Jack Baruth

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Jack Baruth

Testing the Spyker C8 Spyder
Personal information
Full name	John C Baruth II
Nickname	"Squid"
Date of birth	November 8, 1971 (1971-11-08) (age 36)
Country	United States
Height	6'2"
Weight	230lb
Team information
Current team	Retired
Discipline	Bicycle Motocross (BMX)
Role	Racer
Rider type	Off Road
Amateur team(s)
1986-1991	Turbos/JJP Roadscum
Professional team(s)
1992-2003	Squidco
Infobox last updated on:
October 15, 2007

Jack Baruth (born November 8, 1971) is a former professional BMX racer, cycling instructor, and amateur race car driver perhaps best known for writing the "One Racer's Perspective" and "BMX Basics" columns for the National Bicycle League, and for maintaining the www.bmxbasics.org website. He was born at Brooklyn, New York, USA and lives in Powell, Ohio. ^[1] In 2007, he drove the #68 Ford Focus 2.3 ST sedan for Leo Capaldi Racing in the National Auto Sport Association's Spec Focus series ^[2] and campaigned a Porsche Boxster S "550 Spyder" edition in the Sports Car Club of America National Solo and ProSolo Tours, finishing the year by driving a borrowed RX-8 at the Solo National Championships in Topeka, KS and placing 662nd out of 1,155 entrants. ^[3]

In 2008, he will be racing for Green Baron Motorsports in NASA's "Performance Touring E" class. The GBMS car is a 1994-build Neon ACR with an uninterrupted fourteen-year history of Showroom Stock and Improved Touring racing under the ownership of Dean Tener, Lambros Race Engineering, and Jeff Seelig. The complete history of the car is available on the neons.org forum. It was one of very few "true" ACR Neons built in 1994 and was not street licensed. ^[4]

Contents 1 Motorsports career 2 Cycling career 3 BMX writing and training career 4 BMX Business Career 5 Additional Website Contributions 6 External links 7 References

[edit] Motorsports career

In the past two years, Baruth has four podium finishes in four races in Spec Focus and one podium in one race in the Camaro-Mustang-Challenge, driving the Bulldog Racing #16 Mustang Cobra. ^[5] He has several regional wins in the "A Stock" class, and mid-pack PAX finishes on the National Tour. ^[6] In August of 2006, he was the winner of the AMG Challenge held at Autobahn Country Club, beating sixty-three other competitors in identical C55 AMG sedans. ^[7] In May of 2006, he and co-driver Brian Makse won the Alternative Fuel class of the Cannonball One Lap of America. ^[8] He is widely considered the "other" Baruth in autocross competition.

On September 16, 2007, Baruth finished second in the NASA National Championship (Spec Focus class), 4.9 seconds behind the winner (Craig Capaldi) but was penalized thirty-eight seconds and reassigned to third as a result of "avoidable contact" in a passing maneuver. ^[2]

Baruth was a driver for the "Bernie's Revenge" team which won the 24 Hours of LeMons held at Flat Rock Speedway September 29-30, 2007, beginning his stint of the 24-hour race at 8:30 am on Sunday. After passing the first-place Mazda RX-7 run by Car and Driver magazine, he built up a sixty-one-lap lead before stepping out of the car (a Toyota Supra) at 10:55am to hand it over to co-driver Faisal Ahmad. ^[9]

He is expected to serve as a guest driver in the 2008 24 Hours of Lemons at Altamont for the Jalopnik team, along with fellow auto journalists "Murilee Martin" and Johnny Lieberman, in the "Black Metal V8olvo". His "black metal name" is "Count Chocunakch", presumably in reference to Count Grisnakch, the Black Metal musician who stabbed a man in the head for "playing weak metal". ^[10]

[edit] Cycling career

Baruth began racing BMX locally in the 1986 season and won several races in the two following years. In 1988, he was involved in a cycling accident in which he broke his right leg, right hip, second cervical vertebrae, and "a variety of other bones" according to the BMX Basics site, resulting in multiple surgeries to preserve the use of his legs. After an eighteen-month recovery period, he resumed competing in the 17 and over Expert class with limited success. With the removal of his Grosse-Kempf femur implant some months later, Baruth was able again to win local Expert-class races.^[11]

