Ah yes, where were we?? Oh, yes...just prior to the start of the race...Did I mention I gently ran the van into a pair of stanchions in the garage underneath our hotel in Ensenada when being yelled at in Spanish that I couldn't park where I just had, denting both the side of the van and the driver's door making the window exceedingly difficult to raise or lower?? Or that we spent quite a bit of time running around Ensenada trying to find a 2GB or smaller flash card with which to download the GPS files for the race course and were finally gifted such a card by Dennis Chairez, an Ensenada resident known to our most experienced Baja racer, Paul Hartl.
So Elliott Sherwood and I are up relatively early and geared up and ready to go on race day while Paul and Tim Meunier are off in the van with the extra gas and gear and heading down the road to try and find the part of the race course where it comes back and hits Highway 1 after 100+ miles in order to provide any service we may need. We aren't in radio communication at this point as we are quickly separated by miles and terrain too large to broadcast over. We start the day near the tail end of the 130 or so "car" entries of the event. I snicker to myself as I see some other competitors in the garage still working on their cars right before the race..."Ha, at least I'm not breaking out the grinding wheel already!" Sooooo stupid....
I share a few words with Darren Skilton and David Bensadoun, both driving Dakar spec vehicles and men with whom I have little business being alongside. Within the race are other drivers I have no business sharing a race with including Walker Evans, Andy Grider, Bob Gordon, Bruce Meyers, Tim Herbst, etc., etc. Multiple time Dakar entrants, multiple time Baja 500/1000 champions...yup, I'm here...a know nothing "kid" from New Hampshire, ready to show the world what I've got...
Uhhhh, yeah, not so much...The transit out of Ensenada is simple enough and just like a really long transit in a typical Rally back home...except here Stop signs are merely a suggestion, red lights more like yield signs and the city roads strewn with dead animals (and dead people on occasion) and locals seemingly playing a game of chicken with every passing vehicle. Still, with the race started I am a lot more relaxed. This at least I am familiar with...dirt roads, rocks, trees...this I can deal with.
A quick piss on the side of the road--no way I'm making it 100+ miles without pissing my pants after drinking this much water--and we're off. The notes for the stage are a ridiculous, never ending stream of triple and double cautions. Oh and that cliff of death?? That doesn't rate even as a single caution or even a notation. Drive what you see becomes the most common direction given as you can literally go miles between notations pointing out the next intersection--all those ditches, rocks, cacti, cliffs, dropoffs, inclines, washouts?? Make up your intentions as you go....make a decision on the move, no prior notice given.
Oh, and yeah, about the course....it may be a "race" course in name but in truth its an open public road on which you are doing things you would NEVER dare think about back home. Take your dumbest moments "testing" your vehicle on your local backroad thinking "Hey, I can run this road at speed, I've run it 1000 times and there is never anyone on it except old Bob and I know old Bob goes to church at 10AM every Sunday so I know I'm not going to meet any other traffic..." Now take that and throw it out the window cause you don't know anyone here and they don't care that you are racing on their local roads and most certainly their livestock doesn't care that you are racing on their local roads. So right away Elliott and I are shaking our heads as we are rounding corners at my maximum speed into oncoming cars and trucks...after a couple times it seems somewhat normal and you give it little thought that back home they'd shut down the whole damn race if a single car was seen on stage at the same time as a racer....As they say....Its Mexico....its just different here.
The roads themselves are spectacular. Truly. Nothing back home comes close. Long flat gravel straights lasting miles followed by 180 degree turns down a 45 degree washout into a sharp uphill battle through a streambed followed by a three mile run down a single lane road paralleled by 10 foot high fence posts strung together with barbed wire (seriously?? I'm doing close to 70+ down this road where a three foot twitch of the truck would have me picking rusted steel out of my skull for the next year?? Its beautiful but I can't believe I'm doing this...)
