Wicklo Racing

Not the optimal line through the corner....

2007-11-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to www.motorsport.com and www.xpb.cc for these pictures:

Day 7, Where it all went right

2007-11-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

And this is part of what makes the La Carrera so special. We got back to the hotel after the accident with our tale of woe, and met some guys we'd been talking to the night before. We told them what had happened and they turned around and offered us a flight out on their private plane the following morning, They all lived around Orange county and had come down to watch their friends run the race. We'd never met them before the previous evening, but here they were offering us a really easy way out of Mexico.

No bumping over 500 miles in a service truck, just a short drive to Zacatecas Airport and we were on our way home.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped us that evening with spare clothes and an shoulder to cry on, special thanks to Hank, Hook and friends for the lift.

Day 6, Where it all went Wrong.

2007-11-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Day 6 is supposed to be an easy day, we only have a short run to the next city of Zacetecas, and there are only 4 speed sections in the day. Two of them are out and back over La Bufa, another notorious road on the La Carrera, and it was here the Chevy met it's end, and the Driver and Co-driver really counted their blessings.

I don't know whether the dizzying heights of 3rd in class got to our heads or what, but coming down the far side of La Bufa we entered a left hander with just too much speed. The Chevy back end came loose and we slid round the corner. We were almost all the way round it when the back end caught a concrete post at the edge of the road, kicking the car straight and off the edge of the hill. It was 50-60 ft down with a dirt slope. no trees were there to save us this time. I grabbed my straps with my hands to stop my arms flailing about and closed my eyes, this was not going to be a fun ride. We landed sideway to the hill and started to roll. I think we probably went over 5 or 6 times, finishing up a long way off the road. The car came down with a final crash on the wheels. Both Mike and I staggered out of the wreckage and collapsed. It took a couple of minutes to realize that my face was wet and stinging. Another couple of minutes to find a bottle of water and pour it over my face. It turns out that 4 minutes of battery acid on your face is not a recommended defoliant technique. I'm sure I'll get my good looks back in a week or two. In the mean time I'm going to be a bit mottled.

The road we came off is in the background of this picture....

Driver and Co-driver kidding themselves....

Shot from the road where we went off....

Day 5, back through Mil Cumbres

2007-11-02T16:11:00.001-07:00

And we were off again, this time the car seemed to have got over it's idle problem and as running well. Mil Cumbres is usually at it's worst on this day, we run it in the morning into the sun, making it difficult to see, and the mist overnight can be bad enough to leave slippery puddles hiding in the shadows.

None of these proved any problem for Mike and the '52 chevy. This time the car ran well for the entire stage with Mike pulling off a pass! it doesn't get more heroic than doing that round the inside of a corner when the wheels can be 2 feet away from the car you are passing, but the body roll is enough that the top is resting on the other car.

The sway bar mount broke again half way through the day, making the car roll even more. No problem, we'll run the rest of the day with more lean than a VW bus and weld it up for the next day again. The car seems to drink oil too. every kind of oil. Heres Mike filling up the diff for another day.

We ran strongly all day and were really happy to make the podium at the end of it. I had hoped that when I came down I would be part of the overall winning team. I'm not sure that standing on the top step of the podium in the fastest class would have felt as good as getting that third in class with that car. What an achievement.

Day 4

2007-11-02T15:47:00.001-07:00

It felt good to be back in the race, and right before the best roads, we were driving Mil Cumbres, 1000 corners. We had a stage before that where I could get used to to Mike and the new car. Turns out that things were a little more sedate than the Studebaker with Bill. I started calling corners only to wind up 3 corners ahead of Mike before we got to the first corner.

The car was not fast, but Mike did everything he could with it. There were some corners where with the body roll I thought I could lean out the window and touch the road.

We got to Mil Cumbres with some sort of rhythm sorted out between the Driver and Co-driver. Unfortunately that rhythm didn't seem to involve the car, which really didn't like to idle at the high altitude. It stalled many times at we waited for out chance to run, In one case flooding just as the green flag dropped on us.

There were also a couple of clues that Mike was not taking the event as seriously as Bill,During the Mil Cumbres sections, on a notoriously difficult road, I could hear Mike laughing from the drivers seat. It was all I could to to keep from laughing as well and continue with calling the corners.

Later in the same stage we lost about a minute as the jerry rigged wire for the fuel pump became disconnected and we coasted to a halt wondering what was wrong. Despite all those problems, Mike drove well considering our equipment and we finished in the top half of the day. We were well pleased.

In the evening, Mike sorted out the flooding idle by adjusting the jetting of the carb, and welded up the front sway bar that had broken its bracket during the stage.

Days 2 and 3

2007-11-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

For the next couple of days, Bill, Tony and I trailed along behind the race with the car on the trailer. It was a hell of a lot more relaxing than racing, we were waiting the in the Zocolo drinking beers as the cars rolled in with tired and hungry racers. I put the word out that I was looking for a ride, and heard that a guy, Mike Anderson, needed one because his co-driver had flown home. I think the Co-driver was just in over his head.

