Day 7 of Competition

The final day. We have almost finished this epic journey of around 2000 miles with about 400 miles of racing. This day started with going back over the roads on the La Boufa mountain. One of the things about repeating a stage this way is that the driver should know where they are going and should be able to go faster as a result. The problem with that is we were driving back over the stage in the early morning rather than the afternoon that we ran before. Obviously with colder tarmac and some dew on the road this was not the same road.

On this section our chances for a top 10 finish greatly increased. We came round a corner to find the 10^th overall car only just in front of us. It had set off on the stage 90 seconds ahead of us, and with only about 70 seconds separating us in the overall standings, finishing closer to that car and holding on for the remaining sections would give us 10^th. We found out later that the co-driver’s knee had knocked the fuel pump fuse in the car and it had died on track.

The next two sections were the fastest that we had seen yet. Long straights between fast corners. I’m not sure what was going on with the car in these stages, maybe we were back at a lower altitudes and the car could operate better, but we were able to get up to a decent speed throughout these sections. We averaged about 120mph for these two stages, with top speeds probably around 135mph. For comparison, the fastest guy on these stages (Pierre de Thoisy) Averaged 130mph on the first stage and almost 150mph on the second. And just to be clear, both of these stages had corners.

On to the final stage, 5 laps of the track at Monterrey. The track environment should have allowed the Elise to shine once again, and we may have been able to pick up another place.

All of a sudden we came across all the competition cars ahead of us at the side of the road with the police pulling all of us over. The track stage had been cancelled and La Carrera Panamericana 2006 had finished. The whole thing came as a bit of an anticlimax, but we had made it to the finish. We never found out why the last track stage had been cancelled.

Our time was good enough for 10^th overall, but due to the rules of the race, we were placed outside the final finishing table. The Elise had gone about 2000 miles and 400 miles of racing over some truly terrible roads without a hint of mechanical problems. The entire damage to the car amounted to 2 square inches of paint removed under the front cheeks, and about 3 inches of damage to the carbon fiber diffuser fin. All of that damage occurred on speed bumps in the transition stages.

As a team we are truly proud of what we have done here. 10^th overall, with Rachel getting the highest placed female driver. What makes this result all the more spectacular is that we were the only team in the top 30 or so with novice driver and co-driver. None of us had competed in any event like this.

All this goes to show we had a great team and a great car. While many of the top finishing cars look like they are from the 1950s, most of them have entirely modern engines and suspensions, not to mention a lot of money put into them. This race helped show many people just how astonishing the Elise really is.

Many thanks to Rachel for inviting me on this crazy trip, to Randy for the loan of Cameras (there’s a lot of editing to do) and to Robert P for late night suspension advice.

Thanks most of all to Amy for not only letting me go on this trip but encouraging me make the most of this fantastic vacation while she is slaving away at home.

Day 6 of Competition

Perhaps in response to the very real danger that drivers and co-drivers were on the verge of hallucination, Day 6 started at noon, with only a short stage to Zacatecas. That sleep in till 8:30 could not have come at a better time.

The roads on Day 6 were the worst possible roads for us to hang onto the top 10 position. Stages 1 and 2 were incredibly fast, with long straights between fairly fast corners. It is probable that some of the Studebakers were touching on 140-150 mph on these stages, whereas the best the Elise could manage was about 110. The roads on this section were at altitude (8000 ft) and we both felt that the Elise was suffering from it.

The final two stages of the day were going over a mountain called La Boufa in both directions, though not at the same time, that would be bad. They gave us a long lunch stop between the two runs to get everyone off the mountain in one direction before turning round and going over them in the other direction.

This mountain was better for the Elise but still quick with some straights. Rachel was as aggressive as you can be on mountain roads with no barriers, but the straights and altitude conspired against us. I think we finished Day 6 with 14^th on the day and 11^th overall. We were going to need some luck to finish in the top 10.