Ah, and then there's the ocean...the racecourse runs out to the ocean and parallels it for long sections running only yards from the crashing sea. The scenery becomes so distracting that Elliott and I are spending more time oooing and ahhhing about what we are seeing that actual stage notes. Our site seeing is interrupted by other racers on occasion...we sit in the dust of a class 9 buggie for what seems like forever but what was actually only a mile or two (in Stage Rally if you get caught you kindly pull over immediately, not so much here) as we close and then back off a number of times trying to give them the hint that we'd like to pass...but our nice style of passing from back home (with the car being passed pulling over, nicely out of the way and to a near full stop) just ain't gonna happen here and we pass at full speed on what felt like a single lane road running the driverside out in the ditches and brush trying not to punt the little buggie off into the cacti. Damn this is crazy... We do our best to pull way over and out of the way whenever
we are caught--those old Broncos that catch us are HUGE and all steel...no soft fiberglass there.
We settle into what feels like a nice pace and reel off the miles...my god, we've run 90 miles already?? That is as long or longer than some of our full races back home and we're not even close to 1/2 way done with the first day!
Then disaster...or as near to it as I have ever experienced in stage rally to date. At about mile 95 we turn left around a rather casual bend at a fair speed and right there is a kid on a bike riding towards me down the course. I point the kid out to Elliott and we both focus trying not to hit him and suddenly I notice what is surely his younger brother walking down the course towards us on the left hand side with seemingly no interest in jumping out of the way. We slow, but do not stop having gotten used to seeing people, animals, and vehicles on the course, now taking it a bit in stride. There is a right hander coming up and our focus is still on the kids on the left. We pass them safely but before I can feel relief, I have missed noticing the very large, very rough and rocky ditch on the inside of the right hand turn and drop the front passenger side wheel into said ditch. Before I can blink or even notice what I've done, that ditch grabs and twists that wheel sharply back and to the right. There is a large bang and the truck plows straight forward through the sand without steering response and quickly comes to a halt. A flat? Nope. The front passenger tie rod has separated at the socket (which is still attached to the steering rack) from the ball (which is still attached to the "rod" and the wheel/tire).
A few expletives and Elliott's inquiry as to if we have a spare tire rod ("Yes, Elliott, we do...its in the service van of course!") and we are left trying to figure out what to do. Ratchet straps and some manual force do not do the job of either securing the wheel into a stable position and our spirits begin sinking.
As I would find to be the case whenever and wherever we broke during the event, the locals (while the cause of some on course trouble) are more than happy to appear like ghosts out of the ether and lend a hand without fear of getting dirty or putting in hard work for little to no return. In our case here it appears that the two young boys were part of an extended family who had come to spectate at the right hand turn where we broke. Amongst them are three adult males of various ages (Grandfather, father and son?) who begin chattering away and trying to converse with Elliott in broken Spanish. One of them quickly retrieves his family SUV, drives out onto the course and backs it up against the broken tire/wheel on our race truck. The idea here being that if we can line up the ball and socket on the tie rod and exert enough force we can POP them back together in an opposite fashion to how they came apart from the ditch. Cranking the wheel as hard as I can to the right and backing the SUV up into the wheel does the trick!! It pops back together like Mel Gibson and his wonky shoulder in the Lethal Weapon movies! We're back at it! We take some photos with our new "heroes" and set off again in hopes of completing the last 16 or so miles to the highway where we can make a proper repair.
200 yards later from just a crawling speed and a bit of sand?? POP!! That same tie rod performs its magic trick again and comes apart, now leaving us separated from our heroes and buried up to the lower control arm in some very soft sand. Now we're screwed....I begin digging out the broken wheel from the sand by hand (nope, no shovel) and Elliott grabs some ratchet straps. Going forward is no longer any thought in our mind...our hopes only surround being able to get out of the desert somehow. Its about noon, very hot and very dry.
