Total Legend Finishes Baja 1000 With Mum on FaceTime!
A competitor in the Baja 1000 Rally has completed the event with a StarLink panel gaffer taped to his helmet so he could FaceTime his mum during the race!
The internet has a new hero this week, after a competitor in the Baja 1000 off-road rally completed the race while FaceTiming his mum via a phone on his chest!
The racer in question is David Hunter, number 279X in the famous America race. He was riding in the Sortman class for motorcycles, which limits bikes to being over 200cc, and allows suspension modifications. It’s a class that is open to non-pro riders of any age, and while David must be a fairly accomplished pilot, it seems he wanted to be able to share every rock, bolder, and mile of the race with his mum!
With the Baja 1000 taking many hours to complete though, simply slotting the phone on his chest and pressing ‘dial’ wasn’t going to be enough, so to keep his phone juiced up and his mother on the call, David and his team crudely gaffer taped a powerpack to the tail unit of his rally-prepped Sherco.
And it wasn’t just keeping the phone powered up that was an issue, racing across the desert meant that signal to keep the phone connected was patchy at best, so David and the team (and Elon Musk apparently!) came up with a clever plan to keep him connected. On the top of David’s helmet is what appears to be a solar panel, although the item located on the rider’s bonce is actually a receiver for the StarLink satellite internet system. It allowed David to connect to the internet using Elon Musk's low-orbit satellite system, keeping him connected so his mum could watch him cross the finish line.
So there we have it, not all heroes wear capes - some ride a Sherco rally bike with a StarLink internet panel strapped to their head - and that is a sentence I never thought I’d get to write!
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
