By Around 200 miles south of the Baja International Tourist-Cup road-race circuit lies the beautiful Rancho Meling which is used as base camp for the San Pedro Martir Hill Climb, the longest hill climb in the world.
The 30km (kilometres) course of over 150 turns snakes its way up through the San Pedro Martir mountain range, finishing at an elevation of over 2500 meters.
After a practice day which includes 4 runs the race day consisted of two runs, with the best time from each competitor deciding the class & overall winners.
This year’s Overall winner & fastest Heavyweight award went to, John Magnusson from San Diego on his Ducati Multistrada V4, via a lap time of 16 minutes 14 seconds.
Unfortunately, a slide off in practice for Eric Wilson resulted in a broken collar bone and that ruled him out of the race day action and a chance to improve on his 15 minutes 11 seconds time from 2021.
Second place, fastest Superstock & fastest newcomer was Wilson’s good friend Dave Hewson on the Dave Thomas Racing BMW S1000rr with a time of 16 minutes 21 seconds.
Third place went to Wade Boyd on his Yamaha R1 with a time of 16 minutes 23 seconds.
Other class winners were:
Superbike: Eric Foutch 17 minutes 09 seconds
Supersport: Chris Eberz 20 minutes 19 seconds
Middleweight: Jack Chamberlain 16 minutes 48 seconds
Lightweight: Andrew Gawer 16 minutes 47 seconds
Ultra-Lightweight: Matt Young 18 minutes 10 seconds
Overall winner on four wheels was Dodge Viper driver Rey Guerrero, lapping at 16 minutes 22 seconds.
Again Pedro (Vargas Valdez) & his team of volunteer motorsport enthusiasts put on a fantastic event and plans are in place for a bigger & better event in 2023.
The aforementioned Dave Hewson & Eric Wilson already have plans to return next year, check out the teams YouTube channel Dave Hewson Road Racing Obsession Engineering, over the next few weeks for all the action from Baja and help raise the profile of these awesome events.
Photo courtesy of Eric Wilson
Words by Eric Wilson
