This is a recap of the Furnace Creek 508 race. Franz and Paul on a two man relay team. with the team totem “Prairie Dog”. Russ and Sheila were our crew. We all drove down together to Santa Clarita on Friday, October 5th and had our vehicle and bikes inspected.

We made our way over to the race start on Saturday morning. The race started from the front of the Hilton Garden in Santa Clarita. Our team is shown below, Paul, Franz (ready to ride) and our crew Russ and Sheila.

Franz started at 9 am with a police escort through the streets of Santa Clairta. This stage involved 83 miles with over 6,000 feet of climbing, as shown by the profile below. The route took us through Majave to California City.

This image gives you a better feel of the route.

The van went ahead and Paul got ready to ride when Franz arrived at 1:54 pm.

Franz averaged 17 mph. He briefly passed Joe. from the Nutcracker team, towards the end, but Joe would have nothing with that so Joe went ahead and came in one minute before Franz

Paul then next took the baton for Stage 2.

Paul had a 70 mile route, with 4200 feet of climbing as shown with this profile.

Paul made good time on his route, averaging 17.0 mph.

We stop just before Trona because at 6 pm, we had to change to night time rules and follow the rider. We came to the time station at 6:02 pm. Since we were in night time rules, Franz had all his bike clothes and shoes on and ready to role so we were able to make a quick switch over at Trona. During the night the rider can not go ahead of the van. Franz then took off toward Furnace Creek for Stage 3 about two minutes after Paul arrived. See the next blog entry for Stages 3 and 4.

Categories: Furnace Creek 508