Most Interesting Entry at This Year's Baja 1000

 I picked the Quigley 4x4 Van as the 2013 "winner" of this title and many seemed to agree.  They DNF'd and never saw the end of the race but certainly put in a solid effort before returning stateside.

This year I am "awarding" (?) this title to an entry just showing up on the entry list.

Ikuo Hanawa is a long time Baja aficionado having run there a number of times as well as at Pikes Peak on occasion including behind the wheel of an electric vehicle.

For '14 Hanawa is coming to Baja with a completely new vehicle of his own design and build (from what I can decipher from the translated Japanese on his Facebook page).  He also lists it as his Baja/Dakar vehicle so maybe we'll see it in South America in a few months as well?  It certainly looks the Dakar part being VERY small looking with a non-existent rear end, and a wholly enclosed shell with dual spares almost completely covered.

The video Hanawa has posted lists the 2WD vehicle as having about 23 1/2 inches of front end travel and about 21 1/2 inches in the rear.  King bypass and coils dampen the front while the wheels are wrapped in 315/70R17 Yokohama Geolander A/T-S.  I'm not sure what type of transmission is in it but it looks to be a fairly stock version (maybe even a stock Nissan 370Z tranny?) as the video shows Hanawa rowing through the gears, certainly no sequential transmission present.  The engine in the vehicle is a Nissan 3.7L VQ37VHR V6 out of a 370Z putting out around 332 HP, while the "body" is completely tube framed and yet the vehicle will somehow be classified as a Nissan Frontier in SCORE's class 7 for "Open Mini-Trucks".  If there's a Frontier part on it, I'd be shocked.

It certainly looks like a foreign designed and built vehicle with an emphasis on a small size and light weight.  How its rather spindly looking suspension and steering holds up to the roughness of Baja will soon be seen.  I'll be rooting for him but having my doubts as to its ability to stay in one piece.  I would have expected that Hanawa has enough Baja experience to know what he is asking of his vehicle and have designed it accordingly--so what do I know?  My vehicle broke down every day I raced it the 2014 NORRA event, so clearly I don't have the answer.

As always for me, seeing something besides a Geiser Trophy Truck powered by some massive Cheby crate motor is the more captivating portion of this race.  I'm in the minority but I'm more of an underdog, root for the guy who is likely to lose, sort of person.  With someone like Hanawa and his Japanese engined, Dakar style buggie, some eyes might at least be pulled away from the carbon copy lineup one usually sees...if only for a moment.

To follow along with this effort, Ikuo Hanawa is #712.  Tracking should begin tomorrow 11/13.  The "other" Nissan Frontier in the race that I spoke of the other day is #2003.  Best of luck to both of them!

A Nissan Frontier Returning to the Baja 1000 Next Weekend!

At least it currently looks that way!

 Los Angeles resident Glen Tanizawa has had this race in mind for a number of years now and has been transforming his Frontier into a SCORE compliant racer over the course of at least the past year with a significant amount of the work (of course) taking place in the last few months, weeks and days.

Glen and I have talked a bit back and forth with him being particularly interested in my efforts to race down the Baja peninsula earlier this year in my Nissan Frontier during the NORRA 1000.  Both the NORRA 1000 that I raced in and this year's Baja 1000 ran the entire length of the peninsula though the B1K is an whole order of difficulty greater than the NORRA event.

Unlike the NORRA 1000 there is zero downtime in the race.  We at least had each evening to try and make repairs and recover...not so in the B1K.  Glenn and his crew will have to go non-stop for likely close to 48 hours if they hope to finish.  They will also be taking on a course significantly more difficult that what I encountered--bigger rocks, deeper silt, steeper inclines, etc. and will have much fewer "transit" sections that we had in the NORRA event where we covered at least some of the mileage on pavement.

It is a HUGE undertaking, one that defies my imagination even having gotten a taste of what Baja racing entails earlier this year.  If you want to follow along with Glenn you can certainly go to his personal Facebook page and "friend" him to get updates before the race.  The race begins on 11/13 with the motorcycles off the line at 6AM local time and cars/trucks beginning at 12:30PM local time.  Running in the Sportsman 2000 class under #2003, Glenn should be starting darn near the very last of the vehicles to race, probably not until close to 3PM.  It has been years since a Nissan vehicle has even entered a SCORE event, let alone finish a B1K (I believe Bob Graham and his Nissan Titan was the last Nissan vehicle to finish a SCORE event back in '07) and I wish Glenn the best of luck.

