Yuma native calls Baja 500 win a ‘dream come true’

26-year-old Juan Dominguez won 515-mile race in Ensenada, Mexico on June 3

Other than a crash into a barbed-wire fence, it was pretty much a perfect race for Juan Dominguez.

Dominguez, a 26-year-old Yuma native who works a day job as an accountant, won his first-ever Baja 500 on June 3.

“It was like a dream come true,” Dominguez said. “We worked hard. We ran the (Baja) 250 back in April and started working toward this one since. We spent countless hours wrenching on the bike, getting it ready for 500 miles of off-road racing. You’ve got to go through everything; you’ve got to be perfect.”

The Baja 500 is a 515-mile race on a looped track that begins and ends in Ensenada, Mexico, in Baja California. Most of the course goes through rugged, off-road terrain. Some of it actually does go onto Mexico’s road, which are not shut down for the race, meaning the racers are tasked with weaving through normal traffic.

Dominguez races a Sportsman quad, which is in the second of two groups in the Baja 500 — the other being trophy trucks. The quad division had 19 entrants, six of which did not finish.

Dominguez and his team won with a time of 12 hours and 53 minutes, which was 49 minutes faster than the second-place finishers.

Dominguez began riding quads when he was 15 years old and attended his first Baja 500 as a spectator shortly thereafter.

“My family and cousins, everybody, friends, they were into these races,” Dominguez said.

He participated in his first race when he was 18 and his first Baja 500 two years later. He has finished in second or third place often and has won the quad class before, but the 2017 race was his first time winning the overall group.

After his day as an accountant