SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1465106
BOLTON EARNS FIRST 2022 PRO UTV N/A WIN Father-And-Son Team Stand Atop The Podium At 2022 SCORE San Felipe 250 By Stuart Bourdon Photos by Get Some Photo After taking first place in the very competitive Pro UTV NA class at the 2022 King Shocks 35th SCORE San Felipe 250, Joe Bolton told us, “We didn’t have a perfect car, but it was good enough to win. It was especially satisfying because this year my son Austin drove the second half of the race and stood on the podium with me.” Competing in and winning SCORE races since the 1980s on motorcycles (for a while on a factory-supported Honda CR250), Joe began racing cars (Polaris RZRs) in recent years and described the San Felipe race as “always the one that seems to really beat up cars and bikes. This year we blew the shocks out in the first 30 miles. The rest of the race was a struggle, but every time we thought we should change them, we realized we couldn’t spare the time. We just kept going as fast as we could.” Joe started the race with navigation and comms-expert Matt Banuelos in the second seat. “We had already passed the cars ahead of us in our class early in the race, but it wasn’t long before some of those cars got ahead of us.” Joe recalled, “There wasn’t much we could do about it because our shocks were so bad that we couldn’t push the car any harder.” Austin was able to get past other class contenders who were having mechanical troubles of their own in the second half of the race. The team encountered problems with the GPS at one point during the race, but navigator Matt was smart enough to have a backup card in his pocket and reloaded the GPS waypoints while they were driving. They did miss one waypoint during the reload and were dinged with a 10-minute penalty, but Austin brought the car across the finish line with an 18-minute lead, handing the team a first-place Pro UTV NA class finish in the first race of the 2022 SCORE Off-Road Racing season. SJ