After all of the confusion and delays, my turn to drive had finally come. As I climbed into the truck and got the air and comm lines plugged into my helmet, I was definitely suffering from some jitters. There’s always a bit of adrenaline in any kind of race situation, but this time it was compounded by the fact that I had not yet done anything more than driving the truck 50 feet forward at 3mph through crowds during contingency. This time, I’d be driving at real speed through terrain that I could only assume was going to be very, very difficult — since the other two pairs had taken twice as long as expected.
Some background on the truck itself: built by The Baja Experience, this was a tubular-framed truck with an approximately 265 horsepower Ford V6 mounted just behind the rear axle, and driving the rear wheels through a three speed sequential transmission. I’m told the truck weighed about 3000 pounds, so we’re talking about a big, heavy, torquey truck here. Oh, and it was wide — fully nine inches wider than the Hummer H1.
All of which is by way of saying that this was one beast of a truck. Sure, it didn’t have the 900HP that many others in our Trophy Truck class were reputed to have, but I knew that the truck was going to be a challenge just as it was. Another 650 horsepower would only have led to tears.
So Ed and I got rolling out of Bahia de Los Angles around 9am. Fortunately, the first several miles were wide dirt roads with great visibility and gradual turns, so I could get the hang of driving this beast for real. Not to mention that I had very little off-road driving experience, and none at all in race conditions. But after several miles and with the fantastic input and advice from Ed, I started to figure out the basics: don’t worry that it bounces and drifts some, get on the gas going into a dip, realize how wide the thing is so you don’t run Ed into a tree, that sort of thing.
I was gradually bringing our speed up as I got more comfortable with the truck, and Ed and I worked out a good system for communication so he could tell me what was coming up based on the GPS navigation system. “30 degrees right in a quarter mile”, “5 degrees left at the end of this straight”, “60 degree left right nowwww, no, wait, 90 degreeeees aiiiiigh we’re gonna dieeeee”, and so on.
Given that I was still getting comfortable with the truck and the course was really pretty wide open, it’s not surprising that more experienced drivers were going quite a bit faster than I was. I knew to be prepared for a bump at some point, and when it came it was almost anticlimactic. The driver who caught up with us was positively gentle; at first, I wasn’t even sure if we had been bumped or had just kicked up a rock that hit the underside of the truck. Once sure that it had been an actual bump, I moved over and the speedier driver zipped on past. Of course, in the moments after he passed, we were enveloped in a huge dust cloud and I was cruising along at 50-60mph with zero visibility. A little scary.
As we continued on and I learned more about driving the truck and working with Ed, I continued to pick up speed. There were some decent corners, but the vast majority of them had very deep ruts in the loose sand from all of the trucks that had already been by. So most corners it was almost like our truck was on rails: get into the ruts, turn the wheel, get on the gas, and whooosh! I do have to admit that I got into some trouble a couple of times when expected ruts did not materialize because the ground was too hard; after a couple of tens turns that involved lots of countersteering, I got a little better at turning in earlier than I would on a road course and being very careful about whether each corner had ruts or not.
The terrain was doing a beautiful job of gradually increasing in difficulty and variety, so I learned how to deal with lots of small flat rocks (fast, but don’t expect to steer or stop), big undulations (gas into them, back off a bit when the rear end gets light, back on the gas once the rear lands), and narrow trails on cliffs (don’t put Ed’s side over the edge).
And then came the real bump. Where our first bump was delicate, almost friendly, this one was like being hit in the back of the helmet with a 12 pound sledge. There was substantial but brief pain, and a considerable amount of adrenaline and shock. The interior of my helmet turned blue from swearing and, given the comm link that connected us, I can only assume that Ed’s did too. At the time, we were probably going 60mph. The guy who hit us had to be doing at least 75mph, maybe as much as 85mph. Yeeeeeouch.
Now, I have to admit that my second thought (after “What the hell just happend?!”) was “What an asshole!” I mean, why not a gentle tap like the first one? Why so aggressive? Well, I found out pretty quickly.
We soon came up on slower traffic ourselves — one of the ubiquitous Baja bugs. Of course, he was throwing up a huge cloud of dust. I really wanted to pass him, but every time I got close, the dust closed in and I was driving blind, which is not a whole lot of fun. There’s no way he was going to hear our horn or see us through the dust, so it soon became clear that if I wanted to pass, I was going to have to bump him. This was the “aha!” moment. How do you bump someone when you can’t even see them through the cloud of dust? Well, obviously, you charge into the dust and hope that you don’t go off course and that you eventually run into him.
