Story By: HALEIGH JORDAN / MIKE MARSAL RACING – SAN FELIPE, MEXICO – Mike Marsal opened up the SCORE World Desert Championship season this week with the King Shocks 36th SCORE San Felipe 250 fueled by Baja Vida.
Marsal piloted the No. 236 Spy+ Trophy Truck Spec entry with navigator Hudson Hall as the duo opened up the four-event 2023 SCORE championship campaign.
Marsal qualified on Wednesday before Saturday’s race. Ending with a 6:53.786-second qualifying time, Marsal qualified 25th out of 43 entries on a five mile desert course that is separate from the course used for the race.
The original course was set with a 263.50 mile course over a summit, but on Friday the course was reconfigured to go around the Mini Summit due to the danger of the summit for the bigger vehicles. The change added 19.01 miles to the original course for all four wheel vehicles making the race distance 282.51 miles of tough terrain to cover.
Rolling off the starting line a little after 10:00 am PT on Saturday, Marsal took off into the Baja California, Mexico desert. Over the following five hours and fifteen minutes, Marsal and Hall took on every thing that the desert had to challenge them.
“It was a rough race,” said Marsal. “At RM 3 the coms line wiggled out from behind the dash and the navigation screen on the drivers side failed. We were forced to run the race with no communication and no navigation screen on the drivers side. I am thankful we had so many pre-run miles, it really demonstrated just how familiar we were with the course. San Felipe is all about finding the lines and we did exactly that. The time and preparation we put into the race was apparent.”
The Trophy Truck Spec kept an average moving speed of 48.5 mph, Marsal had passed 20 Trophy Truck Spec competitors on the way to taking a strong fifth place class finish to open up the championship campaign.
“We started in the middle of the pack and I think we worked our way up a decent amount on corrected time,” continued Marsal. “The truck ran flawlessly. It has been an awesome race. There was a lot to get through and we hit a couple trees, took out a cactus, but all in all, the Spy truck is in one piece. I want to thank the entire crew and the Grabowski brothers for doing all the pits, the people of Baja and my family, wife and kids back home.”
Marsal will be back in action May 31 – June 4th for the BFGoodrich 55th SCORE Baja 500 presented by 4Wheel Parts.