Somehow our "heroes" must have continued to watch/listen to our progress as a few minutes later as we are attaching our straps to the frame, the eldest of the three adult males and his likely grandson, show up on scene via a quad while other locals and their dogs begin arriving as if from inside the closest yucca plant and chitter away over our shoulders. The eldest male, for some reason, carries with him a big old pot of grease of some kind (huh?!?!) and he begins slathering it all over and inside the socket of the tie rod. Once stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey with grease we employ all our strength on the ratchet straps and crank on the steering wheel once again. Again the tie-rod pops back together! Now, however, we are resigned to our DNF for the day and just want to somehow limp the vehicle back along the access road this family had come in on and get in contact with our chase team with whom we have been unable to relay much of a message too. The "Weatherman" flying relay in the sky knows that we are broken and trying to limp out but we have not received a message back from Paul and Tim.
We very gently back the race truck backwards down the course to the access road at some 5-10 mph and begin the slow ride toward the highway where we hope to figure out just where we are and what to do. Oh! Hey!! Look! The temp gauge on the truck is spiking and there is steam coming from the engine!!
Quickly we kill the engine and exit the vehicle to the sound and smell of superheated coolant spraying all over the engine bay and a pool of green in the dirt. Well, well, well, now that went from bad to worse...So now we can only go a couple hundred yards at a time before the engine begins overheating and has to be shut down to cool. We are quite crippled and are both wishing we had packed more personal water...
In the middle of this slow process up drives the 18 going on 50 boy who had assisted us twice already that day on his quad again. This time he is alone but carries with him a large hammer and chisel (what?) which he immediately runs to the tie-rod with and promptly proceeds to smash down the socket around the ball. Now we have a margin of comfort around the ability of this suspension component to stay together for the last few miles to pavement. He and his grandfather make out with a handful of (unasked for) pesos, and a pair of (unoffered) vice grips and wire snips but its a small price to pay for their assistance.
Hope rising further still as a group of Idaho surfers driving a 4Runner and heading for town in search of some tacos for lunch come sweeping by our pathetic scene... Using full surfer lingo "We were mobbing this and mobbing that!", they kindly offer to tow our vehicle to the highway where they remember a small auto repair garage being present. Huzzah!
These searchers of the Endless Summer pull our vehicle in front of said garage and leave to find their tacos and waves. Here we pull the hood and diagnose the coolant system with a large crack in a plastic fitting as the cause of our heating issues. A hack saw and some metal tubing scavenged from unknown source in the garage proprietor's backyard along with a couple small hose clamps and purchased coolant solves this issue in full.
And look! Its our chase team! They got the relayed message that we were heading out to the highway and given there is only one highway they figured they were bound to find us and so they have. The garage owner kindly allows us to pull the race truck into his shady outdoor facility and get to work on our suspension repairs. A bit of work later and we have the new tie-rod installed and the truck looks like it can stand on its own...turning the wheel however reveals a problem as it binds and will not turn to the left hardly at all. I immediately know what the issue is as I had the same problem when I tore the same suspension and tie-rod from the vehicle during a hill climb event a few years back. The upper control arm on that same side has taken the full force of the ditch impact once the tie rod gave way and twisted badly causing the bind.
Wow! What luck! We have proceeded to break on Day 1 the only two parts on the vehicle for which I carry spares! So off comes the UCA and on goes the new one. Without a spring compressor we resort again to ratchet straps and without a spanner wrench we resort to a hammer and a flathead to turn the spring adjustment ring. Much swearing and cursing is had and my frequent exclaims of "its in there!" when asked if we have a particular tool or not begin grating on everyone's nerves (as I don't actually know where the requested tool is, just that its in a bag or box or van in general). We manage to get the job done with the help of some more locals who use a BFH with great effect on getting the new UCA and bolts back in its now slightly tweaked frame mounts. We have a functional race truck again!
Our race for the day however is over as its now late afternoon and we have hundreds of miles to our hotel in Bahia de Los Angeles that need to now be covered in dusk and dark. We stop at a roadside taco stand run by a great little family (seriously, why don't we have these every other block here in the States?) and have a great meal, well deserved all around.