If I have any advice coming out of my experiences?  Go slow.  Real slow.  As slow as you think you're going??  Go slower.  Stock or near stock vehicle components are just not meant to endure that terrain for any length of time.  You will get lulled into thinking you can go faster than is actually smart and you will be hauling ass down a fire road like course at 80 mph or better and then you'll run right into a minefield of rocks, ruts and ditches while your adrenalin is still coursing from driving with your hair ablaze...Knowing how to flick that switch between the two types of driving is huge.

Regardless, what you find here in photos are some of the build and development photos of Glenn's Frontier.  Enjoy and drop Glenn a line if you can.  I'm sure he could use the pat on the back and encouragement.

Baja 1000 World of X Games Ratings...

This one came up as a bit of a surprise.  It didn't seem like were a lot of people who knew about Roger Norman getting ESPN/ABC on board with broadcasting the one hour show covering the 2013 Baja 1000.  Not only did it get broadcast once but it got broadcast twice, once on ESPN and again on ABC in the middle of this past Saturday.

The ratings did not end up being spectacular but were again in the same range of recent shortcourse shows on similar networks at similar times--though at the upper end, exceeding many as well.  Additionally while the broadcast was tied for the lowest rating of the weekend, it was tied with a large number of other broadcasts including NBC's coverage of Premier League Soccer.

Another point of note here is that the Red Bull Signature Series Year End Wrapup which contained lots of shortcourse racing as well as the Frozen Rush coverage grabbed a 0.6 rating.  The 0.5 rating means that some 571,000 TVs were tuned into the Baja 1K coverage while some 685,000 were turned to the Red Bull program.  A conservative estimate of 1.1 viewers per TV (my household had three people watching it) grows the audience for each broadcast to 628,100 and 753,500 respectively. So between the two shows, well in excess of 1 million viewers took in offroad racing coverage of some kind this weekend...

TELECAST	DATE	NET	TIME (ET)	RATING
"World Of X Games"	12/28	ABC	4:00-5:00pm	0.5
"ESPN Sports Saturday:	12/28	ABC	5:00-6:00pm	0.7
"NCAA Men of March: Rick Pitino"	12/28	CBS	1:00-1:30pm	0.5
"NCAA Men of March: John Calipari"	12/28	CBS	1:30-2:00pm	0.5
College Basketball: Villanova-Syracuse	12/28	CBS	2:00-4:30pm	1.1
College Basketball: Louisville-Kentucky	12/28	CBS	4:30-6:30pm	2.1
EPL: Sunderland-Cardiff	12/28	NBC	12:00-2:30pm	0.5
U.S. Olympic Trials: Speed Skating	12/28	NBC	3:00-4:00pm	0.7
Golf: Long Drive World Championship	12/28	NBC	4:00-5:00pm	0.6
"Red Bull Signature Series Highlight Show"	12/28	NBC	5:00-6:00pm	0.6
"The NFL Today"	12/29	CBS	12:00-1:00pm	3.0
"NFL on CBS": (regional)	12/29	CBS	1:00-4:15pm	10.7
"NFL on CBS": Ravens-Bengals (62%)	12/29	CBS	4:15-7:30pm	12.0
"Fox NFL Sunday"	12/29	Fox	12:00-1:00pm	3.6
"NFL on Fox": (regional)	12/29	Fox	1:00-4:15pm	10.5
"NFL on Fox": Packers-Bears (63%)	12/29	Fox	4:15-7:30pm	15.2
"U.S. Ski Team 36: Bode Miller"	12/29	NBC	1:00-1:30pm	0.5
U.S. Olympic Trials: Ski Jumping, Nordic Combined	12/29	NBC	1:30-3:00pm	0.9
U.S. Olympic Trials: Speed Skating	12/29	NBC	3:00-4:00pm	1.0
Rolex Grand Slam of Show Jumping	12/29	NBC	4:00-5:00pm	0.8
"Dew Tour Year In Review"	12/29	NBC	4:00-5:00pm	0.6
"Football Night in America"	12/29	NBC	7:30-8:15pm	5.1
"Sunday Night Football": Eagles-Cowboys	12/29	NBC	8:30-11:45pm	16.8