I met Mike, and got assurances that he was going to behave himself and listen to the co-driver. I checked out the car for safety equipment and agreed to co drive for him. I was back in the race, starting again on the fourth day. Mike had bought the car from a junk yard for $350. He had less than $5000 into it, making it by far the cheapest car there. He also had the most original paint job...

Day 1 Continued

2007-11-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

I scrambled out of the window of the car. A crucial part of this race is letting other people know where you are when you have an accident and that you are ok. All cars are given a sheet with OK on one side and SOS on the other. I stood on the side of the road for five or six cars holding the OK sign for other cars to see. Bill was still in the car holding the brake to try and stop the car from sliding further down the hill. I went back down to the car and started wedging rock under the wheels of the car so that Bill could get out. It didn’t do any good, because 20 minutes later the dirt hillside gave way and the car slipped 20 feet further down into a tree.

We had no cell phone coverage so we had to wait on the side of the road for almost 2 hours for all the race cars to go by and one of the race organizer cars to come by and pick me up. Bill stayed with the car as the official race was supposed have recovery vehicles of get the car back onto the road. The stage seemed to have been bad for many people. I passed four more wrecks on the way down, and I found that a car had crashed earlier in the stage also. One person had minor injuries.

I eventually got a lift all the way into the next town to hook up with Tony, who I’d been texting on the way down. We believed that there should be 2 tow trucks on the way to Bill, but because of the distance and the number of cars out on the stage, they would just pull him back on the road. We set off back to Bill with the trailer so we could load the car up and come back to town.

About 7:30PM, just as the sun way going down, we were about ½ way to Bill and I got a call from Bill from a landline he had found. No tow truck had come to him yet, he said he was going to leave it till the following morning, so we carried on to pick him up. About 20 minutes later we passed a massive tow truck and managed to persuade the driver and a Federal Policeman to come with us to rescue Bill. At that time we thought we were the cavalry on the way to rescue Bill. Tony said that he didn’t know how we could make things worse. Famous last words.

About 3 hours later we were go to Bill with the policeman and the tow truck only to find Bill had managed to find another one. The Federale decided that the tow truck that was there already was operating without a permit and it was going to cost us 3,000 USD to put it right. It took over an hour of haggling and some good friends with a Mexican film crew who spoke some English to sort that problem out. Further insult to injury, while Bill went off to call on the landline, Thieves had come along and stripped the car of 2 wheels, the tools, the jack, Bills helmet and HANS device and some other stuff. Unbelievable.

After all that we had the car on the trailer by 1AM, and we were back to the hotel in town by 4AM, 16 hours after the crash. And that is a bad day. Pretty much the worst day you can have racing apart from the one where you get hurt.

2007-10-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

A typical day in the La Carrera.

Yesterday was our first day of proper racing. Despite telling the organizers about their Qualifying screwup, we couldn’t change our start time from 12th position, The race is disorganized enough without trying to make changes at the last minute.

Basically the rules are set up so that you have to go through a checkpoint about 300 yards from the start of the speed section in order, but after that checkpoint, cars can switch order for the running of the speed stage. We knew that we were going to be faster than the cars in front so in that 300 yards we tried to juggle position so that we would be not stuck in traffic. The guys directly in front of us let us move up for the first stage, but the next cars, didn’t want to.

The first stage just went to show how wrong the qualifying time was. In the first 21km stage we passed two cars in front of us, starting 30 seconds and a minute before. We weren’t just quick, we were flying.

Again, because of the rules we had to let the cars that we passed in stage back past us for the Z control. The car 2 places in front showed up and went through the check point, but the car directly in front (a ford falcon) did not. We found out later that the car had slid off first stage. They were able to rejoin the race again the next day.

The second speed section was shorter, only 9 kms, but we again caught the Yellow Volvo of Karl Scheible, who came 3nd in the race last year. The signs were good that we were by far the fastest car out there.

The first Stage after lunch Karl let us by before the run, and again we caught and passed 2 cars in 15kms. All of these cars were fast, so it just went to show how fast we were going. For the start of the forth stage I had persuaded 3 more cars to let us past before the run, that meant that we were running around 4th in the pack. The fourth stage was also very long, and around the 8 kms mark we caught and passed a car that was running the race in fourth. To emphasis that, we were going fast enough that that we were 30 seconds faster than the 4th place car for roughly every 8 kms we ran. The car and Driver were more than quick enough to win this event.

That’s when everything went wrong. In a downhill section with a complex of 4 quick corners, I called the left 3 at the end too late. This was totally my fault, in that as soon as I said it I knew that I hadn’t given Bill the time he needed in a downhill fast section to brake for the corner properly. Bill tried to slow the car down and make the corner, but the back right of the car slid out and hit an earth bank on the right, kicking the car straight. We were on loose rocks, and there was no way that we could slow the car in time. The car bounced up onto an earth berm and down over the edge of the hill. We came to rest with the nose about 10 feet down, and the tail of the car still showing above the edge of the berm.