Baruth applied for his NBL Superclass license in 1992 and raced as a professional rider for eleven years in the NBL. He received his A Pro license from the American Bicycle Association in 1999. His last major race as a professional rider was the ABA National at Rockford, IL in 2003, where he finished second to last. A consistent inability to achieve his desired results may have combined with persistent pain and physical difficulties to convince Baruth to retire, which he did some months later, stating on his website in February of 2004:

"We'll make this quick. I had a great time at the most recent Old Man Skatepark Trip but it took me four hours to recover from every hour I spent in the half-pipe, and three weeks later I'm still limping up the stairs, which has forced me to accept something I have been denying for two years now, namely that I no longer have enough in my knees left to race, even after last year's surgery. My career, such as it has been, is over... It has been seventeen years since I first picked up a BMX bike. They have been good years and I wouldn't trade them. I hope you all feel the same way." ^[12]

As a professional BMX rider, Baruth never achieved any measure of consistent success. He stated in print more than once that his primary reason for turning Pro was to understand the sport better and to provide more in-depth coverage in his race reporting. ^[13]

[edit] BMX writing and training career

In 1991, while training with National Bicycle League field director Scott Stevenson, Baruth was introduced to "Bicycles Today" editor Jill Bable (later Jill Geiger) who hired him to write the "One Racer's Perspective" column for the magazine. The column ran for approximately twenty months, including two 5,000-word semi-autobiographical short stories and covering a variety of topics which were unusual for the time. Following an appeal by Baruth in 2001 to NBL racers to dig up any available copies of the 1991-1992 articles, several of the original columns were converted to digital format and archived at The Columns Page.

Baruth also wrote coverage for many of the National race events during the same period. This coverage was non-traditional in the sense that not all race results were reported, with the space thus recovered used for long digressions on topics such as Baruth's experiences working for David Hobbs and a series of oblique references to the novels of John Updike. NBL director Bob Tedesco terminated Baruth's contributions in January of 1993. A series entitled "Product Reviews" was stillborn after the third issue in which it appeared due to manufacturer complaints.

In 1994, Baruth was rehired to write the series "BMX Basics" under the nom de plume of "Jim Boswell", meant to refer to James Boswell, the biographer of 18th Century lexicographer Samuel Johnson. The "BMX Basics" series ran for approximately forty-two issues before Baruth resigned the column, stating his intent to quit BMX.

However, this determination to quit did not last as it quickly became apparent to Baruth that the Website containing his columns, which he had started in June of 1997 under the URL http://www.infinet.com/~jboswell, was considerably more popular than "BMX Today" magazine, which was limited in circulation to NBL members and BMX-friendly bicycle shops. In 1999 Baruth registered the site BMX Basics and added one column a month for the next four years. The site claims to serve over 500,000 articles per month and frequently appears on the top of Google search rankings for terms such as "BMX bunnyhop". The WikiHow entry [www.wikihow.com/Bunny-Hop-on-a-Bike Bunny Hop On A Bike] uses content from the site. Articles from "BMX Basics" have been independently translated into, and discussed in, multiple foreign languages including Spanish, French, German, and Russian. ^{[14] [15] [16]}

Baruth claims to be the world's most popular BMX author, a claim that must be viewed in light of the fact that there are very few competitors for this particular distinction.

All of Baruth's articles continue to be available via the BMX Basics website. In 2003, English cyclist Damien Norris created a 591-page PDF with edited versions of all the "BMX Basics" columns printed up to that time. It can be found at http://www.bmxbasics.org/newer/bmxbasics.pdf.

[edit] BMX Business Career

During 1992, Baruth owned and operated a mail-order bicycle shop which did business as "Squidco" and which placed advertisements in "BMX Today" as well as a variety of "zines" published regionally. There is no evidence that Squidco operated a retail facility or did any significant amount of business. Baruth's current consulting business, Calamarco, appears to bear no resemblance to Squidco outside of the name.

Baruth served as a product design consultant and copywriter for a variety of BMX companies between 1990 and 2000, including Badd & Co., DK Bicycles, Hyper Bicycles, and Supercross BMX. He was the most notable public supporter of the Tange "Switchblade" forks.

The "BMX Basics" website famously accepts no advertising or donations and refuses to endorse any particular company or product.

[edit] Additional Website Contributions

Baruth is the hosting provider for, and occasional contributor to,two other well-known BMX sites: Rich Hetzel's BMX Basement and professional racer Javier Martin Larrea's Jamalama! international racing blog.

[edit] External links

• Official site

[edit] References