El Diablo Run 2019 Down n' Dirty After Action Report

Thirteen years after its inception, our freakout Mexican hell ride has changed in a lot of ways and stayed exactly the same in others. The days of it being 60 people on old bikes are long gone, but the rough roads and harsh terrain haven’t changed a bit. We’ve always said Mexican miles are worth about three-to-one US miles since they humble even the most seasoned riders every time.

This year there were plenty of choppers and customs mixed with regular modern bikes. Ironically our trailer was full of late model bikes from various riders picked up along the way home. Everyone in our group on old bikes made it the entire way, save one lonely friend who’s pan gave up the ghost around Julian on the way home.

Bike games and the Circle of Death race were well attended and we had more participating riders than ever before. The heats and mains for Swingarm and Rigid classes had dudes sending it with no regard for being able to ride home on the same machine. No trailer queens or ringers here–people rode to the event and raced the same bikes. One major change we were unsure of this year was creating a bike show on the Malecon with our friends from Choppers Magazine. On Sunday, the beachfront street was packed with a wild variety of bikes all afternoon.

This was the first time we actually worked with the city of San Felipe and we were stoked, if not a little surprised that they love it when the EDR comes to town. They totally understand that bike riders spend plenty of pesos, and besides, the sleepy little fishing town loves to party! 

The EDR has grown so big now that people are staying all over town in Air BNB’s, hotels, other campgrounds, etc so it’s easy to miss out on some of the better bikes. By having the bike show downtown it allowed our riders to mingle with locals who were stoked to see the crusty creations up close. It also gave us all a consolidated location to see all the cool bikes that showed up. You can bet we will do this again in 2021 and it’ll be even better organized now that the city sees the size of the crowd we can generate.

Monday morning, our crew split into a few smaller groups and took several different ways home. That’s one of the beauties of this trip, there are a couple different routes that offer a wide variety of scenery,–coastal, mountain passes, etc that are even better than the standard published route.

We’d like to say thanks to all of our employees, friends, and family that pull this thing together. It takes an awesome team to make an event like this happen, and we’ve got one! Also, thanks to everyone who rode in from all over. It was truly a melting pot with riders from Canada, Germany, Iceland, Mexico and all parts of the USA.

Adios Amigos, we’ll see you freaks again in two years!