Covering the remaining hours to Bahia de Los Angeles is no easy feat however, even with the trailer unloaded and the race truck driving separately. This first experience with driving Highway 1 at night while being completely exhausted is something that will never leave me. Multiple times I thought I would die from oncoming tractor trailers moving at 60+ mph and passing so close to the van or race truck that their compression wave would lift the windshield wipers right off the glass and audibly compress the driver's side window pane. Somehow we made it to Bay of LA by about 1AM and some of the NORRA staff including Ed Pearlman were still awake tracking down missing race vehicles (of which I am glad we are no longer one). We get some directions to Larry and Raquel's beach camp and arrive to a place where we can hear the waves crashing on the beach and feel the soft sand under our feet as we exit our vehicles. We never do meet Larry or Raquel (who I learned had been gunned down in a highway driveby some years earlier) and merely crash into the first room we find with an open door and no one inside. I feel fairly safe however as some other big teams (Aldo Racing for instance) are here and their crew are still working at this hour (sweeping sand from their tarps underneath their giant EZ Ups at 2AM...)
While the rudimentary room we have acquired has air conditioning and beds, I ask myself if I will ever again find myself on the Sea of Cortez under such a sea of stars as I find overhead. I find that the answer is unlikely and proceed to grab a pillow and a blanket and head to the beach to sleep on the sand, the sound of waves in my ears. I would return to my "hotel" room at about 5:30, my body now bereft of adrenaline and the air quite chilly...but glad I had fallen asleep staring up (literally, no joke) at some shooting stars and constellation patterns not quite where I am used to...
Hopefully keeping the repairs to a minimum will be a
combination of both Narino’s skills and the quality inherent in his chosen
bike. The 2013 Husqvarna 449 he will be
riding will not be his own. While he has
been a long time rider of Husqvarnas, the logistics, expense and hassle of
shipping and prepping his own bike from SoCal was actually more of a pain than
his alternative plan. Buying a fully
Dakar prepped (Sentinal system with light and noise notification, navigation
tower, etc.), yet very light and nimble (comparatively) Husqvarna 449 in
Portugal and having it shipped to Buenos Aires along with the vast majority of
other Dakar racers drastically simplified the process.
My wife and I have frequently tried to collect sand from the beaches and locales we've visited over our time together and display it in little jars in our home as a nice, cheap keepsake and reminder of where we've been. Amongst my many disappointments from my attempt at the NORRA Mexican 1000 was the fact that I didn't collect any sand from anywhere along the near two thousand miles we traversed of the Baja peninsula.
I now have a large ziploc bag filled with some five pounds of Baja Mexico silt. Some of this silt will be going in a jar on a shelf in my house to help bring back all those imbedded memories again and again. The rest? Maybe make a little silt bed in my own backyard? Thanks again to Elliot Sherwod, Paul Hartl and Tim Meunier for plowing my truck through various silt beds and "collecting" all this sand for me, only to be revealed some six months later. Baja...the gift that keeps on giving!
The replacement of the serpentine belt the previous evening was a simple fix and with zero other issues we are hopeful for a successful conclusion. Elliott and Tim get the nod to drive again as their prior day was cut short and hopefully Paul and I will jump in the truck later in the day and bring her across the finish line in Cabo. Being a "short" day of only 124 miles, I, for one, am already thinking of finally making the end of day party for once.
A sinking "here we go again" feeling settles in as we jump back in the van and off we go, not knowing where to. With only a gas station road map in hand and complete ignorance as to where the stage actually started--a general some score odd square mile area, no idea how far they really got, no idea if they have moved to some other location, no idea how to even start finding an access road to the general area they might be, we are groping in the dark--fortunately breaking down early in the day this time leaves us some daylight to work with.
We begin by retracing our route to the nearest town on a major road to where we think the beginning of the stage is and making an inquiry in a random chotchkies store (lots of bongs, pipes, knives, dead animals, rocks, etc.) with the probably high as a kite "employees" as to how best to get to a village that is shown down a tiny road on the map that we think might be a good start. We're told to head up the road and pass through an unmarked cattle guard onto a dirt road leading inland and about 10 miles in will be our village. Taking the van and trailer is a brutal process for this. The entire vehicle seems like it will shake itself to pieces or deafen me completely before we get to the village and we actually never make it...by van. We wisely stop some 1/2 mile outside the village as the road goes from hardpack to fairly deep sand and we are scared that our van will become stuck, leaving us in true trouble.