That will do for now, but this is only the beginning of a shit day. I’ll write more later.

2007-10-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

Simply put, The first day was about the worst possible day you can have racing apart from the day where you get hurt. We are fine, but on top of the crash, parts got stolen off the car while it was crashed, A federale wanted about 3000 USD to make a tow truck permit problem go away, and it took 13 hours alone to get the car out of the place it finished up, and a further 3.5 hours to get to the hotel from there. we went to bed about 4am. I'll write the story in more detail later, suffice to say the team's a bit irritated.

Race Over

2007-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

(Amy posting for Steve again)

Car 108 has retired.
Steve and Bill are both just fine, no injuries, but are very disappointed.

More info to come when Steve can find internet again....

Qualifying Day

2007-10-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

(This is Amy posting for Steve because the Internet has died in his hotel)

If you've taken a look at the results for the Qualifying run today, Bill and Steve (listed as Steve Warren, for some reason) are 12th.

This is a mistake. Steve and Bill passed the car that is listed in 4th place during their run, so they have got to be going faster. The current theory is that the timing people got the two finishing times mixed up.

So it looks like the Batmobile should take 30 seconds off its current qualifying time, which makes it 2nd, and that is pretty darn fast.

In case you'd like to track the cars in real time, go to: http://panamericana.waypointinfo.com and click the "Mapa en linea" button. Click on the appropriate day, a little menu will pop up called Tasks. Click on the Race Cars button and select 108, then click Start Tracking to track Bill and Steve's car via GPS!

Day 2. More Tech

2007-10-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

We got through Tech today, with only a small problem, the car was deemed to be underweight due to a change in the rules made on the fly. We had an e mail that said the weight could be within 5% of 3300 lbs. They now say it has to be over 3300 lbs. We were within 60lbs at weigh in, so we put an extra battery back in and we are very close with an empty gas tank. by the time we've added all the crap to go racing (water, some tools, etc. We'll be in weight without a problem.

A lot more cars showed up today and if i wasn't connecting to the interweb through a Hamster powered connection i'd post a lot more pictures....

This is Gary Faules' beautiful Mustang. It should be pretty quick...

... And this is Doug Moffet's Oldmoblie. This car is probably the favourite for the overall win, Doug and his professional Co-driver Angelica have spent the last week pre running the whole course, Doug has been doing this event for years, and Angelica has just become the first woman to be inducted into the Mexico Motorsports hall of fame. She didn't collect the award because she was prerunning with Doug. Thats how dedicated she is.

I'm here

2007-10-23T14:42:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm here

2007-10-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

I'm now in Oaxaca overlooking this view:

I'm here, the cars are rolling in and some of the people got to know last year are showing up. Some with new beautiful cars like this Shelby Daytona Replica,

some with the same car as last year, dents and all.
we've fixed some minor problems with the car and should be teching it tomorrow. We also may try to get it out for a little run which may or may not involve some of the roads we'll be running on Thursday.

2007-10-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

This post is a quick placeholder for things important for this years La Carrera Panamericana. I will be Navigating for Bill Beilharz, who is driving his newly reworked 1954 Studebaker commander in the Turismo Mayor class. (the big dog class) we are car 108.
Tuesday and Wednesday the 23rd and 24th October are Registration and Tech
Thursday 25th is Qualifying outside Oaxaca
Friday is Day 1 of Racing, Oaxaca to Tehuacan
Saturday is Day 2, Tehuacan to Puebla
Sunday is Day 3, Puebla to Queretaro
Monday is Day 4, Queretaro to Morelia
Tuesday is Day 5, Morelia to Aguascalientes
Halloween is Day 6, Aguascalientes to Zacatecas
Thursday is Day 7, Zacatecas to the finish line at Nuevo Laredo

Important web sites are www.lacarrerapanamericana.com.mx ,the official site, which should have the results and maybe even a way to track us around the country
Also car108.blogspot.com , Bill's blog.

Obviously I'll do my best to update this as I go.

Endurance Racing at Thunderhill

2007-06-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend (the 2nd-3rd of June) we loaded the Elise up in the trailer for the drive up to Thunderhill. Rather than locating Thunderhill in a perfectly sensible location off the 5 south of San Francisco, they decided to build it over an hour north of Sacramento, that means from LA it’s over 8 hours away at trailer towing speeds.

Amy and I drove the Trailer up North with the two co drivers flying in to San Francisco. This race would be the first one for our new driver, Roland. At least Thunderhill is closer than the places we go in Mexico.

On the Saturday I’d managed to get us into a High Performance Driving Event at the track, none of us had driven there before, and although there’s a nice video of running the tack in the Thunderhill web site we really thought that we should drive it before we attempted to race it.

It turns out that running the track ahead of time is a good idea, but maybe we shouldn’t have been in the advanced group. Thunderhill has three very blind corners, Turn 3 is over a crest into an off camber Right hander, you need to be turning before the crest for the corner.