Zacatecas is the biggest party town on the trip. By this point in the race it is normal for quite a few of the cars to be out of the competition but their drivers and crew to be tagging along with the circus. Zacatecas is where they party hard. Quite a few of the guys still in the competition party at this point too, figuring it’s only one day to drive with a hangover. And the way they go about getting the hang over is this: all the drivers and crew are given a shot glass on a ribbon which you hang about your neck. You follow a donkey and a brass band on a 1 mile trail through the middle of town. The brass band plays and the donkey carries the mescal that they fill your shot glass up with every 20 yards. It’s only due to my ability to not drink the alcohol in front of me (trust me, as a Brit this is difficult) that I even made it to the end of the march.

The march finishes in a fabulous old bull ring that has been converted into a hotel. One of the highlights of this trip has been stopping in these amazing old towns, and seeing a side of Mexico that I didn’t know existed.

Day 5 of Competition

Day 5 took us back through Mil Cumbres and on to Aguascalientes. We’d had some rain overnight and the roads through Mil Cumbres were slick in places. We took it somewhat easily through the first section of the day while we figured out the condition of the roads. By the end of the first section we were in sight of the Chevy Sportswear Corvette that set off into the stage 30 seconds before us, but Pierre de Thoisy, who had had mechanical problems on the day before and started a minute behind us, was almost on our tail by the end of the section. He was pushing hard to make up for the day before.

(picture courtesy of Bret Haller)

We started the middle section of Mil Cumbres in the same order, this time Rachel’s confidence that the roads were ok was up and we pushed harder, passing the Vette about half way through the stage, and by the end of the section, there was still no sign of Pierre in our mirrors.

Due to the way the timing works for the overall stage, to avoid penalties, we let the Vette back past us before starting the next timed stage. This time we came round a fast corner to find a wall of blue smoke across the road. The Vette engine had let go in a major way and they were off to the side of the road. The smoke was so thick that we had to pause for a couple of moments rather than fly through it, unsure of exactly where we would find the car.

The afternoon sections this day were far more open than Mil Cumbres, allowing the big horsepower cars to claw back the time they had lost on us in the very twisty sections. These sections were so long and so fast we were sure we’d be dropping places on the day. We would have come in about 13^th on the day except for 4 total mechanical failures in the cars in front of us. The Chevy Vette, Shamrock Racings Porsche, Tom, Gerry and Coop’s Mustang, and another Porsche all had mechanical failures that were serious enough to take them out of the race. We finished the day with our highest day finish to date, 9^th on the day and 10^th overall. With only a day and a half of racing to go we were beginning to hope that we would be able to pull off a top 10 finish. It would all depend on the nature of the remaining sections; if they were too fast the Elise wouldn’t stand a chance against the high horsepower cars in the top 20.

The Final Run into Aguascalientes was done with a police convoy, and every single intersection on the way in blocked to give us priority. We flew through the town, red lights and all to get to the finish line. I would just like to apologize to the people of Aguascalientes for making their Tuesday evening commute a total disaster while we went through the middle on clear roads. Sorry. Thank you. Sorry.

Day 5 also had the latest start drivers meeting so far, with half an hour of local interpretive dancing before hand. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, because the welcomes we got at all the towns on the route were tremendous, but I was at the point where the all important things for finishing this race were food and sleep.

Day 4 Of Competition

Today the race had three speed sections on a famous stretch of road, Mil Cumbres, (1000 corners). Doing well at Mil Cumbres is critical to doing well in the overall competition as the stages here are long and slow. We knew going into this that it was going to be an experience, the course notes and addendums talked about rough roads and landslides. It turned out that there were a few more notes that should have been included.

To make matters even worse it started raining heavily while we were in the middle timed section of Mil Cumbres. Visibility was down and the road surface was bumpy and really slick. Rachel’s driving in this section was phenomenal. I know I would not have pushed the car as hard as she did on such a terrible surface. There was at least 1 section where the Elise went all four wheels airborne for a couple of feet before crashing back down. We came round one corner to find two cows in the road, with probably a 10 ft separation. Rachel didn’t hesitate for a moment and simply split the gap at something around 60mph.

On another corner the course notes said “landslide” where what they meant was “half the road is missing, keep right”. Again Rachel didn’t hesitate and drove round the missing road without blinking.

