November 22, 2008 Voss Motorsports captures their 1st Baja 1000 win! This year’s trip to the Baja 1000 started off not so well, followed by a grueling week of pre-running for our team, but was all paid for in the end. On Nov. 12 at about 3:00am our team left the shop for the 10-hour drive down to Ensenada, when only about 3 miles down the road one of our main support trucks, that was towing our race truck, decided to lose a motor. The team continued on for Baja except for a few guys who had to return to the shop and transfer all of the tools, spare parts, etc into another truck, which set them back 4 hours behind the rest of the team. Once in Baja it was time to begin our pre-running. My dad (Rich Voss) was going to race from the start to rm 290 and I (Jason Voss) was to continue to the finish line. The plan was to pre-run our sections at least twice each and then to head back out to any problem areas of the course to see what we would be dealing with come race day. It took many repairs to the pre-runners and late nights getting back to camp but we managed to accomplish all that we wanted to before race day. We were starting 3rd in our class on race day. Our strategy was for my dad to take it easy on the truck through his entire section and get the truck to me in one piece. Well, when he handed the truck over to me at the driver’s change we were in first place with about a 55 mile lead on second. I’m not sure how easy he was on the truck, but it was all in one piece and running great when I took off. I continued on down the racecourse and knew all I had to do was save the truck and not get stuck in any silt. The lower San Felipe loop was very rough but I took it easy and made my way through it. We headed for the coast through San Vicente where we ran into some really bad fog. Even though we seemed to be just “putting along” at this time the gap between us and second place was getting even bigger, the other teams must have been having issues of their own. We continued on through the silt hills after Uruapan and had no problems of getting stuck. Everything was going smooth as we crossed the highway and headed for the housing track going into Ensenada. As we wound our way through the hills we suddenly found ourselves off the trail and had no markings on our GPS of the road we were on. However, it looked as if we were going to run directly back into the race course so we continued on. As we crested the top of a null, I could not see that the trail turned left as I soon found myself off the side of the trail and stuck in the bushes. We immediately called our team on our radio and told them that we needed someone to come pull us out. My co-pilot and I jumped out of the truck, hooked up the tow strap to be ready when help arrived, and then continued to dig our way out to make sure that we were going to get unstuck. Our pre runner arrived and pulled us off of the hillside and back onto course. I knew we were going to make it to the finish now, with only twenty more miles to go. Before we knew it we were sliding around the last turn of the race and took the checkered flag for our first Baja 1000 win. Thanks to all of the Voss Motorsports sponsors: SCQ Rents, Teasdale Quality Foods and especially General Tire for keeping us flat tire free this race! |
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