A pillar of any good relationship is communication. But Kaden Wells of Hurricane couldn’t hear his fiancee Emma Cornwell. Not in an abstract, psychoanalytical way. Rather, she was sitting in the passenger seat of their side-by-side not even a foot away from him and her lips were moving, but the tones of her voice were imperceptible.
Considering they were in the middle of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and considering she was his navigator, it wasn’t Wells’ ideal way to embark on the second half of a 21-hour road trip, much of which would be in the dark along cow paths. Adding to his vexation, they had no time to work out the problem.
They were competing in the Baja 1000, one of the world’s most prestigious and challenging off-road races. With a strong finish — probably no worse than second among UTVs — Wells and Cornwell could lay claim to overall class and UTV titles in the SCORE International series, which includes three Baja races and the San Felipe 250. Plus, if everything went well, they could be driving the first UTV to win the overall four-wheel-drive series title in almost a decade.
But everything wasn’t going well. Because the race typically takes between 20 and 30 hours to complete, and because it requires such intense focus, Wells and Cornwell had handed the keys to another pair of drivers for about four hours so the couple could recharge. During that time, those alternate drivers had then been the victims of a teensy run-in with another racer.
“I got in the car and I told that guy, ‘Hey, look at the exhaust. It sounds really loud,’” Wells recalled. “And then he’s like, ‘You don’t have an exhaust on there.’”
Wells said the car was vibrating so much it “was rattling your eyes, almost.” Next to him, Cornwell was blasting KISS’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” through their helmet speakers to get them pumped up for their second stint. He couldn’t hear a single note.
And that was just the beginning of their troubles.
“It’s got to be a win.”
Wells and Cornwell can seem like an odd couple. She’s a California girl who played water polo for USC. When she’s not racing, she works as a physician’s assistant at a med spa, giving Botox injections and other aesthetic treatments. He’s a construction worker who has been racing most of his life in the southern Utah desert. He started with BMX and then moved into UTVs when he was 17.
Racing brought them together.
(Courtesy of Kaden Wells) Emma Cornwell, left, celebrates a SCORE International Baja race finish with her father, Dan, and fiancee Kaden Wells. The couple, driving for Risq Racing out of Hurricane, drove the first UTV in nearly a decade to win the SCORE International overall four-wheel-drive season title after they finished second in the Baja 1000 in November 2025.
Cornwell’s father, Dan, had been a consistent and successful off-road buggy racer in the 1970s and ’80s before becoming the SCORE International technical director around 2014. He recently started getting back into racing, and he enlisted his more social-media-savvy daughter to help him track down parts online. In exchange, he taught her how to navigate.
One of the people Emma bartered with was Wells. While she was using her personal account, though, he was messaging her via the account for Risq Racing, the team his parents started. Its profile and page only had pictures of cars and UTVs.
“I had no idea who Kaden or Risq Racing was,” Cornwell said. “So I thought I was just talking to some old, random, racer guy.”
They finally met in person at the 2021 Baja 1000, where Cornwell was giving pre-race IV hydration to competitors. Wells asked her to join him in his car for the next race, the Mint 400 near Las Vegas. She accepted. They won, marking Wells’ first victory in what claims to be the oldest off-road race in the United States.
At the finish line, the DJ played Blink-182’s “First Date.”
That connection led to more dates and more wins. In March 2024, the pair drove to their first victory in the San Felipe 250 — 42 years after Cornwell’s father won its inaugural running. Afterward, Wells climbed on the roof of their Can-Am and proposed.
“My mom had [the ring], and she’s like ‘You’ve got to propose no matter what,’” Wells said. “I’m like, ‘It’s got to be a win.’”
A little more than a year later, as the couple encountered obstacle after obstacle in pursuit of a finish in last month’s Baja 1000 — probably the least of which was their eyeballs rattling in their sockets — Wells didn’t regret his decision.
Reaching the finish line
This was no time for small talk. Not that the tens of hours they spend in their side-by-side during a race ever provide much opportunity for chitchat or wedding planning (they’ve set the date for May). Wells’ focus has to be on the road, or whatever patches of sagebrush or swaths of sand serve as a road at the time.