We also pulled off another pass in Mil Cumbres over an absolutely enormous Hudson weighing at least 3 times as much as the Elise. Little wonder they were running slower on these roads. He saw us coming and took the wide line for one corner allowing us to nip by on the inside. Whenever Rachel pulls off a pass, I lose my place in the notes. I get too preoccupied with the car in front and Rachel then has to drive for a mile or so on sight while I try and figure out where we are.

All the seasoned guys down here say that one of the most important things you need to learn is to tell the Driver that you are lost and they need to rely on visual for a while, and then to be patient and be sure that you are in the right part of the route book before starting to give instructions again. One of the very worst things you can do is read instructions that are wrong and have the driver think she is doing a grade 0 turn which is in fact a grade 3 turn.

Our standing at the end of the day was 10^th for the day and 10^th overall. A real testament to Rachel’s driving and the durability of the Elise. We were ecstatic with the result. Mil Cumbres took its toll on many cars, with more mechanical breakdowns than on any day since the first day. It also took its toll with crashes. At least 4 cars went over the edges and down the steep banks into the trees. Unfortunately one E type went off hard and hit a tree 60 ft down the slope. Both the driver and co-driver are fairly seriously injured and in the hospital at this time.

(Pictures courtesy of Brian Durand)

Day 3 of Competition

Today I was back in the co-pilot seat for one of the nastiest transition stages. We were going into Mexico City to the Formula 1 track for a stage made of 5 laps around the track, then crossing Mexico City to Queratero.

Right from the start the organization of this day was a disaster (are you noticing a theme here yet?). We had a 7:00 AM start in the middle of Puebla to get us to the Formula1 track in time to run before the Champ Cars started warm up. Unfortunately it seemed that the organizers were not particularly organized or ready for the early start and 7:00am came and went without them showing up.

When they did show up, they had with them timesheets that went off a 7am start, even though we actually set off some time after 7:15. That meant we had about 90 minutes to cover 100 miles to the Z control at the end of the stage at the track. With the last 5 miles on surface streets in Mexico City at rush hour. One of the good things about this race is that provided you have your official stickers on the side of the car, the Federales on the freeways encourage you to go quicker rather than pulling you over. We got to the track just in time. We were immediately waved out onto the wet track to run our laps. It was total chaos. By the time we were on our 2^nd lap there were probably 40 cars on the track, ranging from 6-700hp Studebakers to a 3 cylinder, 2 stroke Saab. The Elise showed off big time at the track, especially in the wet. Some of the cars seemed to have half mile braking zones, so it was easy for the Elise to go down the inside and nip round the corner.

(Picture courtesy of Bret Haller)

(Picture Courtesy of www.LaCarreraPanamericana.com.mx)

On leaving the track, we had to make our way across Mexico City. We had clear and concise instructions, with the distance on the odo for every marker along the way. That would have made it easy, but for some reason the road we were supposed to be taking was closed. A main freeway through the middle of town shut down just when we wanted to use it.

We got lost.

Luckily there is a fairly nifty way to get round this problem. Find a taxi, tell him which road you’re trying to get on, then follow the taxi there. It worked well for us in Mexico City.

The afternoon speed sections were around Queretaro, on mountain roads that looked a little like those around Malibu. The chaos from lost cars through Mexico City persisted into the start of this section, so we started with a fairly slow Mercedes 30 seconds in front of us. About 5 miles into the stage, Rachel pulled off a pass, out of a corner and into a short straight. With a wall on one side and a steep drop off on the other, the pass was fairly exciting, to put it mildly. It was a great piece of driving.

There was only one crash today, a 1953 Corvette that went into the concrete wall at the track. The contact didn’t seem to be very hard, and as they have the best mechanic here on their team there is every chance that the car will be fixed for tomorrow.

Day 2 of Competition

Today Cade was in the Navigator seat with Rachel, which meant I was driving the service truck. The goal here was to get to the half way stage for the day ahead of the competition cars and set up lunch for them, then get to the hotel for the night ahead of them to check in, and have their luggage ready for them. Piece of cake. I even had time to catch up on my writing. I’d post this to you all, but gas stations in Mexico appear to be short on wireless internet connections.

