel. This pit service was set up north of there and would likely take quite some time to relocate to the new course. As our guys were running up front and almost there, this was a major problem. The 1A Honda runs a thirteen to one piston and would require race gas to make things worse. A little running around and some pleading with the BFG guys was all it took to get enough race gas for this pit.
           
The 1A quad emerged with the lead still intact,  swapped riders and Nick Destout headed south on Highway 3. We paced him for the 60mph highway section. We pinned it to pace Nick down the pavement section, and Mike Cafro brought the 10A out of Mikes about 2 minutes behind again. After 40 miles of unexpected pavement, the course popped off the highway in Borrego. SCORE officials had set up a stop check and were holding riders for a restart while they busily marked the new course. The impound/restart was really unorganized and teams were confused as to whether fueling, servicing, etc. was legal or not. One of the bike teams took it upon themselves to fill there machine, nearly resulting in a fight as SCORE officials decided to just let everyone fill there tanks.

The A1 race team being paced down the 40 miles of paved roads by the teams chase trucks to insure the 60 mph speed limit

After more than 3 hours of waiting, SCORE officials restarted the race. Racers were started at one minute intervals in the position they were running. Time differences were recorded and they were to be accounted for at the finish. The 10A bike had got to Borrego 2 minutes and 10 seconds behind the 1A leader. This meant that only 10 seconds separated them on adjusted time. Nick Destout and Jorie Williams left and would approach to there new sections. As it would be, Destout overshot a turn and lost some time trying to restart his machine. As the 1A was swapping riders the 10A bike slipped by for their first physical lead of the day. Francisco Vera was determined not to let that stick, and he quickly passed them back keeping the physical lead all the way to the finish.

The finish line brought more confusion. With the time allotments for the start,  and the restart both teams were skeptical of who actually won. When figured out on paper, the 10A bike was the winner by less than 10 seconds. As it turned out, both teams had received minor penalties which did not change the end result, but increased the gap to about thirteen minutes. All in all it was a great race, both teams overcame the confusion caused by the weather and lack of communication by SCORE, and MCR team of Javier Robles Jr. won the race.

1 ::Page 2::