As we left the Highway section it was time to head out past Valle de Trinidad to mile marker 252, the end of Mike’s Sky loop. Of course it was nearing lunch time and a trip to Baja just isn’t complete unless you torture your stomach on some local street tacos right? So after a quick Lunch in “Valle T” it was back to the race action. Catching back to the race action we caught up to the ATV race leader, the 3a Factory Honda. They now were able to pull a slight amount on the challenging 1a Honda as they accumulated a seven minute time gap between the pair. The next ATV to come into the pits at “Valle T” was the 111a limited Pro ATV followed by the 15a Cycle Parts West Honda 450R. The team was up front and doing very well at the halfway point but they would end up with a DNF for the day as they were not able to complete the course on time due to unknown circumstances.

The next few bikes through were the 108a, and 114a along with 107a. The 108a Honda 450R ridden by Enrique Felix, Esquilil Soto and Oscar Garcia was through on the heels of the 107a KFX450R. These two would battle the rest of the day along with the upcoming 114a Honda 450R piloted by Sergio Alvarado, Gary Gonzalez, and Cesar Chanate, as number 114a would pull ahead for the second in class, while a mere 9 seconds would be the margin of victory for 108a taking third place away from 107a. As the sportsman ATV’s started making their way through, it was 63a upfront over second place 66a with a five minute lead. Coming in third for the sportsman class was the Yamaha Raptor 700, number 74a driven by Soren Meling and his team to an impressive third overall for the day and a top position for Yamaha with a time of 11:50:36, averaging 35.819mph.

51A CanAm Renegade	74A Yamaha Rhino

As the race left Valle de Trinidad and it picked up on the previous Baja 250 course to wind its way to San Vicente and out to the Pacific Ocean through the town of Erendria. The lead ATV’s would swap out as the 1a Honda would take over the lead after a terrible accident with the 3a Honda involving Wes Miller. Wes was riding the ATV when it went over a cliff breaking his leg. And as a die hard racer he was able to hoist himself back on the bike and limp it to the next pit for a critical rider change.

The 1a Honda would go on to win the race and Overall for the ATV class with a time of 10:09:07, averaging 41.787mph. Coming is second place was the 3a Honda team only 15 minutes behind the leader with a time of 10:24:26, averaging 40.762. Third place would go to 2a, the XR650 Hybrid, as fourth place would got to another Honda 450r, 10 piloted by Mark Dyer, Randy Dyer and Edward Scantelbury .And with the always stretching time gap between the leaders, and the stragglers, we were unable to chase the ATV race any further. With the race still going late in the day we had to fight our way back through traffic as the other vehicles and racers made their way around the course.

Team 1A Claimed the Win	Team 3A Finished in 2nd Place

With the Sport UTV class being the last off the line it again made it very difficult to try and catch up to them in hopes of pictures and information. Since they were now allowed to leave around two hours earlier than scheduled, we missed the remaining UTV’s at they headed around Mike’s Sky loop. Nearly half of the UTV class was out of the race before ever reaching our staging location, and the rest faded before reaching the finish line. None of the UTV’s completed the race on time this year as it was especially tough for them since they had to race on a course that just saw the most vehicle entries in SCORE history pound through. However, the 1808 Yamaha Rhino driven by Thomas and Kelly Graves did finish the course about 1 hour after the allotted time along with the 1806 Tomcar about one and a half hours behind the Rhino.