2014: Class 10 Came Down to Seventeen Seconds at San Felipe

Rain delayed the start of the 28th Tecate SCORE San Felipe 250 by more than two hours. Officials cut and re-routed the course. What was left measured about 219 miles of rock, sand, mud and silt around San Felipe, on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja.

Cody Robinson of El Centro, California, and Roberto Romo of Mexicali, Mexico, lined up in Class 10 for the first time. They had already won at San Felipe in the smaller 1600 class. Now they were in a Racer Engineering Chevy open wheel car, No. 1016, built in their own shop and wearing Radar tires.

Their official time was 4 hours, 8 minutes and 24 seconds. That was good for about 53 miles an hour and eleventh among all the pro cars and trucks on the day.

Ricardo Malo of Mexicali was second in Class 10 on official time, seventeen seconds slower in an AlumiCraft Chevy. Twenty one Class 10 cars had started. Sixteen were scored as finishers. Nobody else got within a minute of those two on the clock.

"The course had just about everything you could throw at us," Robinson said afterward. "Rocks, sand, plenty of mud and even some silt."

Romo had built the car as well as driven it. "Winning the Class 10 San Felipe 250 as a driver is huge," he said. "But to build the buggy and win in our first outing... I'm stoked."

Class 10 is SCORE's limited open wheel class, a long way from the unlimited Trophy Trucks that owned the overall that weekend. For one March afternoon in San Felipe, seventeen seconds was the whole race.