Turn 5 (bypass) is an incredibly blind corner, a sharp crest with nothing but sky in front of you. When you see the track on the far side, it’s all you can do to stop yourself turning right away, as you are facing a medium right, but the car is unloaded at the time and really needs to settle before attempting to turn.

Turn 9 is a chicane on the crest of a hill. The left to start it you can see on the way up the hill, the right is over the hill and again only experience at the track will teach you the right line coming over that.

So we went out with the Driving event, me driving and Roland passenger. It only took 3 laps for me to screw up. I came over the crest of 3 faster than I had done before to find that I was already too late to make the off camber turn. I braked as hard as I could in a straight line, and then got off the brakes to shoot off the track in a straight line. Slow down, turn back to track, wait for a gap in traffic again and get going.

In the after session meeting I got ridiculed (I deserved it). The Racer was the first to go off in session. The fate for the first to go off is usually a pink tutu, but luckily the group leader forgotten it and I was spared.

For the second Driving session, Roland went out with Gary Faules, a fantastic driver, who has won a bunch of events including The 25 hours of Thunderhill. If anyone can show us how to drive this track it’s Gary. Roland came in after the session feeling a bunch more confident. I went out with Gary in the third driving session and found out what Roland was talking about. Having someone like Gary in the car really gives you the confidence to aggressively learn the track. Before riding with Gary I’d been way too hesitant, especially at the blind corners.

About this time Rachel decided that she didn’t want to drive in the Sunday endurance. She wasn’t feeling up to it, leaving Roland and I to share the 3 hour race. Roland and I went out for the final warmup session of Saturday with Roland driving.

On Sunday, the race itself started at 3pm. Before that we had qualifying at 10am. Because I was taking the start, I took the qualifying also. I came in from that to find that the transponder on the car was out and because of that I’d be starting at the back of 30+ cars. More of a problem than that was why our transponder wasn’t working. It was wired into the Lotus running lights. We pulled the cover off the fuses and found the running light fuse was blown. Relief. We’ll just pop in the spare and turn everything on… Pop. Ohshit. Something in the running lights circuit is blowing fuses and taking the Transponder out. We have 2 hours to the start of the race and we have no transponder, we can’t find one to borrow. Time to start taking the car apart to get to the wiring.

With 1 hour to the start, the car was in bits, but I’d unplugged one of the headlights and plugged the transponder into that. The transponder itself was working, and the headlight fuse wasn’t blowing. I taped everything up as well as I could and tried to get it all back together. Time was really short. I got the car into the pits with 3 minutes to spare, stressed to hell.

The start was going to be a 2 wide rolling start with me firmly at the back of 31 cars. The density of the cars on the track at the time is more than a little nerve-wracking. There are 6 different classes running together, and in theory we are in the 3rd fastest, that meant I had a bunch of cars that should be slower than me in front of me. At the same time as trying to get past them, they are trying to get past others. Luckily, with it being an endurance race, there aren’t that many idiots out there. Everyone drove with real care.

There is a bunch of spec Miatas that that runs in the fifth fastest group, and as drivers those guys are phenomenal. As I started working my way through the pack, more than once I blew past the Miatas down one of the straights, only to have them pass me back in the twistier sections. I think that happened to me 4-5 times before I worked my way through the Miata group.

By the end of lap 10 I was up to 13th overall and feeling pretty good about myself. Admittedly, 4 of those places were gained from retirements, but I’d managed a number of passes and had one more guy in front of me before there was a nice big space on the track. I’d been running in traffic up to that point, some time in space would let me calm down and settle into the drive some. The car in front was slower in some of the twisties but on the straights was a little quicker than me, making a pass hard. I decided I could have a go into turn 14, a place where he seemed to be particularly slow. I wasn’t close enough on this lap, but maybe next.

I came round 14 to find that the guy in front had missed a gear or something, he was really slow. There was a gap to the inside of 15, and without thinking about it I went for it. I tried to hold a tighter line as I went past to leave him room on the outside. But as I pinched the corner the back end of the Elise stepped out in a big way. I caught it only to have the car swing the other way, and I didn’t catch that one. For an instant I was doing about 60 backwards, facing the guy I was trying to pass at a distance of about 2 car lengths. We exchanged a look of horror and I went off to the inside of the track. I got going quickly, that lap only being 7 seconds slower than my average, but the spin cost me 4 places.

By lap 22 I was back up to 12th. The traffic was more spread out on the track and everything was calmer. My only problem was that I’d lost my radio communication to Amy in the pits. That was actually a big problem. They wouldn’t know when I was coming in for gas, and Roland may not be ready to take the Drivers seat. I was thinking about that when I went round turn 11 and got a black flag.

Black flags are normally “Come into pits, you’ve got a penalty” so I came straight in wondering what it could be. It turns out my rushed wiring job on the transponder gave way and they were getting no signals from the car. I came in, Roland got my radio working again, and Amy managed to find a spare rechargeable transponder and zip tied it to the car in record time.

I got back out, but the Black Flag and efforts in the pits had cost me 1.5 laps and I was all the way down to 22nd.

