Blowing Bubbles: 09 Baja 500

A Baja Adventure.

Sitting in bar waiting for mid term results just shaking 1130:
I’m sitting in a bar just shaking. I had just taken my Paramedic mid term, I was suppose to be on my way to Mexico an hour and a half ago. If I don’t pass this test, I am out of medic class, 9 months wasted. I am sitting here just shaking. Finally Jerry walks in and sits down. He starts spouting out grades in no particular order. Finally mine hits. Passes, Thank you Jesus

Driving thorough Camp Verde redirect to LA: I am about an hour into my drive south. Just outside of Camp Verde. I am pulled out of my trance of the drive by the ring of my phone. On the other end of a cordless conversation is Jess. During the morning’s pre-run, a front shock on the car had been torn off. He asked if we could go to Los Angeles first and pick up a shock and some parts from one of Trav’s friends shops. When I left the house that morning I had put on a Starlight Customs t shirt. Now I was on my way to their shop which I had never been, in a town that I have not been to in 20 years.
We pull into Starlight, correct that, we are guided in by yet another cordless telephone conversation. 2400hrs. Jack looks like Trav’s twin. It’s been ten years. Things are just weird. Starlight has a nice place right in the middle of the Gasoline Alley. Old school hot rod business here. It’s a good shop, and they have been building many a hotrod in the last few months. We are on a mission, so we say our good by’s and head to Garden Grove.
Garden Grove. We pull our ski masks on as we pull up to King Shocks. By far the best off road shock builder there is. It’s 1 something in the morning, and we are digging through the bushes in front of their shop. We find two bag’s camouflaged with tan pain. It makes me wonder if they do this often. We have the shock parts, and we are headed to South once again.

Finding Travis C
Flash back to 1600hrs. I am in the annals of Phoenix. I am on the phone with Travis C. my co dawg for most of this adventure. I find his house quite uneventfully. He says his good by’s to his girlfriend and we are off to look for Sat phones

Finding sat phones in an unmarked room:
We are in Mesa, but we are lost. We are about a city too far to the north. We get on the freeway, and soon we are in Chandler looking for the Green door so to speak. We make a loop around a weird bar, and park in the complex looking for the magic Green door. After a short search we find a black door with a number 150 on it. We go inside, and make the first left through an unmarked door. Inside, the magic room was abuzz cubicles and clickitiy clack of keyboards. We are approached by a woman, we can see no one else. Soon she disappears and a very large man appears. He tells us our phones will be ready asap. We mull around the entry way. Not so much a waiting room. Just a mess, some cubicles and a bunch of techie stuff on the walls that I didn’t understand. What a strange place. We leave as quickly as we can and head west.


Phoenix construction:
I mention this because it sucks. It started in New River, and ended some were outside of Goodyear. It’s a mess, and quite constant.

Hitting a bf bird outside Goodyear:
We are hauling the mail. Doing about 85 just west of Goodyear on the 10. Traffic is clearing out. 2000hrs. Travis C and I are contemplating some pretty serious shit as we usually do when all of a sudden, !BAM! and bird feathers cover the windshield. I guess this is where I should mention the rules of a Baja trip. You need to have a couple of things to make it to Baja. First you need to leave late, usually at some outrageous hour to start off a 13 or 14 hr journey. Next you need an insane redirect of the trip which will add hours to the journey. Some were, usually a couple of hours into the trip you need an animal encounter. It could be donkey’s, it could be birds, you name it, but there must be an animal encounter. So you are driving all night and it’s utterly redicuouls but you stop some place to get gas, and you must run into some interesting people. Maybe it’s just a weirdo, this time is was a scam at a gas station at 2 in the morning by a couple of under age girls involving gas money. Last but not least, you need to get lost for a while in a Mexican town. We did this once in TJ, and for a while in Ensenada.

Cabazon: Casino’s and Wind
Now I had never driven from Phx to LA on the ten. This was an experience for me. Especially at night. You see, my little Jeep isn’t the most powerful thing out there, and some were near the Salton Sea the wind began to blow. It blew harder and harder, rocks were hitting the windshield as the rock music played. Soon I saw the lights of the casinos. I had not planned for casino’s nor did I stop at the casino’s. We just kept a true coarse and soon we were in familiar territory of Montclair and the familiar home of SoCal.

