Wow. Just wow. Now that was an experience. It’s going to take a while to digest and write about, so in the interest of keeping family sane in the face of inevitable media reports of the deaths and serious injuries that occured, let me first say that I survived, in one piece, with nothing more than normal wear and tear: a few cuts and bruises, and not nearly enough sleep. So now I’m going to try to tell the story of the trip, or at least those bits that were not lost in a haze of exhaustion.
We drove down to Ensenada on Sunday, getting there in the afternoon and basically just getting checked into a hotel and spending some time talking to each other, since most of the people on the team had not met before.
Monday was supposed to be spent in two ways: getting the truck tech inspected and taking turns driving the spare truck so we would all have at least some idea of what we were doing when we got behind the wheel in race conditions. Some of us would stay with the race truck and walk it through contingency and tech while others took the spare out through the first 10 miles or so of course and then return to swap places.
The contingency part went easily and well. It takes a long time to tech 400 vehicles, so the line moved really slowly. The truck had gotten in line around 9am, and by 11am it was pretty clear that this was an all day process. Which was fine; the tech line wended its way through crowds and booths of vendors — T-shirts and hats for the spectators, all sorts of parts and gear for the racers. The line must have gone on for about a mile, all of it densely populated with what seemed like a decent percentage of the population of Mexico.
It was a great atmosphere, and all of us did our share of signing autographs (I’m famous! Or at least, I would be if I had signed my name instead of Robb Rill, our driver of record and the name people would expect to see). We were constantly thronged by crowds of kids wanting stickers — apparently it’s a tradition for race teams to give them out, which was news to us. Oops. Sorry, kids.
Robb and Jimmy had taken the spare truck out first and returned around 1pm or so. Robb was really impressed with the truck and waxed a bit poetic. This, he said, was quite a machine. Fern and Kalbas went out next while the rest of us continued to move the truck through the tech line, with occasional side jaunts to grab food (yum, roadside carne asada tacos) or last minute gear (gloves that fit, in my case).
So everything’s going well, if noisily and crowdily, when my cell phone rings. It’s Fern. “We rolled the truck,” he says. My first thought, having just met all these people in the past day or two, is that this Fern guy is turning out to be something of a joker. “Ummm,” I respond cautiously if not articulately. “It’s upside down and it’s not going to run and we need help,” Fern elaborates. Ok, maybe this isn’t a joke. Maybe this is really bad news. So I pass the phone to Rob Ward, our main guide and organizer.
One thing that’s not so great about the Baja 1000 is the malicious streak in a some of the spectators, especially kids, and especially near the start in Ensenada. They like to mess with course markings, throw bottles at motorcyclists, and misdirect racers into dangerous situations. One day, when you see a headline “Baja 1000 racer mows down crowd,” be aware that it was probably at least understandable, if not entirely justifiable.
In this case, kids had messed with course signs that indicated a left turn, changing it to a straight and removing the “danger, do not go straight” sign. They then stood by the side of the and waved racers on — over a what couldn’t really be called a cliff, but was certainly a very steep embankment. And, well, they got Fern. He was driving when he and Kalbas found themselves airborne with the road, such as it is, dropping away beneath them. They estimate it was about a second and a half of air time, which is a lot of time to be airborne in a vehicle that does not have wings.
It sounds like they would have been landed it OK, but as luck would have it, they clipped a large boulder with the right front wheel upon landing. If the back of the truck is rebounding after landing a pretty high jump and the right front wheel suddenly stops dead against a boulder, you’re going over. Which they did, rolling a couple of times before coming to a stop (butter side down, of course).
Fortunately, these trucks are incredibly safe machines, and of course we’re all using a full complement of safety gear. So Fern and Kalbas were fine, but the truck was pretty much dead. When we got there, another team had helped them get it back on its wheels. Our support crew got the thing duct taped together enough to be able to get it out of the gully and tow it back to a shop.
While most of us were out helping with the rolled truck, Ed had gotten the race truck through tech inspection. So the lot of us headed to the driver’s meeting and then dinner, dismayed at the loss of the truck but happy that both Fern and Kalbas were no worse for the wear. Tomorrow would be the first day of the race, and it looked like I would be getting behind the wheel of a fairly insane vehicle under race conditions without so much as driving it around the block first. So it goes.
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