This stage went from Veracruz to Puebla. On arrival in Puebla, there were apparently

3000 people waiting for the race to come in. It took Cade and Rachel 2 hours and hundreds to signatures to get themselves and their car out of the town center and back to the hotel.

One of the things that made this race so hard was attempting to take care of yourself. The starts are normally around 8am, which meant the car had to be ready to go at the start at 7:30. Working backwards, we were getting up at 6:30. That would be fine, but there was a drivers meeting every night that had awards and changes of information for the following day. Invariably, these were set for 8pm, but only actually started after 9, and finished after 10, sometimes much later. Trying to fit an evening meal between the end of the day’s driving and the beginning of the meeting proved difficult. We were running hungry and tired every day.

Day 1 of Competition

Day one of racing proper and we had drilled into us once again that 50% of the crashes in previous years have occurred in the morning of the first day. We were gridded according to qualifying times, which meant that we were mixing with some pretty quick cars (Modern Nascar cars with 1950s bodies. Some of these vehicles cost over $200k. We were a bit nervous. Half way through the first stage of the first day we came across the first wreck. A beautiful 50s Chevy pointing the wrong way for the corner and flipped over on its side. We knew that car is one of the more expensive ones here. These guys are crazy.

The first section was very good for us, nice twisty mountain roads with smooth tarmac. There were only a couple of tricky features on this section, a tight right hairpin at a junction, with the outside of the junction lined with people, and a couple of turns onto narrow bridges. The bridges were only about 6 ft above a small river, but with no rail whatsoever, it made for an interesting corner.

We took it relatively easy on that section while still working on our communication. No drama, just smooth, quick, driving. Our confidence climbed a little.

The next section took all the confidence away again. The surface of the road was broken up and very bumpy. There had also been a very half assed attempt to repair it by filling the worst offenders with loose asphalt, which was coming back out of the holes with every passing car and spreading gravel all over the road. We decided to coast that section. It just wasn’t worth the potential damage to the car to push at all.

The transition to the next speed section was probably in the worst condition I had ever seen. There were potholes all over the place, which were big enough to take a wheel off the car no problem: 6-8” deep and 2-3ft across. And they were all over the road. The weird thing was that the road was very smooth and in good condition apart from these holes. We picked our way through them very carefully.

The final stage before lunch was wide open mountain roads and very quick for the Elise. I’m sure we did well on that one. Then after lunch we did the same sections in reverse back to Veracruz. (Due to the political problems in Oaxaca, the routes got changed at the last minute. It isn’t normal for the rally to backtrack like this).

The problem with that was we had to do the bad road second section again. We coasted it again, there really was no option. The final section was a repeat of the first section in the opposite direction. This time the bridges were much more interesting because another Studebaker had gone off it and was sitting in the middle of the river. That one may make it back into the event, but an accident like that will definitely put it out of the running.

(Pictures courtesy of www.LaCarreraPanamericana.com.mx)

The Cumulative Crash Count at the end of day 1 was about 10 with maybe 3 of them not able to make it back at all. There are also some mechanical dropouts. Despite that, we slipped 8 places to 24^th (I think). Most of the lost places were because of the nightmare bad road sections on the way out and back. If we continue to hit bad road sections like that (and the consensus is that we will occasionally) we’ll have no choice but to take it easy. Next year we’ll come back with a lifted Elise on soft shocks for the bad sections, but this year we’ll just do our best to finish. After the first day it’s not hard to guess that fully half of the cars to start will not manage that.

Qualifying

Qualifying stage was a 6 mile or so stretch of closed Mexican road, which I found out the day after in the first day of competition can mean practically anything. They say you can’t win if you don’t finish. Well it turns out you definitely can’t win if you roll the car twice in qualifying. That’s what Rachel and I came across pushed off to the side of the road round one corner only a mile or so into the race. A totally destroyed Studebaker on one side of the road and an only slightly rolled Mini off to the other side of the road. The Studebaker had both doors off and heavily crunched wings. That car is an almost total write-off. The Mini on the other hand had hit on the front wings and on top of both corners of the windscreen, but thanks to the roll cage, was more or less ok.