The Torrance connection:
Growing up in SoCal We always’ had dreams of racing off road. We would pretend to be racers, we would pretend to be Army men. My friends and my Cousins and I were pretty close. My brother and his friends were closer. You see it’s good to have friends. We try to put rides together throughout the year that pulls together the AZ and CA side of things. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. The thing about the friends we have is they will, as we will, pretty much do anything to help a brother out. If I have a buddy who is a thousand miles away and needs my help, I am on my way. These were these kinds of friends. Seeing Jack after ten years or so was a pretty big shock. I would have sworn it was my Bro Trav if I had been drinking. Same style, same mannerism. It was pretty much awesome. He’s got this cool little shop in Gasoline Alley were Hot Rods have been created for years. These are good people.

Scam Artists in Oceanside:
Travis C is a good person. Two girls in Oceanside are not so good. We stopped for gas and to meet up with Jesse K. at a Mobil in Oceanside. It’s pushing 3 a.m. This pathetic looking girl of 18 or so approaches Travis C with a story of loosing her wallet and needing gas money to get home. He puts ten bucks of credit on her pump and we walk out. Sitting in the jeep drinking some stay awake juice, I pull around and park so we can see them, but just to wait for Jesse K. who was about a half hour out. While we were in the store the clerk had mentioned that the girls in the SUV with Travis C’s gas money looked “familiar”. So we sit for about ten minutes, and the two crack babies pull off the pump, and around the back of the Denny’s next door. The gas station clerk walks out and tells us that they never pumped any gas and she thought they were pulling a scam. She offers Travis C’s ten bucks back, and he takes it. Things are looking better all around, that is unless you are an underage crack head scammer in Oceanside. We meet up with Jesse K, and haul it towards Mexico.


Getting Robbed at the border:
Let me be the first to say, UP YOURS YOU MEXICAN BORDER CROSSING GUARD PIECES OF SHIT. We are the lucky honky’s who get pulled aside and searched getting INTO Mexico. They swipe twenty bucks out of Travis C’s wallet as they riffle through our stuff. If we ever get into a war with Mexico, I will line up to shoot these bastards. Jesse K gets searched because he stops with us, and finally we are on our way south again. It’s 330am.

Lost in Ensenada
First off, in Mexico, they don’t try real hard to mark the road signs. They also have as much construction going on as does the Phoenix metro. We get lost within five minutes of being in Tijuana. We are racing through side streets and hauling through the ghetto. Dodging produce trucks, and trying to avoid the Mexican cops. Finally we drop out of the hilltop ghetto’s and onto the highway 1 toll road. Two tolls down and we are in Ensenada. It’s 500am. I miss the turn that continues Hwy 1 and end up in the ghetto’s of Ensenada at 5 in the morning. The only cars on the street are us and a couple of taxi’s. Finally we find the camp ground and put up our tents just as the sun is starting to rise

Day one, multiple motor swaps, and RG Tire balls to the face, greasy fingers:
Two hours after we go to sleep we are up and getting greasy working on the car. The crew has put a “New” motor in after they had used the motor built by F2 racing for the pre running that they did. The motor that was taken out was the same motor that we had in the Baja 1000, and it had run a few races since. There was 3 guys on the motor, 3 on the trans. And three working on fixing the front shock that broke. We got the motor in, but it would not start. We swapped some wiring and finally it started. BUT IT STARTED BANGING like crazy. Pass side cylinder was making a racket. Damn it, We took that “new” motor back out and 8 guys and 5 hours later the F2 motor was back in and the car was ripping around the short coarse track at Estero Beach.

Taco’s round one:
When in Mexico, you eat taco’s. Taco stand taco’s. Open air taco stands are every where. You sit down on a broken stool and watch anywhere from a 10yo kid to an 80yo woman cooking and flipping you as many taco’s as you can eat. Taco’s and only taco’s. That and warm Cola, or fruit soda. These would never fly in the states. They are open air, and taco’s are dirt cheap. The health department would never let it fly. The only bad thing is all you eat is taco’s and more taco’s. Let me tell you though, at 2 in the morning after a day of pre running, nothing is better than taco’s from a couple of 10 yo kids on the side of the road.