“When you’re out there, you have to be at 100% concentration,” Cornwell’s father, Dan, said. “One lack of that, and you could rip the whole front of the car off. That’s all it takes. It’s just one mistake and you’re done.”
(Courtesy of Kaden Wells) Fiancees Emma Cornwell and Kaden Wells of Risq Racing, out of Hurricane, celebrate finishing a Baja race. The couple drove the first UTV in nearly a decade to win the SCORE International overall four-wheel-drive season title after they finished second in the Baja 1000 in November 2025.
So Cornwell kept her directions simple and clear.
“L1,” she’d shout through her headset, indicating a left-hand turn at the slowest speed possible. Or “R4”, a right-hand turn, but keep your foot on the gas. In the week prior to the race, they’d probably driven 2,500 miles mapping out the best routes and viable alternatives. Later, Cornwell would spend hours uploading the directions into their GPS.
But the GPS doesn’t offer instructions on what to do when a radius rod snaps. So, when that happened in the middle of the desert, they figured it out together. They called for help from their pit crew, then stripped the rescue UTV of both the rod and its axle.
Back on course, they faced a decision. They could push the UTV, now equipped with less hardy factory parts, to its max and go for race victory. But with that, they risked losing everything if they didn’t finish. Or, they could proceed with caution and hope that, by finishing second or third, they could still lay claim to the series titles.
Against their competitive natures, they chose the cautious route. And yet, they still didn’t finish — at least not on their first try.
“Two miles from the finish, the car died, and we were coasting in,” Wells said. “And then we went to turn it over, and it did one crank over and then seized up.”
Their engine was toast.
They got a tow — albeit a leisurely one, they said — to the finish. That was within the rules, which state any vehicle can be towed up to 1% of the race distance, or roughly eight miles. Yet, upon arrival at the finish, they learned they’d been disqualified. Race rules also state that all vehicles must complete the final mile of the race under their own power.
(Courtesy of Kaden Wells) Kaden Wells, driving for Risq Racing, out of Hurricane, and navigator Emma Cornwell celebrate winning the 2021 Mint 400 near Las Vegas. That was the first date for the couple, which in November 2025 drove the first UTV in nearly a decade to win the SCORE International overall four-wheel-drive season title after they finished second in the Baja 1000.
Nevermind that Cornwell and Wells didn’t know where the finish line was since a sudden deluge had forced organizers to shorten the race. Nor did they have a way of signaling to the tow truck that they wanted to be dropped off a mile from the new finish. Even if they had, the track was too muddy and hilly for them to get out and push their Can-Am through it.
Just as the team had expertly navigated the course, though, it found a workaround through this quagmire. After about 40 minutes of conferring amongst themselves, race officials told Cornwell and Wells that if they could get their vehicle running and drive back out on the course, they could drive in the final mile and have their time count. But, the clock was ticking.
By coincidence, the couple discovered during the break that what they thought was a seized engine was just a faulty fuel pump switch. If they manually held it down, the UTV would run.
“We’re excited, and he has an adrenaline rush, like ‘We’re going again! We can do this!’ And there’s jumps and turns and stuff. ... So I’m like, ‘Hey, don’t go fast! I’m going to let go of it,’” Cornwell recalled. “And as soon as I let go of it, because there’s no fuel in the car, the car dies. So we go over a few jumps, and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’
“But, we made it.”
Even with the mishaps and delays, the missing mufflers and the faulty fuel pump wires, Wells and Cornwell finished second among all UTVs. With that, they drove away with all three series titles they’d been seeking.
Cornwell said she’s learned a successful racing season and a successful relationship aren’t so different. They both require communication and trust. And sometimes that means finding a way to get a message across, even when the noise is so loud it could rattle eyeballs in their sockets.
“I think a big part of our relationship working is that we have so much trust in the car that it transfers over in real life,” she said, “and we both have to honor and respect that. And if that’s ever broken, understanding that it could be very detrimental to our communication in the car.”
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