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Orange supervisor will race through the desert Date published: 10/18/2009
BY ROBIN KNEPPER There are birthday celebrations and there are birthday experiences. It's not unusual to choose the latter as we get older. But Zack Burkett may be going over the top. He has chosen the experience of racing through the Mexican desert in an extremely modified Volkswagen over getting a new pair of socks. The Orange County supervisor, who will turn 70 in January, will commemorate his birthday by competing in the Baja 1,000, the world's longest point-to-point race. "I always wanted to run in a race, and I figured if I didn't do it, now I'd have trouble doing it later," he said. "My wife asked why I didn't do something sane like jumping out of an airplane." The race will run for 31 hours Nov. 19-22 over a 673-mile loop course that begins and ends in Ensenada on the Baja peninsula--that long piece of land that appears to be Southern California but is really part of Mexico. Burkett heads the Still Crazy Racing team that includes his 45-year-old son, who is the Texas amateur cross-country motorcycle-racing champion in the over-40 category. "I call him Zack Burkett the Lesser, but he kinda resents it," his father said with a laugh. The two Zacks will share the time behind the wheel of the custom-built "Baja Bug" that the elder Burkett spent 18 months building. He put the car through a test race last weekend and had no major problems with the Class 9 short-wheelbase vehicle, which uses a VW drive train on a custom-built race car chassis. "We rolled it during the test run," Burkett said, "but we drove it away. Since then we've been fixing and modifying it." In an earlier test, he said, he found that he had put the switches out of his reach when he was strapped into the required five-point safety harness. Comfort has been an issue, too. "It can get painful after a few hours of bouncing through the dirt," he said. "As a kid, I did hot-rodding, but nothing like this. I went to the Baja 1,000 last year and talked to people there to see what we would be getting into. "About 30 miles of the race was on the road, but the rest is through the desert. We'll test the car in the desert when we get out there and see if there are things we still need to figure out." But it's not just a lark for the birthday boy. "When we started this, I was hoping just to finish, but now I think we have a good shot at winning our class," he said. Robin Knepper: 540/972-5701
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