SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1443954
SCORE 2021 PRO MOTO 60 CHAMPION Scott McIntosh leads his team to the SCORE 2021 Pro Moto 60 Championship By Stuart Bourdon Photography by Art Eugenio “We started racing SCORE back in 2016 as a bucket list sort of deal,” said Scott McIntosh, 2021 SCORE Off-Road Racing Pro Moto 60 Class Champion. “Our team’s first race was the 2016 SCORE San Felipe 250, and we finished. That felt good. In 2017, we did the SCORE Baja 1000 and that went pretty well, even though we blew the motor late in the race and had to push the bike across the finish line.” With McIntosh (Rider of Record) and his team feeling like they were headed in the right direction, they decided to do the 2018 SCORE Baja 500 and Baja 1000. They finished both. “The next year, (2019) we ran the SCORE San Felipe 250 again and got our first podium finish. That felt incredibly good.” In 2020, the team ran all the races in the Sportsman class, got second place at the SCORE Baja 1000, and ended up third in class points. Now they were hooked. The 2021 SCORE Off-Road Racing season began for McIntosh’s 628x team with the SCORE San Felipe 250. While it’s the shortest race in the series, it turned out to be one of the most rugged courses the event offered to racers in many years. “Every Baja race is brutal, but the 2021 SCORE San Felipe 250 race was really tough on the bike and rider,” said McIntosh. “During the SCORE Baja 500 and the Baja 400, it would have saved us a lot of grief to run ahead of the trucks because they tore up the course so much that it was difficult for us to just finish those races.” However, no other 2021 SCORE race presented McIntosh and his team with the challenges they encountered in the SCORE Baja 1000. “There were ‘gotcha’ moments in every race, but the Baja 1000 was definitely the one that made me think we might not get through this,” he said. For example, McIntosh told of a couple of times when the team was sure the bike was not going to make it. “When I got the bike at mile 937, I was told that if it stopped running it might never start again. We thought the motor was toast– it was losing oil, it was losing water, and it was overheating.” McIntosh knew the first hill on his section was brutal and would likely kill the bike, so they had better fix it there. “We found the water leak. It was a hose with a hole in it,” said McIntosh. “But when we fixed it, we found that the O-ring in one of the flanges the hose was connected to had melted, and it was leaking too.” They had to take parts off one of the pre-runner bikes to repair the race bike, change the oil, put in fresh water, and replace a spark plug. After all that, the bike was still so hot that it wouldn’t start. They had to sit tight for about an hour and let the bike cool down. Going into the SCORE Baja 1000, Scott’s team was looking good towards earning points towards a championship, because they only had to get starting points to win it. “That’s not the way we were going to play it. We were there to finish,” said McIntosh. “The 2018 and 2019 championship teams had come back for the 2021 race to try to kick our butts, and we were just not going to have that. We were not there to just show up.” “For us, it’s all about finishing something you’ve started. When we began racing in Baja, we just wanted to get a finish. That was our goal. We got that, and then we got a second, and then we got a podium, and then we got a third in class points. We never thought we would win the class championship, but we did. It was exciting to win the class championship this year, and we are going to go after it again next year.” SJ