Running low on water in 95 degree heat we begin making the trek into the village where we find a handful of people (none very friendly or English speaking), a lot of livestock, numerous third world huts and shacks and some tracks in the sand from the race cars having passed through a while earlier. Had they made it this far? Did they take this left? Have we backtracked far enough? All unknown. We return to the van where Paul ventures out on his own down a side trail where the tire tracks go in hopes of running across something to give us a clue. I give him an hour to walk and return and I'm left alone in the silent desert with a breaking down van, a few ounces of water and no clue. After a few minutes of sitting alone in the shade, I am joined by a wonderful dog belonging to the house behind the abandoned roadside bar surrounded by rusting barbed wire I now sit in front of. This is how news stories of dead American tourists start isn't it??
Close to an hour later I hear a vehicle approaching from the direction Paul had wandered in. Paul has been picked up by a few locals who had been observing/assisting with the race and had knowledge of our guys. They had broken down somewhere along the road Paul had been walking and they believed our guys had been pulled out somehow at the other end, though they did not know exactly where that road came out at or where our guys currently were....just a general idea of what happened and the direction they were headed. Happy to have Paul (or any friendly, English speaking company) back with me and with HOPE that we might be headed in the right direction, we head out, back down the village access road, shaking our brains silly again.
We route South, again, and then turn Northeast in hopes of finding where the stage route came out...we find little with the road becoming more and more empty and in places in indescribably bad condition. With our trailer tires all pretty much shot at this point (oh, did I mention the horribly bad wear the tires were experiencing? The brand new trailer tires that had begun the trip were now almost down to the cords in places due to massively uneven wear from what we think are bent axle shafts/housings) every pothole makes me wince, waiting for the inevitable blowout. It never comes (this day) and we run into another team making their recovery. Once again we have run into someone with another part of the puzzle. They believe our guys may be up the road a few miles having been pulled out by some locals and now not moving.
Very early on in the stage with Tim as driver the truck had dropped its front right hand side down into a rut that was running along the road and suffered the same fate at it had with myself at the wheel on day one of the event--a tie rod separating at the ball and socket connection to the steering rack. They knew immediately what had happened and now without any spares and a long way from help they were resigned to a long day in the desert. Popping the tie-rod back together as we had done on Day 1 did not work this time leaving Tim and Elliott with a very crippled vehicle a long way from anywhere.
As happened numerous times throughout the event it was the locals to the rescue. Operating a 30 year old Bronco II with 300,000+ miles on the odometer a local family was able to flat tow the race vehicle to where it now stood with the tire ratchet strapped kinda "straight"...This kind family also provided much needed snacks and water to our racers--things that were much appreciated given the amount of time in the desert they were due to spend waiting. So here was Tim...Where was Elliott??
Come to find out, Elliott had been "picked up" by some local girls--ages unknown but of dubious legality on the Northern side of the border--who had been passing by the stranded truck and decided to stop. Through broken Spanish they offered to drive Elliott to their home where it was hoped he could get cell reception and communicate with SOMEONE who could then tell myself and Paul where the broken truck was now located. Using Google Translate as an assistant the first words these two girls try and communicate to Elliott as they drive off away from Tim are "shootings" and "robberies"...Come to find out, the region in which the truck was now stranded with Tim minding the store solo is considered quite dangerous and well known for its criminal element.
Soon after Paul and I arrive on the scene, Elliott and the girls return (Elliott assures us no shenanigans took place with said lovely locals) and we work to get the broken truck on the trailer once again. Night time has fallen, our race is over, we look at our watches knowing we have hours to drive before we arrive at our hotel in Cabo and know that we won't be making the closing ceremony, fireworks, free booze and impressive spread laid out for the other racers who have made it to the end. Might as well be consistent I suppose...
