Day 1 Continued

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.