Tech/contingency/race/Andy Grider:
So we don’t get the car back together until well after dark. It’s on the day of the race, and we don’t have the car even entered in the race. We go to find the Score officials and get the car tech’d. The thing about most organizations is that if you show up, and are willing to pay, they will take your money and let you enter. It was less than 2 hours until the car was suppose to leave the line, and we are standing in line to get the car entered in the race, Score liscences and get the paperwork done to race. We pull it off. Funny thing is, as we are finishing, so is Andy Grider, one of Robbie Gordon’s co drivers. They were maybe an hour or less from start time. Just crazy times getting things done in the nic of time.

Jess and I pile in the Box Van (which you should remember from previous stories) an Isuzu NPR that just won’t die. We haul as much ass as we can out to RM 40 for our first pit.

RM 40 chaos
We set up at RM 40. The road crossing at Ojo’s Negros. It’s pandemonium. Probably ten thousand people cramming to watch the classes come across Highway 3. There are people driving the wrong way on the coarse, there are people running across the coarse while race trucks and cars are bearing down on them. It’s pure chaos. The trophy trucks are coming through two and three wide at 60mph in a left hand turn. Rocks are spraying, and the dust is flying. People are inches from getting killed. It’s purely a mess.
We find a spot in the parking lot that is this road crossing to try to pit on Hwy 3. Our car radio’s 5 minutes out and they think they have a flat. We can’t get a good spot, so we grab tools and 5 of us haul ass towards an open space on a Y in the road. Our car comes flying in. They are LEADING THEIR CLASS! We give the car a good look and there are NO FLATS! Nothing is wrong, the car is running perfect! We quickly finish our pit stop and get the hell out of the way. There are still vehicles coming on the coarse and we were in a dangerous place. We head back to the box van and wait to see the next UTV come through before we leave. The next car comes through maybe 5 minutes later. We kick the NPR into high gear and head toward RM 80.

RM 80: Pit chaos, Score official asshole:
We get to the next road crossing and the next pit at RM 80. The only spot we can find is about 110 ft from the pt were the coarse enters the road. We set up and a few of us go to the turn to watch for the car. A Score official starts to give us shit about parking too close to the road crossing. Our car comes in and this Score official that is suppose to be flagging traffic to stop comes over as we are pitting our car and starts yelling at us that we are going to be DQ’s NEXT YEAR!? What the heck whack job? We were just at the legal limit away from the corner. Piss off. Another UTV team that I won’t mention was just 20 feet to the left of where the coarse entered the highway. A couple of our crew were still near the corner, and the Score official never said a word to them! I guess that’s what happens when you are a big money team and you bend over for these Score guy’s. (I won’t even get into last years B1k, or the whole Trophy truck cheating thing) We get our car pitted, everything is working great! They were a few minutes behind another UTV, but our compeditor had some repairs to be made and we were in the lead again. Sweet. We wait a few minutes, and then we start the drive to the Borrego road crossing.

RM 84: Loosing Brent, blowing shocks, Shocks strapped to Jess, Chaos
“1086 race, to 1806 chase, do you copy?” “1806 chase, we have torn a front shock off the car after hitting a hole and need you to rebuild one of the torn up shocks from the pre run and get it to us on the coarse”.
I go to work rebuilding the shock that was broken on the pre run. Jess gets on the sat phone and tries to find Brent who has the Nitrogen to recharge the newly rebuilt shock. We can’t get a hold of Brent, but soon Joey and his crew in the chase truck come along and pull in to were we are parked. Jess sends them to catch Brent, who must have blown past us at RM 80. It took Joey to a few miles past Valley T to catch Brent and they all almost ended up in a crash trying to get stopped. Poor communication on every ones part, sorry to all involved.
I get the shock rebuilt, and Jess gets his ridding gear on. The blue bomber just became Afradium Chase One. Brent finally gets back and we charge the shock with nitrogen and use duct tape to strap the shock to the back of Jess. We wrap the tape around and around until the shock won’t move. We pile the parts into his pack and tape the rest to him. He heads up the trail on his bike, and we sit and wait by the radio.
It seems like hours pass until we heard something. “1086 race, we are back in the race heading towards the summit. “We’ll see you on the other side” and we head towards Valley T. An hour later we get a call on the sat phone. The car has lost 2 tires going over the summit and they need a chase truck to the dry lake. It’s a two hour drive at least to the Drylake, almost all the way to San Filepe. We send Joey and his crew with the truck and trailer back back towards the dry lake. They make it there just in time.