From that point on I was more or less driving in a daze. I’d already been on the track for an hour. I had about 25 minutes to the pitstop. This racing business is hard work.

I came into the pits on lap 34 after getting through 10 gallons of gas. The Elise was beginning to suffer starvation. I jumped out of the car and Roland got in. Because of the rules of refueling, I was the only one in the team suited to do the refueling, while Amy pointed the fire extinguisher at me. I put in about 9 gallons (you are not allowed to spill a drop of gas, it’s a 5 minute penalty, with no automatic shutoff you have to be careful not to overflow the tank.) And Roland was on his way. The gas stop had cost us about 2 laps.

We hoped that Roland would be able to make it to the end of the race from what I had put in. It soon became clear though, that I could have put in more gas and Roland was going to have to stop again.

Roland did an awesome job in the second half, driving really consistent laps, and working the car back up to 15th overall, he says that he had his moments on the track, but from what we saw it was an amazing drive. But we needed to bring him back in again for gas. This time I put in 5 gallons, and the stop only cost him just over 1 lap. Roland brought the car come in 16th overall, 5th in class. Not a bad result for our 2nd race (1st time at Thunderhill), but looking at the results showed just how costly the transponder failure was. Simply taking out the 1.5 lap stop for a new transponder would have moved us up to 9th overall and 3rd in class. I guess it goes to show once again, that the most important thing in an endurance race is reliability of every part.

I think we can also work on refueling. I saw some teams had modifications to the gas cans to make refilling without spilling easier. We’ll do those for next time.

I’m also now convinced that Hoosier R6s will survive a race, and they would definitely gain us some time. I guess we have a lot of room for improvement.

The race was a real blast once again. A big thank you to Amy for being our pit boss and voice of reason in our ear, Thanks to Rachel for letting us race her car, and Thanks to Gary Faules for his track instruction. Without that both drivers would have struggled much more.

2007-04-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

Videos from the chihuahua express, Shot by Amy...

2007-04-24T16:51:00.001-07:00

Back home after the Chihuahua Express.

Once again I have found that the intense nature of these events and the effort of attempting to write a blog do not mix too well. It may be worth just waiting for the end of it and writing the whole thing now. That way I can concentrate on making my English more better.

Day Two was the highlight of this event, and the highlight of day 2 was over 40kms of speed section to take us to the rim of Copper Canyon, the Mexican equivalent of the Grand Canyon. This road was incredible, wide, smooth but very very twisty. We thought before we set off that this might be the best section for the lotus. How right we were. About 20kms into the section we came up to the back of the Mitsubishi Evo of Steve Walden that had set off 1 minute before us. We got his attention with the horn and on a short straight to a right hand corner he gave up the line and we flew past. The only small issue was that the short straight contained the third of three rail crossings on the stage. The first two were completely smooth, the third was not. According to the co driver of the Evo, he could see Elise rear wheels clear off the ground as we flew off the rail crossing.

That rail crossing was a source of drama for the other drivers too. An old Mercedes hit the same bump, breaking the control arm, and crashing the oil pan into the ground in the compression after the rails. It tore a 1 inch hole in the pan, leaving oil all over the road for the run back down the stage. On the way back down the same road, the LT Special running in third place came round the corner to the same rail crossing to find the tourist train in the rail crossing. They came screeching to a halt and had to wait about 30 seconds for the train to cross before they could continue down the speed stage. Unbelievable. They had us racing down a speed stage and they hadn’t stopped the train? I still can’t get my head around that.

We had lunch in the restaurant on the edge of the canyon and our intrepid crew of Amy, Roland and Brett, got to the top in time to spend 2 minutes with us before setting off back down. All through the 3 days of racing they would do their best to try and get into a stage before we ran, wait in the stage while we passed, and then get back ahead of the stage. That meant that their schedule was even crazier than ours. The support they gave us was amazing. Thanks to them we have some very cool pictures of us racing, and we were cheered on throughout our race. We had the best crew!

At the end of the day we got our results and we had a lot to cheer about. We had slashed the lead of the Golf to only 24 seconds and we found out that we had the third overall fastest time on the Copper canyon section both up and down. We beat the 650hp Viper of Jerry Churchill (one of the race organizers) by 1 second on the way up and by 2 seconds on the way down. What makes this even more amazing is that the Viper team ran so hard that they put new brake pads on before day 2, and a second set at the lunch break before setting off back down the canyon. The Elise ran the whole 3 days on the one set of pads and had no mechanical servicing at all throughout the event. What an incredible car.

Day Three took us east of Chihuahua almost to the US border at Ojinaga. This day again had really long speed sections, but it had some very high speed sections that had been missing from the day before. It takes a special kind of courage for the Driver to go over blind crests in the road at up to 120mph based on what the Co driver is telling them from the routebook, and Rachel definitely has that courage. Day three had perhaps 50 of these crests in about 180kms of speed stage.

