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

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

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.

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.