(Pictures courtesy of Bret Haller)

Rachel and I had already decided that this was a section to take it easy, and seeing these cars so early in the stage only encouraged us to do just that. So we were as surprised as anyone when we found ourselves in 16^th after qualifying. Rachel definitely drove the section well, but we were certainly not pushing.

The co-driver’s job turns out to be a total bitch. A normal section of the Rally starts at Checkpoint A, where you are given a start time on a timecard and released into the speed stage. Then things get busy. You have to tell the driver the distance to the next corner, the direction of the corner, and then the grade of the corner, where 0 is pretty much flat out and 4 is a sharp hairpin. The problems arise when you get into a corner complex, and you find yourself saying to the driver: “300 Right 1 into Right 2 into Left 3” while trying to give her the information in a way she can use it. It’s no good giving the Left turn while we are still on the straight, it’s also no good giving her it as we round the end of the Right 2.

So far so good. Now the problem on coming out of the complex of corners is that the next distance measurement is given from the start of the previous complex, not the end. This means that you can be reading “400 to Right 1” when you are only 150 meters from the corner.

On top of that due to the rush job in getting here we don’t have a co pilots odometer or a Terratrip. That means as you are running the stage you are trying to look at the driver’s odo. On the Elise that’s not easy. The alternative is to be watching the corners and trying to match them to the notes, leaving you to try and decide whether the jink in the road is the Right 0 corner or that it didn’t count as a corner at all and the next corner is the Right 0.

After that you blow through the finish (Checkpoint B). The next job of the co-driver is to attempt to get the driver to slow down in time for Checkpoint C where they write down the time you crossed Checkpoint B. You then progress along open roads to the end of the section, obeying (in theory) the speed limit. The end of the section is at checkpoint Z. You have to arrive at Z in the 60 seconds after your start time (from Checkpoint A) plus the stage elapsed time. You get penalized for arriving early or 60 seconds too late. It’s up to the co-driver to tell the driver when to arrive at Z. Usually you arrive early and wait in a line to crawl up at your assigned time. Easy, eh? And the driver only has to drive.

Most of the drivers here are fairly old white guys. The sponsors for the event include Centrum Silver and Viagra. We’ve been given samples of the Centrum Silver but not the Viagra.

More Road to La Carrera Panamericana

Yesterday we left San Miguel late with the goal of getting through the center of Mexico City sometime after midnight. Only at that time of night was the traffic going to be light enough for us to hope to stay together as a convoy. Pretty much as soon as we set off, this leg of the trip was trouble. We ran into a cloudburst with all of the convoy driving trucks and trailers on slippery windy roads while the traffic picked up around us. Then the third truck in line lost the head of the convoy at a Y in the road, leaving about 20 vehicles without official guidance. Mexico City is a dangerous city so none of us were particularly happy with the idea of attempting to find our own way. Luckily, one of the members of the convoy had a Mexican Mechanic with them who lived in Mexico City and took over the leadership.

Before long we got pulled over by the Federales. There are roads in Mexico City that you are not allowed to drive trucks with trailers on. The convoy had special permission to drive on those roads, but that permission didn’t filter down to the guys in the police cars, so we all got pulled over. That Mexican Mechanic once again proved to be worth his weight in gold.

Mexico City was still not over. It’s home to 30 million people, though luckily most of them were not on the road after midnight. The cloudburst that had hit the convoy earlier had also hit the city and on one of the roads the sewers had flooded to about a foot deep.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad if we weren’t passed by a bus at about 40mph as we attempted to creep through it. The truck is now the worst smelling vehicle ever. At least The Elise was in an enclosed trailer. In some ways it’s almost a blessing that the honeymoon couple in the Volvo broke down just after leaving San Miguel. The car was not exactly waterproof and I seriously doubt a marriage can survive 8 days in a car that’s been washed out with raw sewage.