The courage of the Co driver is a different thing. You are trusting the Driver to be able to drive. You are trusting the Driver to listen to what you tell them, and you are trusting the route book to be accurate. There is nothing more scary than looking at the routebook and seeing it tell you something different than what is out there. Take a look at the entry on line 4 to see what I mean. There were three of these on day three. When you see that , provided you have the time to look at the symbol and the text, you have no choice but to tell the driver to “Go to Visual” in other words, don’t rely on me, drive the corners as you see them.

We met up with Amy and Roland for lunch and a pep talk in Ojinaga for about 30 minutes before turning round and doing the morning stages in reverse. It’s a great feeling when you pull into a service stop and the crew is there before you to take care of you for while.

Day Three gave us our best result so far, joint 4^th overall which came as a real surprise because we thought that the high speeds would hurt us. The LT special, which had finished ahead of us on the previous 2 days Managed to have a whole collection of problems on this day. It had an electrical problem, which meant it needed to be bump started, and once started it wouldn’t idle needing a constant pressure on the accelerator. On the third stage of the day, it bottomed out in a dip on the drivers side, ripping the floorboards back to the drivers seat, leaving nothing but air under his heels, then finally, on the transit on the way home the spare tire dropped out from under the car and skidded down the road. It came into the celebratory finish with the spare tire held on top of the roll cage by the co-driver. For some reason, all these problems meant the car was slower on the day.

In the final results we finished 6^th overall and 2^nd overall in the under 2.4L class to an old BMW 325. (think about that for a moment) After over 4 hours 30 minutes of racing, the gap between the lotus and the BMW was less than 40 seconds.

Once again I feel we’ve shown that that the Elise is as close as any car can be to bullet proof. The only way we could be harder on the car is if we entered it in the Paris Dakar Rally. When other cars were being worked on through the night, the Elise was parked in the evening and left till the morning. Thanks to Lotus for building this amazing car.

This whole event was excellent, the long and twisty speed stages almost guarantee that we’ll be back next year for more of the same. I would encourage anyone who can to enter this event next year. Where else can you as fast as you can on closed roads (except for trains) for almost 600kms?

This event also has a touring class, which also runs on the closed roads, but does not require safety equipment as they do not technically race. I think it would be great if we could get a group together to go and do the touring class if nothing else.

Many thanks to those who helped us with this event, including Sector111, ChaseCam and Simpson Racing.

Huge thanks to Amy and Roland for taking care of the Driver and Co-Driver. Thanks to Brett for taking care of Amy and Roland.

That’s it till our next event, Thunder Hill endurance race on the weekend of June 2^nd, 3^rd

2007-04-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

Thursday

A stupid day of getting the car teched, preparing the car to race, running around trying to remember everything that we would need in the car for rally racing and going to a lot of meetings where we get told how the race will work.

According to Steve’s 1^st law of racing in Mexico, any time written down for a meeting to happen is not the time the meeting will happen. And so it was today. You can spot the people who are here for their first time, they are the ones who are getting aggravated when they follow all the written down stuff to the letter and still miss the meetings.

Friday

Today was the first race day. As the event is based in Chihuahua and returns to Chihuahua every night, all the stages run in the morning of a race day are run again in the afternoon in the opposite direction. We went out North West of the city an on to some of the most amazing roads you can imagine. Moderately wide, two lane roads over the over mountain passes going up to over 7000 feet. The first stage was just over 40kms long, much longer than anything from the La Carerra Panamericana. That may not sound like a lot, but it added up to a whole bunch of commands shouted at Rachel. It has been a while since we’ve run this format, so it took us a while to get back into the rhythm. The other problem with this stage and some of the others we ran today is that there were some really long straights mixed in with the twisty stuff. We had the Elise pegged at around 120 a few times. The altitude kept us from going any quicker.

There were two pretty big wrecks, One Studebaker took a trip off into the woods. So far into the woods in fact that no one following could see them from the road. We spent the next couple of stages wondering where they had got to. Both Driver and Co-pilot are ok, but the car is a mess. The other one was a beautiful Fastback mustang that went off the road into a rockface at the corner, rolling right over and winding up on one of the doors. Again, the roll cage and belts made sure that they walked away from it.

After the fist stage Rachels driving just got quicker and quicker. In the final stage on the way back, we pulled off the first pass of the day on a Subaru WRX. He saw us coming and moved over to give us room. That made the whole thing easy. At least from the Co-Drivers seat.

The results came in and we are 7^th overall (out of 29 starters) and 2^nd in the under 2.4L class. We were pretty happy with that until we found that the one car in front of us is a VW rabbit. Seriously.

It gives us a goal for tomorrow when we’ll be going up to copper canyon.

Disclaimer: Spelling and grammar mistakes in this entry are because I’m too tired to go over what I’ve written.

2007-04-18T23:27:00.001-07:00

So we’ve made it to the start of the Chihuahua Express race. The journey here has been 1 part boredom and about 27 part screaming irritation at the bureaucratic nightmare that is attempting to get 1 Car, one trailer and one racecar into Mexico. Today we spent over 8 hours trying to do just that.