Dry Lake Action:
The car comes into the dry lake with three 29” tires, and one 39” tire from a Class one car. Going over the summit the car lost 2 tires, and came to a stop next to a class one car. They had some talks, and the class one car was out of the race so doing the Baja thing, they gave our guy’s one of their spares. The crew gets the last of the Tire Balls spares on the car, and they put an “AIR” spare on the car. Joey’s crew got them going, and gave us a call that they were moving. The car was heading into a seriously rough section, and had ten miles of silt to deal with. Only 40 miles though. It would take as much time for Joey’s crew to get to the Borrego road crossing for the driver change as it would for the car to get there. We make the decision for them to wait on the dry lake for 10 minutes to make sure the car gets going again before they leave.
It’s a good thing they wait because less than 20 minutes later the car gets stuck in the silt, and burns up the clutch. A good sam in a Unimog pulls them out of the silt, and the chase truck with trailer goes pounding through the desert AROUND the silt to get to the car to swap the clutch. Joey’s crew does their magic, and soon the car is on it’s way.
We wait in the dark not having eaten much that day waiting for the car.

Borrego Crossing: Helping out with lights, One 5/16 20 mexican motor swap
We are sitting at the Borrego road crossing and it’s just getting dark. A couple of cars are still bumping through, but not too many. A couple of UTV’s pass. We sit and wait. Still nothing. Soon a motor home stops and a couple of guy’s get out. They are waiting for their car, a 5/16 that has lost a tranny. Soon out of the desert comes a Toyota Tacoma pulling the 5/16. They are all but catching air pulling the car which looked like it was catching air. They pull in and 20 or so Mexican guy’s swarm in and start to work on the car. It’s getting dark so we offer up our lights so they can see. They just tear into the car with the owner/driver/mechanic is doing most of the work. It takes them two hours to swap the trans and soon they are back on their way. We set up our lights to prepare for our pit and soon we are sitting in the dark. I fall asleep for a while but soon I can’t sleep anymore. I sit and wait.

Borrego, in the car Getting it!
Finally the car pulls into the pit. It’s maybe 12 midnight. Time stopped making sense hours ago. John and Brian look like they just went through 12 hours of hell, which they basically did. Jess and I are beat after 12 hours of our own hell, but we have a mission to accomplish. We climb into the car and tighten down the belts. Soon we are off into the night, alone. There is not another light in sight after we leave our pit. Just Baja darkness, and a full moon. A couple of miles into our drive we get passed by a long lost 7S truck. Soon after it’s darkness again. Miles of bumps and darkness.
We start to see the signs for Mag 7 pits. These guy’s are our fuel stop. We are horribly behind, and I am fumbling with the radio to try to notify them we are soon to be parked in front of them. I can’t get the damn radio straight and we pull into their pit with the motor screaming. I lay on the horn to rouse the drowsy fuel crew. They stumble out and dump us fuel. We thank them and are off into the night.

Mikes Sky:
We make it through the next few miles an soon we are on the road towards Mikes Sky Ranch. “Get Some” I holler over the radio, and continue with my Left Right Left of reading the GPS map. That brings me to my job. I get the to read the GPS map, and reference it to what is going on in real life. Check the gauges, back to the GPS, Left, hard left, 180 right, left sweeper, the story goes on. I find my self trying to steer with the grab bar. I am twisting the motorcycle grips like the throttle on my 450, and trying to stay relaxed. Luckily for me I have done some miles with Jess before, and I wouldn’t want to be with any other driver.

Highway one:
Well not quite. About half way there we start to get radio traffic from the Box Van Crew. All of a sudden out of the darkness, we see the giant “Afradium Racing” on the side of the box van. I remembered this spot from my race last year in the 500. We blow by them, loop around, and pull up on the back side. The check out the car, and dump as much fuel as they can. Soon we are off into the night again


The rock hill battle:
RM 260 to RM 280 is pure misery. It’s basically bumps, silt, and hills that will eat our little car. This is the kind of stuff that rock crawlers enjoy. We keep the car in a low gear, and just bounce it off the rev limiter and try not to loose it getting up the hills. Up shift on the down hills into the bumps, then into first for the charge up the next hill. We endure this for about 5 miles, Then it’s more switch backs. Eventually the road straightens out and we are flat hauling ass. I am having a hard time telling which way to go on the course. The thing about Baja, is there are A LOT of lines, it’s hard to tell which one to take. We blow one or two corners, but we don’t get stuck and we stay on coarse. Soon we make it to Hwy 1 and we pick up the pace to within tenths of a mph of the 60mph limit. Soon we turn off the highway, and there is a check point. It’s pushing 3 in the morning, and we basically wake people up so they can count us. We continue on into the darkness, not another car in sight.

