The Baja 500 was held a while ago, but with SCORE handing out penalties like no one else’s business, it has taken a while for the race’s sanctioning body to fully release the official finishing times for the event.
We had previously run a story on Joe Bacal, the first racer to bring a Lexus SUV into the competitive off-road mix. A survivor of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Bacal took his Lexus LX 570 to a 1st-place finish in the Stock Full class with an initially reported time of 16 hours, 22 minutes, and 26 seconds. While Bacal was pretty much guaranteed first, as two other competitors in the class registered DNFs, we wanted to see what his final time would be. In light of penalties substantially changing the final finishing orders of other racers, we give our kudos to Bacal for running a penalty-free race.
Incurred penalties add minutes to the racer’s initial finishing times, with such violations including course deviations, insufficient data, illegal pit, no highway data, and highway speed (speeding). Two unlucky racers managed to get hit with a “no tracking device at finish line,” which ended up adding 200 and 540 minutes to both racers’ respective times. With the high number of penalties in the 2009 Baja 500, nine classes, so far, have seen their 1st-place finishers change due to the addition of penalty time.