8 hours.

In case you missed that, it took 8 hours to get everything we needed into Mexico. At one point even the Tahoe wasn’t allowed into Mexico because it was too new.

Everyone here says that every time they come over the border they the rules change, and there’s always going to be a problem. I guess that we should be grateful that we have made it here and we are somewhat ready to start the race.

We have been given a summary of the race and that looks pretty interesting, with a number of the stages around 40 kilometers long, much longer than anything we ran on the La Carrera. There will be around 200 km of speeds stages on each of the three days. I think we will both be suffering from exhaustion at the end of this race.

The big thing for us in the Elise will be how twisty the stages are. If that are very twisty then we should be able to do pretty well, but too many straights and the top speeds of the other cars will kill us.

We’ll let you know tomorrow when we get the route books.

2007-02-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

Endurance Racing,

This weekend saw the first outing of endurance team Bacon Racin’ (Rachel Larratt, Steve Warwick, Amy Lo, and Roland Pritzker) in the Western Endurance Racing Championship at Sears Point in Northern California. Getting there was a headache. A really big one.

We are racing Rachel’s race prepped Elise. This is the same car that completed the La Carrera Pan Americana in Mexico last year. This car already had a full roll cage and harnesses, and so we had thought would pass tech for the endurance races without much difficulty. Then we find out with just a couple of days to go that race belts mounted to the seat rails will fail tech. Belts are required to follow the belt manufacturer’s mounting requirements and that means they must be mounted to the floor.

Of course in the Elise the floor isn’t made out of anything much, so last minute efforts by Qais and the Lotus of South Bay crew had the drivers’ belts mounted to the rail at the back of the drivers’ compartment with big backing plates under the car. This was so last minute that we picked the car up from Lotus of South Bay on Friday about 10:00am for a Saturday and Sunday race. The car hadn’t been teched yet, so we set off on an eight hour drive to Sears Point not knowing if we could get through tech and race on Saturday.

Saturday morning saw us talking to the tech guy, Tom of 7s Only Racing. The car passed without too much drama and we were ready to go out for the warm up. With only 20 minutes of warm-up available, the plan was that Rachel would take the whole 20 minutes to get used to the track and conditions, then take the start, so that I could learn the track and conditions in a slightly more spread out field.

It was a good plan, but it had a couple of fairly large flaws. In the rush to get everything ready to come to the event we had not really thought about conditions. We were now trying to race at Sears point in a cold downpour on A048 tires. The other large flaw is that due to the time that endurance takes up in a race schedule, this particular 3 hour race was split into two 1.5 hour races, one on Saturday afternoon, the other Sunday morning, and each of those starts were combined with the A class races (whatever that is) putting more than 60 race cars of all sorts of speeds on the track at the same time. This was going to be a real baptism by fire. Or rain.

Rachel went out with these 60 or so cars for the warm up and found out that Sears Point is possibly the slickest track ever made in the rain. The A048s just made matters worse, the warm up was chaos, with cars spinning off all over the place. Unfortunately Rachel was among them, and if the 048s didn’t get much grip on the track, they got a lot less in the mud and grass at the side of the track. Rachel lost most of the warm up time being towed back onto the grass.

Time for a team meeting. We knew we had a single file rolling start, which is probably about the most benign start you can have, but it is still 60 close packed cars sent out in random order with very different power levels. Rachel didn’t feel happy with taking the start after her experiences in warm up, on the other hand I wasn’t wild about it because I would be attempting to learn a track I had never driven in anger in a car I had never driven in anger. In the rain. With 60 other cars.

In the end I took the start and even in the formation lap I was sliding badly. I came up with a strategy, which was, “Let everyone by until I’m in some sort of space and learn the track there.” Another good plan, although the name was a little long. After letting about 4 cars past I had a space I could work with and calm down some. The rain continued to come down, and I felt like I was trying to race on ice. I certainly wasn’t the only one with problems, every lap around the track there were more cars off. The lucky ones were just stuck in the mud away from the track, but there were at least a few who came into solid contact with the K walls. No one got hurt, but quite a few cars were bent or worse. Of course the problem with a fiberglass and aluminum car is that it doesn’t bend too well. I did everything I could to avoid walls and other cars.

I did spin though. I was gradually squeezing on the gas in a right sweeper and the back came round on me. I knew I wasn’t going to catch this one, but I was more or less following the track, so my Skip Barber training snapped into action “Spin, both feet in” and I came to a halt 90 degrees to the track, but still on the surface. Deep breath, let that car by, and off we go again.

The carnage became so bad that they put out the safety car with a full course yellow to clean up the mess. As we paraded round there were no less than 4 separate recovery vehicles working on different incidents.