We arrive at our hotel in the early morning again, all but two racers who are drunkenly doing flips into the pool at 2AM are nowhere to be found. We crash into yet another hotel room with Elliott and Paul needing to leave early the next day to make their flights home. Their trip is over. Tim and I however, have many thousands of miles yet to go and some very sick vehicles to try and nurse...
Fortunately Elliott and Paul track down a local auto supply store a few blocks away and run off to grab a few sets of open lugs (the front bolt thread pitch is different from the rear so having a couple sets of proper open lugs is best) and I try and prepare the truck to quickly swap the tires upon their return. Paul and Elliott return with the lugs and we get the proper wheels/tires on and Elliott and Tim take off in the race truck to find the start of the second of the day's stages (again, due to the late arrival and last minute obstacles we have decided to only try and run the later of the day's stages).
Well, Paul and I take this as good news...the race truck must be running well if it made it here that quick and just kept on going. We hop in the van and begin sprinting down the road hoping that we can catch our guys as they come out on the other end some hour or more down the road. By the time we reach the other end of the stage the sun is about to set and none of the course workers here have seen our truck. Then we begin hearing radio transmissions from race controllers that there are up to a dozen or more vehicles stuck in a series of silt beds shortly after the road crossing we had just left. We wait, and wait and then find out that our truck had stopped in that silt bed area and ceased any movement. Oh, boy...with a giant van with only 2WD and a trailer we have absolutely zero way to get to them, let alone retrieve them. Remember...this is Mexico and Baja racing...driving out onto a hot race course is perfectly fine here. No need to wait till the course is deemed "clear", afterall these are public roads that are never shut.
So we are faced with a dilemma, we are a tad low on gas and the nearest gas station is over an hour away, in the opposite direction from the road crossing we hope to get back to. Do we spend more than two hours just getting gas before we even begin looking for our guys or do we risk running out of gas in the middle of nowhere (there are NO gas stations for multiple hours in the direction the road crossing requires) but begin looking for our boys right away. Paul and I decide to take the risk and figure it out as we go and head after Elliott and Tim. It takes us about an hour to get back to the general area of the road crossing where we hope to pick up the race course and get as close to them as possible and discover what has happened. We find a couple of roadside stores/houses/shacks that have their lights on and we pop our heads in with Paul using his Spanish to inquire as to the particular road the course is located on. We grab some additional water and supplies and ask if there is any gas around (as we are running very low now). We are directed to a local farmer down the road who is known to have some gas in containers for his personal use. Upon arriving at his house Paul inquires as to the availability of gas and the farmer agrees to supply us with some at a somewhat inflated price. Gas siphoned into van by blowing into the top of a large container of gas held higher than the gas tank and now tube running to it, we are just about back on the road when a truck with some gringo faces hanging out the windows pulls up.
We arrive on scene to find Elliott and Tim waiting and smiling--thank god. The hood of the truck is off and obviously not running. We greet and embrace looking to hear just what had happened. Yes, they had been running well, crossed the road and kept going as they had plenty of gas. The roads had been beautiful and fast, stage rally type roads that they had made great time on. Things went downhill quickly however when they hit the silt beds. Running down a small incline and into the silt a huge wave of the fine powder crests over the hood and windshield of the truck, blotting out all visibility and rapidly pulling the truck to a halt. In the process of the rapid deceleration the Nissan's engine somehow throws its serpentine belt which rapidly becomes chewed to pieces in the fan. Without a spare and deep in the silt things looked fairly hopeless--that is, until "luck" takes over and located at this spot (obviously aware of the likely result of numerous vehicles trying to run through the silt) is an individual with a tractor. Words are exchanged between Elliott and the tractor owner and the tractor pulls the truck out. Without a serpentine belt the engine isn't going to be doing much of anything. Some redneck engineering places a series of shoestrings in place of the shredded belt and gets the truck a short distance before that fails as well. I am a tad fuzzy on the remaining details on Tim and Elliott's remaining trip back to the main road but I believe another competitor's crew or similar flat towed the race truck back to where we now found it.