Silt bump battles:
The thing people will tell you about Baja is that Silt Sucks. We leave the check point and we know we have some serious silt in front of us. We come to the silt, put the car in first gear, and just put the pedal on the floor. It is rough as it gets, up and down hilly, and most of it is on a side hill. The car is going nose down then nose in the air. We are on the edge of a complete crash. We are just ridding it out, and trying not to get stuck. We can’t afford to smoke the clutch again. We need to maintain 35+ mph to finish within the time limit, and we are doing good. We make it out of the silt and back onto some of the roads. We are hauling ass again when we see a Mag 7 pits sign.
“Mag 7 pit, 1806 race” I holler over the radio. Nothing, I try another channel. Nothing. Finally I get them on the radio. They have about ten seconds before we pull into their pit. We get fuel and info from them about the beach section and beach silt. Soon we are off heading towards the coast.

Loosing the rack in the mountains after Highway 1:
We are flat hauling ass, 40mph plus through everything. Jess has the car dialed, and we are feeling good about getting the car to the next driver change. All of a sudden the car starts to shake side to side like we have lost a tire, then all of a sudden it makes a hard right turn. Jess slams on the brakes, and we come sliding to a stop headed off the side of the road and a 30 foot drop. Some how we come to rest with the drivers side hanging on by a hair to a dirt berm and the passenger side hanging over the edge of the drop. I crawl out, and basically fall. I grab onto the car and hang on. It’s too steep to crawl back up, so I just climb around. We check the damage.
The bolts that hold the tie rods to the rack and pinion have sheared off. We were lucky to say the least. We were lucky we didn’t ball the car up off a 30 foot cliff. We could have had it go south at 65mph in one of the straights and been stuck upside down in the car for hours. It broke, but we were lucky. We look for some way to repair the thing, but we are hopelessly stuck. Nothing to do but wait. We lean up against the tires and rest. A Tomcar comes by, and never lifts. A class one car comes by, at maybe 25mph. We sit in the dark trying to stay warm. Finally at 4 am the chase crew makes it to us. The Box Van is in San Vicente about 45minutes away. We jerry rig the rack, and put the car on the trailer. Our race is over, we are timed out as it is. I am asleep within minutes of being in the chase truck. I am flat wasted and tired.

On the trailer, back to Ensenada:
We meet the Box Van and we caravan back to Ensenada. The sun is coming up again as we make it into Ensenada. We all fall into our tents and sleep for as long as we can. It’s pretty much useless. It’s getting warm, and nobody can sleep. We get maybe 2 or 3 hours, and we are on our way home by noon.
We all stop at the vender row to hone our bartering skills. I chisel a guy down to 20 bucks for a sweatshirt and t shirt then we leave.

Hauling ass home, the border crossing race:
It’s hard to get into Mexico, and it harder to get out. Our caravan gets split up and we all end up in the fray to cross the border. All four cars in four different lines. There are street vendors on the white lines between the cars. Kids juggling, people selling all kinds of stuff. It’s pure chaos. A moving carnival is the only way to describe it.

A thin grey line: Stopping to sleep:
I have been driving for close to 13 hours. All I can see in front of me is a grey line that resembles a road way. I have been blowing bubbles for a couple of hours. This is worse than being drunk. Finally I give up and park on the side of the road and sleep. Two hours pass, and I can’t sleep anymore. It’s 3am. I just push on to home. I hit my bet at 4am. I sleep for a couple of hours and then wake up and start tearing down from the trip. I feel like the walking dead for a couple of days. It’s been a week, and I am still recovering. Chaos.

The Mental aftermath.

The hardest thing about Baja is not the physical part. It’s not the long drives, or the inconsistent food. What gets you, what messes you up is the Mental part. In Baja you have so many close calls. You live on the edge for so long that your mind just gets flogged. You spend long hours in dangerous terrain. You are in a foreign country were you don’t understand the language and you are trying to get things done. You have crooked cops and federallies screwing with you. You have all kinds of Americans and locals doing crazy shit putting you life in danger. Physically you can handle the stress, but mentally you get destroyed. If you added up all the close calls you may have in a lifetime and combine them into 4 days, that’s Baja.