I will indeed be telling the story of a racing team participating in the 2009 Baja 1000 race, which gets underway this Friday. I just won’t be following the team I started out with.
The team I am going to be following is J2 Racing. The riders are Jason Hill and John Lowe, two dirt-bike riding buddies in their early years who were reunited just two years ago after an extended loss of contact. Here’s how Jason describes their decision to do the Baja.
As we began catching up, John asked, ‘Do you remember when we were riding as kids how we used to watch the Baja races on TV and always said we’d run it one day?’ ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Well, it’s time.’ And that was that. It took some convincing, but I finally agreed that it was indeed time, so we began incubating a plan.
I met up with these guys on the Adventure Rider forum. When my initial plans to go to the race and report first-hand fell through I posted a notice on Adventure Rider asking if there was a team going who would like me to tell their story. Jason quickly replied and the deal was set. This time I made absolutely certain to make it clear what our relationship is. I am not a team member, I am an outside observer, and my position is not to tell a bunch of fluffy stories that paint the team as perfect, it is to tell the story as it really is, true to life. Jason is something of a writer himself so he understands that false starts and missteps are part of life, and how you handle them is sometimes the most interesting part of the story.
So anyway, I won’t be posting the reports of their adventure here; that will be on Examiner.com. I’ll post links here to those pieces and if there are any interesting side notes that don’t really fit into the main story, I will, as usual, be telling those stories here.
Additionally, you can follow the team’s progress during the race in real-time on their SpotAdventures.com website.
Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Reunited riding buddies will fulfill Baja racing dream
Biker Quote for Today
I’m sure I look a sight, with my filthy off-road gear and motocross boots on, drooling and staggering to the metal detector.
My phone rang this afternoon and it was Jim Campbell on the line, calling from the Fort Worth hospital where he is still recovering from 
Up till now, motorcyclists going through Custer State Park, which means a heck of a lot of the folks going to the rally, paid $6 for one on the bike, or $12 if riding two-up. That pass was then good for 7 days.
My standard line to anyone asking is that Examiner does not pay much but it opens doors. One door it opened is