And still Mexico City went on.

Today, the run from Puebla outside Mexico city to Veracruz on the gulf of Mexico was a piece of cake. Only about 4 hours of driving through some amazing mountain roads. We’ll be competing in these roads on the way back out. The roads were so nice that we got the Elise out for the final stretch into town.

Of course as a result we got lost again.

I will tell you right now that a truck and trailer combination is even harder to drive through the center of a Mexican Market than it was on the cobble streets of San Miguel. At least market stalls are soft and don’t damage the trailer.

I have a better idea of what I’ve got myself into with this event. There is a documentary available through Google video (search for La Carrara Panamericana) that was taken on last year’s event. It’s in French as the driver they are following is French, but still well worth taking a look.

Two days into tech and registration and we are done. We’ve been standing around in a Costco parking lot for 2 days doing all we needed to do to be able to run in this race, everything from having blood pressure sorted out to shelling out 250 bucks for a Mexican driving license. The only thing that made the heat bearable was the collection of old cars around us. The smallest entry is not the Elise, but a classic Mini. The largest entry is a Buick Regal (I think). It is my personal goal to beat that Buick. I hate being beaten by Buick Regals.

As part of registration the car got fitted with a GPS receiver. It should be possible to track our progress from the official website (www.lacarrerapanamericana.com.mx) as the race progresses. We are car 500.

The car has been hand painted by a local in about 2 hours flat. It has our names on it and some other stuff. Go over to Rachel’s blog http://www.mil0.com/blog/ for pictures of it and other stuff.

Our car is also signed by Coop. We had the poor guy lying under the front of the Elise taping it up to hope to hold it together over some of the killer speed bumps. How cool is that?

The Road to La Carrera Panamericana.

La Carrera Panamericana is a historic race that started some time in the 1950s (you are at a computer, you look up the history of it) that started somewhere down in the south of Mexico and runs up to somewhere in the North (you came to me looking for specifics? I don’t have them.) Originally it was run unlimited all the way meaning that every mile they traveled was as fast as you could. There were breaks in the in the 2000 mile trip for servicing, but only for a couple of hours and they were off again. As all these huge races faded in the late 50s and 60s, so did the Carrera Panamericana.

Until sometime in the Eighties where it came back as a classic run using car from the era, also covering the 2000 miles from the south to the north. The race is now a little different from the original. The cars run unlimited sections for 5 to 10 miles at a time then driven to the start of the next unlimited section at highway speeds. There are 2000 miles to covering 7 days of racing. How cool is that?

2006 is the first year that they are allowing unlimited entry cars, i.e. cars that were made some time after 1960. Rachel has decided to enter her car and has gone through all the race car preparations. She has been gracious enough to allow me to share the driving, co-driving and support for her team. There are three of us in our Team Rachel, Cade and myself, and at the moment we are one night into our trip to the start of the race. We haven’t even started the race proper and already it’s an experience. We are currently in San Miguel de Allende, a very cool old town in the heart of Mexico, where a huge charity dinner has been organized around the arrival of La Carrera Panamericana. The tomorrow the cars are exhibited in the center of town before we hit the road again to get the car to the start, Veracruz.

Getting into San Miguel was a total nightmare. The drive down into Mexico was done in convoy with some directions put together that bore little or no resemblance to the Mexico we found on the ground. The biggest problem was a failure of an escort meeting us outside of the town. The result of which was that we drove the truck and trailer through the center of town. The streets started narrow, got narrower, steeper and cobbled. The trucks brakes started to cook. It was about that time that we found a bus going in the opposite direction….

The car exhibit in the middle of town made us feel like the heroes we know we really are. Kids asked for our signature, crowds swarmed all over the car. I love this trip. We’ve already started to get to know a bunch of the other drivers. There’s a couple driving an old Volvo on their honeymoon. They are one of the more brave teams on this run as they are driving their competition car all the way down rather than trailering it with the goal of testing their marriage to breaking point before it even gets started. Also Coop is here as a co-driver. Dave, feel free to fly in here and join us.

(Picture courtesy of Coop)