Stumbling Forward on Road to Baja 1000
“The road to Ensenada is plenty wide and fast” says Lyle Lovett but he wasn’t speaking about the preparations for the Baja 1000 currently underway with the race team I’ll be accompanying.
First off, if you don’t know what the Baja 1000 is you really ought to view this trailer to the definitive Baja 1000 movie, Dust to Glory.
I’m riding down to Ensenada, on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, with Rsenal Racing to write about the event and the team’s efforts for the variety of motorcycle publications I write for. The race itself starts Nov. 19 but we’ll be down there in advance to get ready.
Chuck Shortt is the driving force behind this adventure, and what I’m coming to understand about Chuck is that he is a big idea person who then frequently turns to others to make his big dreams become reality. If the dream is improbable but the person succeeds, that’s fantastic, they’ve really accomplished something. If they don’t succeed, oh well, good idea that didn’t work. Move on.
This is not a criticism of Chuck or a bad thing; it is something useful to understand about him.
For instance, when he first told me about this thing, Chuck told me they would have satellite uplinks and wanted to livecast the event via the Web. He asked me if Examiner or RumBum might be interested and able to carry the feed. I agreed to ask RumBum.
Happily, RumBum said they were very interested and their tech guy, Tobias, would contact me to work out details. In the meantime, Chuck told me to hook up with John, the team’s tech guy. Well, it seems that having a satellite hook-up was not in the game, but Tobias suggested that if the team could supply video segments periodically, that would be fine and even easier than a live link.
I figured that before I pushed this any further I needed to check in with Jeff and Sydney Mikelson, the photographers on the team, to see what they felt they would be capable of in terms of supplying RumBum with segments. Surprise, surprise. Sydney told me they had no video editing software, and were planning to bring their raw footage home and turn it over to a friend who is a video editor. So nothing at all available to RumBum unless they wanted raw footage.
Then we learned that the non-satellite internet connection Jack was hoping have set up was not going to be within the team’s price range so the whole matter was really moot. And then Sydney called me to say that she and Jeff had had to opt out of the trip due to financial considerations. Totally moot.
OK, so that’s where we stand. The rest of us are still going, and I’m hoping to have some great pictures and terrific stories to tell. Coming soon.
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Tags: Baja 1000