The moment I went out for the first leg I found that the radio contact with the pit that we had tested and tested didn’t work. We had a contingency plan for when I would come in to let Rachel take the drive, but confirming it on radio would have been nice. Extremely nice given that when I came in for the driver change over Rachel wasn’t quite ready to go. We had decided before we even started that the important thing would be finishing the race, so the slow pit stop while the got Rachel in the car was not a big deal. Rachel went out for the second 45 minutes of the race and quickly got into a good groove. We got the radio fixed to that we could talk to her, and from that and the lap time it looked like her confidence in the car and herself improved lab by lap. She took the checkered flag for the first day of racing after 40 minutes of almost spotless driving. She clearly remembered her skip barber too, because she managed one 360 spin down the line of the track. She didn’t even come to a halt before getting going again. From the lap times that spin cost her less than 6 seconds.

I got some sleep that night. I don’t remember that much else about the evening except that it had really good chicken in it.

In the continuation of the race the next day Rachel was again a little nervous about the start, and I, now being a veteran on starts, was happy to take it. The rain had stopped, so although the track was wet, we knew that it would dry out fairly quickly. The grid was started this time in the order of finishing the previous day, this meant that due to the number of cars that had gone off the previous day, we started 18^th out of 60ish. Not bad, but that meant a couple of really quick cars which had hit the wall were starting right behind us, now that the mechanics had sorted them out.

I followed the same plan as Saturday, if they are quick they are going to get by me anyway. I may as well make it easy and let them by early. Again, that gave me a little room to work on getting used to the drying track and take some breaths. (note to self, when on the race track, breath.)

The conditions got better and better for the car. The track dried and I started to make serious headway on the guys in front. The car is fantastic for this stuff, higher corner exit speeds allow faster speeds on the straights, fantastic brakes and higher speeds in the next corner mean that passing cars on the straight is not that hard, even when they are running similar lap times. I really felt I got in the groove of things and the lap times came tumbling down. I passed the two cars that had started in front of me, and was feeling pretty good about the whole thing when we caught up to a whole mess of traffic, maybe 8 cars all fighting amongst themselves, but lapping 5-8 seconds slower then us. This was where my inexperience showed, I was really hesitant about passing back markers when they were busy trying to pass each other, The two cars I had passed were nowhere near as hesitant, passing me and back markers in big overtaking maneuvers.

One of the rules about this endurance series is that you must put at least 5 gallons of gas in the car during the race. With the Elises small tank and 10mpg on the track, that turns out to be a bit of a problem. We needed to know that when we stopped for driver handover we would be able to get the whole 5 gallons in the car, that meant that we started Sundays race with the tank about ½ full. It turns out that was too little, and around the 40 minute mark I got fuel starvation. With the radio working the pits had about 1 minute warning that I was coming in, and they were ready to do the refill. Here’s a tip if you ever wind up refilling a car in an endurance race, make sure you’ve cut open the breather hole for the can. What should have been around 1 minute of refueling became about 8 minutes because of that. Just one more thing we would have sorted out if we’d had time before this event.

I went back out expecting to do 10 minutes more running before handing over to Rachel. The car had other ideas. Halfway round that out lap the exhaust came off, and things got real loud in the cockpit. I know from experience that hot exhaust gas can damage or set fire to the fiberglass, so I called the pits and brought it straight back in. Sure enough, the recently installed stock exhaust was disconnected.

We decided the thing to do was to head back to the paddock to carry out real work on the car. We had about 35 minutes to the end of the race. If we could get out before that we would at least finish. Some quick pit work got the diffuser part way off, and left us trying to reconnect really hot exhaust piping with not much success. With about 5 minutes to go we decided to send the car out again with the exhaust not fixed. I short shifted everything, trying to limit the heat I was putting into the exhaust bay, this meant I was way off the pace and really having to drive my mirrors.

With one or two laps left I saw a fast Evo closing on me, to make things easy on him I planned to run the outside line in the corner to give him room on the inside, the only problem was he committed himself to the outside line. We came really close. Really, really close. Time to start breathing again.

One of the things about racing is that you know cars rather than people, so when you get out of the car you can be badmouthing a car only to find the person in the car is standing right next to you. Suffice to say the driver of the Evo was doing that with me about 6ft away. Before he stuck his foot further in his mouth I let him know who I was. He was a bit pissed because the thought I’d hit him. I argued a little, cos, it’s an Elise right? If there’s contact there’s broken fiberglass, right?

Turns out I was wrong and I owe the guy an apology. We did have contact, but if the paint on the Elise had been thinner there would not have been. So there you go, it’s possible to touch cars at 90mph and polish it out. If you’re really lucky.

Our final result was 6 out of 7 in class, and 16 out of 23 for all endurance classes. Given our refueling problems, and 20 minutes attempting to fix the exhaust we were pretty happy with that. Even better, we had got through our first endurance race in terrible conditions and finished with the car unscathed (it will polish out). I definitely consider that a victory.

Massive thanks to NASA officials and other endurance racers who made our first event easier than we’d hoped, to Amy and Roland for keeping two very stressed drivers as calm as they could, and especially to Rachel for trusting me with her car.

2007-01-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

I, In Fact, Rock.

Day 7 of Competition

2006-11-16T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

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)