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.

Anyways, there was a lot of confusion surrounding what helicopter had crashed and under what circumstances. It eventually turned out that both pilot and passenger were killed, and two spectators were seriously injured. This is not the kind of news you want to hear any time, but especially only 200 miles into a 1269 mile race. This was on top of fairly constant radio traffic directing rescue and medic teams to injured racers (primarily motorcycles).

Finding the vicinity of pit #5 was not a problem. All we had to do was stop at a gas station and ask the good folks in another chase vehicle, and they helped us find the right turnoff to get to the pit area. The problem was in finding the goddamned pit itself. We found the parking lot full of spectators. We found a huge traffic jam with chase vehicles and trailers. We even found dirt roads that wandered off and went nowhere near the pit. Where the hell was the pit? While we were driving around looking for it, we contacted them by radio and heard that our truck was indeed there, had stopped, and was waiting for us.

A word about how pits work on the Baja 1000: large and well funded teams run their own pit stops using several chase vehicles which go to pit areas and set up tents, refueling stations, etc. However, most teams (including us) use one of several pit companies who have a bunch of pits scattered down the length of the course. In our case we were using Baja Pits. Without exception they were fantastically nice, well organized, well equipped, professional and competent.

However, they were not always easy for the chase vehicles to find, as we learned here at pit #5. We got them on the radio again and they helpfully informed us that they were easy to find had had a large dome light that we couldn’t miss. Well, ok, they were also somewhat down course from the main pit area and spectators. Down course? Like, on the race course? Yes. So we need to drive on the race course in our rental trucks and hope that nobody fast comes up behind us and runs us over? Yes, but only for a couple of miles. A couple of miles? Yes.

There wasn’t really anything for it but to get going. We carefully looked at the 100 feet or so of course that we could see and then drove as fast as we could. Fortunately the course here was pretty much a dirt road, so it wasn’t wildly impractical, just scary. Once or twice we saw lights behind us and hurriedly pulled over to let a race vehicle pass. But we did eventually make it to the pit.

Anyways, as is normal in racing, after all of that waiting and driving and finding, it was a flurry of activity as we got Fern and Kalbas into the truck so they could continue for the next leg. They were getting the truck at about 8pm and would be driving about 300 miles. However, 60 miles of that was on a paved highway where they would be able to go 60mph (no more than that, or the GPS tracking would alert race officials who could penalize us). So we figured they’d be getting to the next driver change around 3am.

Once they were packed up in the trucks and zoomed off, we packed up the chase truck and headed off. We were all starving, so food was in order. After that, I planned to try to get a little bit of sleep, since Ed and I would be the next driving pair and it seemed we would start around 3am.

We found a great place to eat in El Rosaria (I had Arrachera — thanks for turning me on to that, Vic!). Just as we were walking in, we saw the next bit of bad news: an ambulance went screaming by, and through the windows we could see there were clearly members of a race team standing in it. A few minutes later, two tow trucks went by hauling a pair of fairly much totaled chase trucks (the numbers on the windows and spare tires in the beds made it clear what they were). We learned later that these two had had a head on accident. Ugh.

After dinner we headed out again, aiming for the next driver change. It was about 11pm and I figured I’d try to get a couple of hours of sleep in the chase truck so I wouldn’t be completely beat when I started driving at 3am. So the next thing I knew, we were at the next driver change and it was about 2am. So I figured I’d sleep a little more.

It wasn’t a good sleep, of course, so I was aware that hours were passing and that the truck had not appeared. Other members of our team who were foregoing sleep periodically reported that nothing had been heard from our truck and there was no ETA for its arrival, so I dozed off and on and waited for news.

Finally, around 8am, our truck appeared and there was much rejoicing. I desperately wanted to hear news from the guys and find out how it had taken them 12 hours to go 300 miles (60 of them on the highway!). But that’s not how things work. We were in a rush to get situated in the truck and get going. We were pretty far behind our estimated schedule, but on the bright side I had gotten a few hours of sleep and rather than our original estimate that Ed and I would drive 11pm-7am, or our revised estimate of 3am-11am, it was now looking more like 8am-4pm. Which I was pretty happy about. Now all I had to do was learn to drive a Baja 1000 race truck for the very first time, on a presumably difficult off road course, with all sorts of other traffic.

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.

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.

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.

Woohoo! This week I will be part of a team driving the Baja 1000. It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do, but never thought would be possible. It should be a pretty amazing week, though I’m definitely having a few of the “what the hell did I get myself into” jitters. But those are good for you, right?

I’ll be one of several drivers on a team using a truck prepared by The Baja Experience. The total route is about 1250 miles this year, and will take two full days to complete. They should be two plenty exhausting days, in the best possible way. We’ll start in Ensenada on Tuesday, November 13th, and get to Cabo sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday. It sounds like I’ll drive about 200 miles, and play copilot for another 200 miles.

I had dinner tonight with most of the team. Robb, the organizer, has done this before, so he briefed us on some of what to expect. Of course, his anecdotes ranged from the useful (we will have course maps with dangers marked) to the downright scary (his tale of wandering around in the dark, carrying a very heavy jack, looking for his stuck vehicle, worried about being run over by other racers). But hey, anything that crazy has to be fun, right?