We got started bright and early Tuesday morning, with all of the usual pre-race confusion and mayhem. We had a few helmets that needed last minute tech inspection, the chase cars needed to grab water and snacks, that sort of thing. The truck was lined up in its starting place, the GPS course map was loaded (finally!), and we were ready to go… and waiting. But, as so often happens in racing, after lots of waiting it was suddenly time to start.
The start line itself was something to see: a large dirt mound where each truck would pause for pictures, then a proper starting line with a flagman. Our truck was starting second to last in the Trophy Truck class, so we were only about the 30th vehicle out, and the crowds were still very excited and loud. This being Mexico, the crowds were also only about five feet away from the trucks as they roared off from the start and around a 90 degree corner to head out to the course.
Robb and Jimmy were our first drivers, and as soon as the flag waved, they were gone. The rest of us stayed for a bit to watch some of Class 1 start, since we knew we had plenty of time to catch up with the truck at the first driver change, about 200 course miles from the start. Watching a race start is always fun, but this was particularly exciting because the cars were zooming mere feet away from spectators around the first corner, and at least one car managed to spin in the corner and scare everyone (I said “exciting”, not “smart”).
After watching for a while and deciding that the spectators were probably nimble enough that nothing awful was going to happen, we headed to the chase vehicles and set off to find the fifth pit stop on the course, where our first driver change would happen. You may well ask how any kind of remotely normal car is going to find a pit stop on an incredibly grueling off-road course. The short answers are “with great difficulty”, “with plenty of time to spare”, and “in a rental with full insurance.”
The thing is, the Baja 1000 course winds its way back and forth from the west coast to the east coast of Baja California. The main and only real highway goes pretty much straight north-south, so the course crosses the highway several times along its length. But you can’t very well have huge off-road pit stops on the only main highway, so the trick is finding the pit stops that are merely 5-10 miles away from the highway rather than 50. And even the closest pit stops are down windy, unpaved roads which don’t appear on most maps. Unfortunately, we only had most maps.
All of that is by way of saying that once we got on the road and started heading to mile 203, we found that we didn’t really know where it was. The AAA map, in conjunction with the course map, helped us find an approximate region, but there was no direct map to the pit stop. So we headed in the general direction and finally decided that it must be just south of a national park near San Vincente, where the only major inland road was. As we neared the road, we got increasingly confident: other chase vehicles were turning down the road, and yet more (presumably for motorcycles, who started 3 hours earlier) were coming back.
So we head down this paved road and eventually find out way to a large pit and spectating area along the course. Hooray! It was probably about 2pm when we got there, and we estimated that our truck would appear about 4:30 or so. So we just hung out and talked and waited, and eventually the first Trophy Trucks started to zoom past and provide some entertainment. We knew our guys wouldn’t be with the leaders, since our truck really had no business being in this class. And sure enough, Class 1 vehicles started to appear when we still had no sign of our guys.
And then some more, slower classes started to appear, and it got to be around 5pm. And still more slower-in-theory classes appeared, and we waited. And waited. We had CB radios and satellite phones, so we knew that we’d hear from our guys if they had broken down. So we waited some more and tried not to worry as increasingly slow classes kept zipping by. By this point, of course, all of those pretty trucks and vehicles zipping by were the same shade of dirt brown.
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Finally, around 7pm, there they were! There’s our truck, coming around the corner into the long pit lane and slowing down! Woohoo! We’re all running out and cheering for them and… there they go! Right past us and headed down course with the engine roaring. Ed took off after them at a run, since there was a checkpoint they’d have to stop (very briefly) at. I was wearing flops and probably not going to make decent time in the dirt, so all I could do is watch as Ed chased the truck, hollering and waving as he approached the checkpoint, until… they drove off.
Meanwhile, some of our crew had had the great idea of running back to our chase vehicles and radioing the pits and checkpoints to stop our truck. So all of us — our chase vehicles and the pits — were on the radio on our race channel yelling “race 34, you’ve passed the pits! Race 34, turn around and come back to pit!” Race 34 did not stop. Race 34 did not come back to the pit.
Well, there was nothing for it but to get in the chase vehicles and try to beat them to the next pit — presumably not difficult, since it had taken them 8 hours to go 200 course miles, and the next pit was 35 miles away. As we were getting to our trucks, it seemed a good time to check if we were at the right pit in the first place.
Oops. We were at pit #4 (mile 170 or so), not pit #5 (mile 203). Of course, the truck had been scheduled to stop at pit #4 anyway for fuel, since we weren’t sure it could make 200 miles on one tank. So we went to the wrong pit, but they should have stopped anyway. And why weren’t they responding on the radio? Yes, we were one smart and well organized race team.
So we zoomed off to find pit #5, a mere 35 or so course miles away.
PS: I have no idea why the Mexican government saw fit to station Humvees with armed soldiers at a pit stop for an off road race, but they sure were picturesque.
