From when I was a young boy growing up on a farm, I was racing cows, bikes, horses, etc. … then one day I found an old motorcycle in the barn, fixed it and started off road riding. I was 10 years old. Then, I built a dune buggy with milk crates for seats and a Chock full o’Nuts can as a gas tank! I just kept building and racing: snow mobiles, boats, jet skis, sail boats, golf carts (hey, it was the ’70s), tractors, trucks, cars and even cow tipping … ooo, and there was a short time with airplanes, too. I’d race anything with an engine. I would take my kids riding and they always had a blast riding in the dune buggy, then one day, I wanted to do something that they would remember for the rest of their lives. It was also a dream of mine: to race in the Baja 1000 (and no I had never seen “Dust to Glory,” but I had seen “Smokey & the Bandit” and “Cannonball Run” – they had a big impact on me and a valuable lesson: if you’re going to try a movie stunt don’t use your own vehicle unless you race prepped it! lol

So with a lot of help from Bill Savage and Chris Doneza we started re-building the car for the race, we made a few mistakes, and we were just on the wrong coast! We spent 4 straight days fixing the car before we headed off to Baja. We passed tech with a lot of help from the Cops racing team and the Penhall’s.

My kids were the most excited about sitting in B.J. Baldwin’s Trophy truck, we made a lot of friends, it was like joining a big bowling league, but with race cars instead of balls! We fit right in! Not being as well prepared as we should have, no chase team, no pre-run, the car had 1 hour of running time, half of that on the streets of Mexico and most importantly: we had never raced professionally.

Jim Gram showed us how to use the navigation system and radio while in the starting line. At the start line Bill Savage leans into the car and asked if we were asleep and helped us put on our seat belts. I said that we never used them before … and off we went. After a while, the float in the carburetor stuck open, so it was wide open or nothing. We burned out a fuel pump, got stuck on top of a mountain, where we were helped by a man named, Rico, and his friends. We ran like that until we stopped at Baja Pits where they replaced the fuel pump and tightened down the body – everything comes lose in Baja. Still pushing onward, now deep into the dark nights of Baja, we blew the clutch and could no longer shift, yet we still continued on until we ripped out a CV joint. We were done! Unbeknownst to us, the friends we made along the way were going to come save us. We were stranded on the race course and we heard Baja Bill’s voice come over the IRC unit. He was able to get two teams on their way to rescue us, one was BF Goodrich towing. They towed us, fed us and even fixed the CV joint!! BF Goodrich offered us pit services for the following year and by the end of the race we were ahead of over 50 other seasoned races and that’s how it all began,

– Calore Motorsports Racing Team