ODO: 315,043
What do I do once I finish watching Berne speed away down a rocky wash? I give the race team that just got out of the car their lunch, help pack up our pit, and get on the road. My job is to follow the racecar north, along the highway. I carry as much stuff from the HellTrain as possible so it can be quick and nimble if it needs to help the racecar. I’m basically a cargo transport. Most of my prep involves having food I can eat while driving, within easy reach, and knowing where the decent bathrooms are. My week of pre-running was spent making laps up and down the highway until I could drive it in my sleep. Which is good because a lot of my drive will be done in the dark.
Berne got in the car around 4pm, a solid two hours earlier than we were expecting. We get the driver teams swapped, and the racecar on its way after a quick inspection. Now it’s time for excited locals to get some pictures of Mike and Sean, the driver team that just got out of the car. Everyone is a rockstar today. It helps that our pit is about 15 minutes outside Loreto and easy to get to, so the crowd is large.
Being the cargo transport, I also get to haul the dirty race gear. It takes up a lot of space, is still damp from sweat and other bodily fluids, and this keeps us from having to unpack the back of another chase truck to try and stow it properly. Hey, whatever gets us on the road faster, right?
With the dust from our car starting to settle, we pack our driver team into our small convoy (just two of us) of chase trucks and head for the highway and the other two chase trucks waiting for us. Along the highway there are access roads to the race course. As we drive north our convoy will shrink and grow depending on who needs to stay at these roads and who we pick up as the car successfully passes these points. All of our chase trucks have various tools and spare parts to keep the racecar moving. Not every chase truck has the same parts, it’s expensive to have several of everything, and impractical. There are a lot of logistics that happen before the race to try and plan what we think is most likely to break where, and have those parts in those areas. And then the race starts and our best plans go out the window. Luckily we have an eye in the sky (three amazing humans that trade off for 36+ hours) monitoring the racecar and all the chase truck positions, coordinating everything.
In case you didn’t know, the Tacoma is slow. This works out because I’m also a slow driver. Roads in Baja are narrow, and full of pot holes and cows that blend into the night. During the race, the most dangerous place to be is on the highway. There is so much traffic, people driving sketchy and hauling giant trailers that are too wide for the lanes, and everyone is exhausted. Because I’m a solo driver, extra effort is put into keeping track of me. I’m either at the front of the convoy, to keep everyone together, or I’m sent ahead to meet another truck that isn’t supposed to leave until I get there.
On one of these transfers I ended up with Justin’s younger brothers. They were great convoy buddies. We had a gas adventure, saw an overturned semi trailer just outside Mulegé, and set up a pit together.
One of the hardest parts of chasing is making sure you have gas. During normal times, towns in Baja regularly run out of gas. This only gets worse during the race. The rule becomes: stop for gas whenever you see gas whether you need it or not. We were in the middle of a gas stop when the power went out. A busy gas station with long lines of trucks waiting to fill up was suddenly black. We got lucky, we were the last vehicles that finished filling before the power went out. Good timing too because shortly after getting back on the road, we learned two big towns in front of us were out of gas.
Back on the road, we got word that the racecar might have a leaky shock. It’s hard to know for sure what’s happening in the racecar, so we made a plan to meet them at the next pit stop to see what was going on. We were carrying a spare shock, unfortunately it wasn’t a shock for the racecar (we need prerunner spare parts too), and anyone who knew this wasn’t in radio range.
BF Goodrich (yup, the tires) sets up pit stops along the race course, and if you use their tires and pay a fee, you can use their pit service. It’s volunteers who will inspect your vehicle and fuel you, and depending on the volunteer, will help put your car back together so you can keep racing. It’s an amazing service. We use BFG pits. We safely hustled to the pit in San Ignacio and got ready to meet the racecar. Justin and Berne pulled in very confused. They had been getting chatter about a leaking shock, but hadn’t felt anything while they were driving. BFG helped us do a fast once over on the car, confirmed the shock was good and got them back on course. It turns out at the previous pit, someone noticed a shock looked wet, but it turned out to be just condensation. You never know with these things so you have to check. The other reason Justin and Berne were confused was because they knew that spare shock I was carrying was for the HellTrain, not the racecar.
This final leg of Justin and Berne’s section was a fast one for them, and a slow one for the highway, so I needed to hustle to try and reach the driver change before they did. Spoiler, I didn’t make it, but just by a little bit. The driver change was in a town that feels like a ghost town. El Arco is desolate, and creepy. Think scary movie landscape with an abandoned playground, scary church and that one weird tree. Our pit was behind some of the buildings. With all the big lights cutting through the night, the town looked even more scary movie abandoned. After a bit of a rest and some coffee, we packed up another pit, added more trucks to our convoy and got back on the road. It’s always a big relief when everyone gets out of the car safely. Two driver changes down, one more to go.
It’s around 3am, and everyone is very tired. My absolutely least favorite road is the dirt road from the highway to El Arco. It should be great, it’s wide and graded and straight and flat. But being a slow driver, I can’t comfortably make the truck go fast enough to hit the good harmonics on the road, so it’s just a long punisher. I should still be driving, Berne just got out of the racecar, he’s wiped, but he agrees to get us down the road to the highway. Tensions are high, we’re both tired, so I’m slow to call out a bad pothole and Berne is slow to avoid it, and we slam into it. We do manage to warn the HellTrain behind us, but we’re going to need to stop and see if we’ve done anything tragic once we get to some pavement. I think that sounds like a story for next week.
