SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1522709
TRADING PAINT Justin Davis Fought Hard For The SCORE TT Spec Win Story by Stuart Bourdon Photos by Get Some Photo Justin Davis was the Spec TT Class winner at the BFGoodrich Tires 56th SCORE Baja 500. He had a relatively clean run to the finish, but definitely wouldn’t call it easy. Justin talked about his day in the driver’s seat, “We qualified second in our class, which we felt good about since we knew this race would be pretty dusty. We hoped that would limit our chances of getting stuck in log jams that can happen in the early stages of these races. However, as soon as we took off, and we’re still trying to figure out why, we felt a severe vibration every time the truck’s suspension would compress. We pulled into our pit at Ojos to see if anything was hanging down or broken. Everything looked good, so we just kept driving and it just kept shaking. At that point, we decided to go until it doesn’t go anymore, and then we’ll know what broke.” “When we pulled into Ojos to do the visual, we got passed by Sampietro and ‘Apdaly’ Lopez (Davis had already passed Lopez earlier). The dust was terrible, just not moving, sitting in all the valleys. We played it smart and didn’t get in a hurry. We were passing other slower trucks but could barely see ahead of us and had to be careful to not hit rocks or sticks while getting around them.” Eventually, Davis caught up to Lopez going over the summit. “We were right on his bumper for the longest time. I took one line, and he went a different way. We came door to door, but he wasn’t going to move. I would have done the same. I had to chase him through all the washes after the summit, but it was so dusty that I didn’t know we had passed him. It must have been somewhere before mile 175 when we pulled into our pit because they told us we were the first Spec truck on the road.” When Davis got to Uruapan, we began to push a little harder because he thought there wasn’t much (elapsed) time between them and Herbst. He had already planned to do that if it was close. Davis said, “I’ve made that mistake before close to the finish line and lost the win, and with only about 40 miles to go, I’m not going to let someone get me there. There were a lot of jumps on the last bit of the racecourse and the truck was still making grinding noises. We were trying to be smart, but not lose too much speed. At that time, we didn’t know that Herbst was 15 minutes behind us. Then we got to the speed zone, and I thought ‘whew, we got through all that’ and cruised to the finish.” Davis told us, “This class (Spec TT) is so competitive because everybody can run hard, and everybody’s got very similar equipment. It’s not about two-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive. Essentially we all have the same truck. You can’t make mistakes. That’s what gets you. I had won this race before, so we knew the pace to run and what to do. We just had to execute and have no issues. The truck and the team performed perfectly, and after three years of trying to win this race again, we finally did it. That’s what it takes in this class. You can’t have issues.” SJ