Camburg Racing in the 2007 Baja 1000
This year the Baja 1000 impacted us with mixed emotions. From the beauty of what Baja has to offer to the corruption of the wicked. Camburg racing still had a blast at the 40th running of the SCORE Baja 1000. The race had its challenges for us and tested us most of the way. We brought a planned out crew with 4 chase trucks and 15 dedicated Camburg team mates to get the truck 1300 miles to Cabo. Special thank you to the guys from SoCalTundras! Drivers included Jason Campbell, Kirk Miller from AEM, and myself. Navigators included Justin hinds, Ed Jager from Ironclad, Scott Zindroski, Casey Campbell, Razor Rob Mc Cullough, and Drew Thomas. It was the first time a few of these guys were ever in a race truck and there stories will be told for years! Off the starting line the truck was in limp mode due to an outerwear that was installed to cover the intake hole on the airbox. We were able to get the truck running with normal power at mile 2 on the pavement in Ensenada about 1/2 hour later. After we got the truck running in the right hand turn in the street with the dip in it the driveshaft flange broke. We were able to fix this in about 20 min with the spare on the truck but thought we should have another spare for the next 200 miles we had to do. We called a chase truck to turn around and meet us back in town to load another spare on the race truck. We headed back to the main drag in Ensenada at the start line and waited for our chase truck to arrive. Now 1.5 hours later we were ready to start the Baja 1000 for the second time. The truck was doing a great job through the start and the only obstacles were locals driving home backwards on the race course to get home. This slowed us down for the first 100 miles of the course for our safety. We encountered a few broken down trucks blocking the race course and bottle necks of locals going each direction who would not move out of each others way to let each other by. We figured this cost us an extra hour to hour and a half. We got the truck to Jason Campbell at mile 205 with no flats and no other issues. Jason's job was to get the truck to mile 400+ on the Bay of LA road. He got the truck there the next morning and Kirk Miller drove the truck from this location to Viscano. Kirk at 70 mph towards the end of his leg hit a large metal pole at around 70+ mph bending the stock spindle of the truck. To other damage amazed us as we have seen trucks do the same thing and bend frames, a-arms, etc. I got back into the truck from mile 650 to 982 With Ed Jager and Rob McCullough. We had a great time and a fast section where we were able to catch a few of the guys in our class and pick up our average speed to 32 mph. The 4x4 in this new Tundra and the power of the new 5.7L engine was amazing and we were about the really need it at mile 880. The silt beds in this area were torn up and about the worst silt I have seen since the 2005 Baja 1000. The Tundra worked its way through with no problems until I hit silt so deep the bottom of the truck just high centered. We were stuck for about 2 hours until I ran 2 miles in the dark and got a local with a tractor to come pull us out. On our way again we made it to mile 982 at around 11 pm Wednesday night and Jason was off to finish this 40th Baja 1000. Jason got to mile 1034 when the engine lost power and made screeching noises. We called it a day at this time due to engine damage. The next day at 7 am we drained the oil in a plastic bag and box, installed a new oil filter and added new oil. we inspected the air filter and intake tube and found no dirt at all in the intake tube shock off the filter and re installed it. At this time we do not know what caused the damage as the truck is still on the trailer and we have been working on the EDGE race truck to battle for first place overall in the BITD 7200 mini TT class.
Baja Racing News.com