SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/693984
SJ: At the SCORE Baja 500 Qualifying you ended up in 13th place. What happened? Vildosola: There are two things that happened in qualifying. First, we are probably one of the only teams to run race setup during qualifying, except for the 1000. We didn't run an underdrive or a different gear ratio; we ran our standard transmission and set-up on everything. We wanted to be conservative in qualifying. We don't think that qualifying first or second is necessarily so good, but we do want to be in the top five. Secondly, we have been playing with a lot of electronics in the car and one of our setups was wrong. It ended up costing us about 25 seconds. We know the mistake we made and it won't happen again. And now, after winning this race from 13th position, people are going to say Tavo likes starting in the back. I hate starting in the back! I hate going through the dust. But one thing I think works in our favor when starting back is that everyone on the team is more mentally sharp. They know it's going to be more difficult. We all feel like underdogs coming from the back mentality, and it works. It worked in San Felipe, it worked at the 1000 and it worked here. I don't like it but you can't argue with the results. SJ: It seems that you had the perfect race, tell us about it. Vildosola: Thankfully there were no problems, which is basically the only way you can win these days. I knew that passing someone in the first 40 to 70 miles was going to be really difficult. I really took it easy and was patient. I didn't catch anyone before K77. After that I knew the race course opened up a bit and we were able to sneak up on TJ Flores, and passed him coming out of the pits. As soon as we came down the summit, the biggest issue for everyone was the heat. For us, thankfully, the Trophy Truck ran great through all the heat in the northern section of the course down to San Felipe. We were hot, thirsty and cramping up. It was miserable, but the truck was running great and we were able to make up time in that section. We knew we could push hard on the San Felipe loop. Just south of Borrego we were five minutes behind Menzies, and we pushed really hard. I know the San Felipe terrain like the back of my hand so that was an advantage for us. When we got back on the VILDOSOLA BEGAN THE SCORE BAJA 500 IN 13TH PLACE, BUT THAT DIDN'T DETER HIM AND HIS TEAM FROM FOCUSING ON THE RACE AHEAD. 044 SCORE JOURNAL