After Ed and I handed the truck over, we caught a ride with Wally to the checkpoint where Jim and Doug would give the truck to Ruben and Ed. We knew they had a long and difficult section, about 300 miles worth of difficult and dangerous terrain that would take them from El Datil to Santa Rita. And since they were leaving around 4pm, it would be an overnight drive.
The drive to Santa Rita was fairly uneventful; Ed dozed and I chatted with Wally while he bombed along mostly dirt roads (some of them part of the course) at a pretty good clip in the rental H3, which really turned out to be surprisingly capable for what amounts to a Trailblazer with different bodywork. We got to Santa Rita around 9pm, I think, had a couple of beers, and then it was time to sleep.
Or, at least, to try to sleep. As capable as the H3 turned out to be for driving, it is not a terribly comfortable car for three grown men to try to sleep in. And it got cold. So it was a fitful night with a bit of sleep here or there and no actual food (some beers count as food; Tecate doesn’t).
Sometime in the middle of the night, I think, we heard from the other chase vehicle with Rob & Tara & Fern & Jimmy. Fern, it turns out, was in dire shape. He wasn’t feeling well at all and had numerous physical issues that his doctor had diagnosed as possible internal bleeding from rolling the truck and/or the off-road race itself. They were trying to find a hospital to get blood work done with no luck. Bad, bad news, but there really wasn’t anything that we at Santa Rita could do about it.
Jim and Doug showed up around 8am, if I remember correctly, after what had to be a truly exhausting overnight drive. They had gotten stuck in silt for a couple of hours at one point, and had had trouble with the engine’s computer, necessitating a pit stop to swap it out.
Once they got in, it was the usual flurry of activity getting Ruben and Ed into the truck. Ed would be co-driving again just 12 hours after his last stint. Given that Ruben wasn’t experienced and that there was some concern about his very gung-ho attitude, I think we were all pleased to have Ed along to make sure the truck made it the remaining 200 miles or so to the finish line.
Once they got going, I hopped in the rental 4Runner with Rob Ward and we set off to hit the first pit stop where Ruben and Ed were expected to stop so that we could provide any needed assistance. The end was near; the truck just had to make 200 miles in daylight. After more than a thousand miles of grueling terrain and two nights of solid driving, it seemed a sure thing.
Until we got close to the pit stop and — surprise — heard from the truck on the radio. The radio! It worked! It turned out that several of our chase vehicles had been misinformed about the channel that the truck would broadcast on. That, coupled with the fact that our responses were coming across the truck’s speakers rather than the helmet comm system, had kept us from communicating. But no more! Now we could at least hear them, and they could hear us if they stopped and it was quiet enough to hear the speakers.
Unfortunately, our newfound communications ability brought us news that the truck had been on fire. This is not the kind of thing you want to hear at any time, but especially this far into the race. Here’s where the foreshadowing in earlier posts comes in: remember the oil leak? And the addition of extra oil? And the repair of the oil leak? Well, those things combined to an overfull oil system, which seeped oil out the breather, which got all over one of the spark plug wires, which was probably frayed and sparking, which caused the oil to catch fire.
Ruben and Ed had put the fire out with sand, and the two of them combined for an impressive bit of McGuyvering: Ruben, being Mexican, was able to talk a local farmer into raiding a spark plug wire from the farmer’s truck. And Ed managed to splice the borrowed wire onto our burned plug wire to get the truck running again. But that’s not an idea race solution. So, miracle of miracles, they had caught us on the radio.
Fortunately, Rob Ward and I were in range and heard about the problem. Also fortunately, Dave Snoddy, another chase vehicle driver, was towing the backup truck that Fern and Kalbas had rolled back in Ensenada, with the express idea that it could be used for parts. So Rob and I were able to get a new plug wire from Dave and drive it down to Ruben and Ed. Dave also had us replace the oil breather with a cap, the theory being that if the oil breather was dripping on the plug wire, it was better to just not have it.
Ok, well, at least the fire was out and Ruben and Ed were getting practice dealing with vehicle fires. And they were just 150 miles or so from the finish, and, at this point, no longer on fire. So Rob Ward and I headed down to Todos Santos, where the truck would cross the highway for the last time before getting to Cabo. We joined Eric there. At this point we were starting to get giddy and excited; the race was almost done, and other than a rolled truck, a medical emergency, and two vehicle fires, things had gone really well.
And we waited. And waited. And, um, waited. And waited some more. What could be taking so long? The race rules allow 53 hours to complete the race, and we were coming up on hour 49. Four hours to go 90 miles isn’t bad, as the last bit of the course was expected to be fairly easy. But where were they?
And then the satellite phone rang. I should really stop answering those things; it’s always trouble. And this was no exception. At this point I’m not even sure who it was that called, but the message was grim: the truck was wrecked. Ruben had, somehow, driven into a big cactus. I was pretty much in shock when I gave the phone to Rob Ward, our organizer.
The rest of that day just sucked. Getting out to the wreck meant a long trek on a dirt road, and then going 10 miles upstream on the race course through difficult terrain in what we just now discovered was a 2 wheel drive 4Runner. Rob Ward did a wonderful job of driving this very-not-capable truck trough huge swaths of deep sand and over some pretty good bumps and dips. We kept the windows down and had to dart out of the way a couple of times when we heard a race car coming towards us. Yikes.
Finally, we made it to the truck. And while it wasn’t totaled by any stretch, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going anywhere. The passenger side rear wheel was knocked pretty much underneath the truck, and the drive shaft had been driven back through the transmission, taking big old chunks out of the housing. The grommets that hold the A-arm to the chassis had failed, and things had gone bad from there.