I wasn’t prepared for that. The idea of charging into a huge cloud of dust with the goal of ramming another car was just so far outside my experience that I chickened out, er, I mean wisely decided to just hang back a bit and wait for a better opportunity. And sure enough, just a mile or two later, he pulled off to pit and I was spared further self debate.
I continued to pick up speed as I started to realize what an incredible truck I was driving. I cannot emphasize enough how capable this truck was: anything I asked it to do, it did. When I made mistakes, it made recovering easy. Over and over again, I found myself exclaiming “this thing is insane!” I found that I could bomb along at 75mph in straights, get down to 30mph in the brief moment before sharp turns, and accelerate out of the turn sooner than I ever would have expected. This Baja Experience truck was just a superlative machine.
Anyways, we soon came to mile 565, where our first scheduled pit stop was. Unfortunately, there was no pit to be found. We continued to mile 566 and mile 567 before getting a bit worried. Had we past it? There had been some trucks and pit-type activity around 565, but they didn’t say Baja Pits, and didn’t look like the right thing. Still, missing a pit is a little scary. So we stopped and talked about it before deciding to head back and look at the stuff at 565 again. This was not an easy decision to make, since it meant going upstream on the course, with vehicles of varying speeds and braking abilities flying towards us.
And sure enough, we had to quickly get out of the way once or twice as surprised-looking drivers shot past our wrong-way-facing selves. And just when we were getting back to mile 565, Ed managed to get Baja Pits on the radio. And guess what? They were actually at mile 580 or so, not their published 565. What the hell? Still, it felt good to be going with traffic again. Once we got to the relocated pit, things were uneventful except that they didn’t have the rear tires we were expecting, but the Toyo tires we were using looked to be in great shape anyway, so it didn’t really matter.
We stopped after about 80 miles of driving for a human pit stop; as you can imagine, jouncing up and down for a couple of hours definitely exercises the kidneys. More hardcore people use catheters to avoid stopping, but since we knew we weren’t competitive in our class and just wanted to finish, Ed and I opted instead for an “if either of us wants to stop, we can” policy. And it was lucky we did: Ed looked the truck over and found that it was leaking oil from the oil filter mount. Not a whole not, but enough to be a concern. He added oil and we got back on the road. There’s some foreshadowing there, by the way.
Soon after that, we switched places and Ed showed me how someone who knows what they’re doing drives a truck like that. Where I had been cautiously and uncertainly approaching each corner and gradually picking up speed a bit at a time, it was clear that Ed knew what to expect at every moment, and he was able to push the truck considerably harder than I had had the guts to do. He, too, couldn’t believe what this thing was capable of, and it was his turn to go on about how thrilled he was.
The rest of the drive passed pretty uneventfully; we swapped places again and I finished our leg, which was primarily wide open dirt roads punctuated with occasional patches of difficult terrain. We stopped at another pit to get fuel, and the pit crew managed to fix our small oil leak (still foreshadowing here). Towards the end of our drive we found some silt, which is basically a very fine powder that the truck wants to sink into, stop, and get stuck, and some wet salt flats, which are basically areas of wet salt that the truck wants to sink into, stop, and get stuck. But we pressed on and I kept the revs up and we managed to get through everything without actually getting stuck.
We finally got to our own driver handover at mile 800 sometime around 3pm, with our GPS unit showing an average speed of 47mph across 280 miles . And, while I was tempted to play “gee, I don’t know what your problem was” with our co-drivers, I knew that we had clearly lucked out and gotten the easiest bit of terrain, and in broad daylight at that.
We handed the truck over to Doug and Jim from Minnesota, two guys I still hadn’t really met since they weren’t around for our pre-race dinners and preparation. They zoomed off to start their own 300-mile leg and we hopped into Wally’s rental H3 and set off towards the next driver change, where Doug and Jim would hand it over to Ruben, who would have Ed as his copilot. At this point, we were feeling pretty good — 800 miles done, with only severe fiberglass damage, a missing spare tire, and a small oil leak that was now fixed. That’s not bad at all, right?
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