Five on Four – Part 8 – the Finish

I drove, and Kevin called the turns.  We raced to Mike’s Sky Ranch – a rustic hotel in the mountains catering to off-road racers.  Just past Mikes, the course gets really steep and really rocky.  You can’t take a civilian vehicle back there.  

Mountain switchbacks….up, down, turns.  We come upon a race vehicle – a VW Beetle stopped.  The co-driver is out of the car and runs up to us.  We stop, the nose of our car pointing up at a 35-degree angle.  He asks us to pull him up the hill.  No way we can do it.  We apologize.  We don’t have the power.

When I step on the gas our machine struggles to pull itself up the rocks and silt on a steep grade.  

A few ridges later we see a driver carrying a wheel and tire down a steep hill.  He did not signal for us so we drove by.  We reckon we are 20 miles from the nearest ranch.  Then we see a race vehicle.  The spare tire fell off and the driver we saw had walked a long distance back up the hill to find it.

We get to the Pacific side hours after getting in the car.  Randy was waiting for us.  While he gave the car a once over, we ate a burrito and a cold Cappuccino drink without taking our helmets off.  Heaven. Two minutes and we were gone.  The course got smoother and faster for a while.  But that is not permanent in Baja.  I knew that.

Back into some really rough stuff, back east across the mountains.  A few driver changes later Marie and I were closing in on the finish line.  Marie had a coat on.  I didn’t.  I misjudged.    I thought we’d be done by dark.  We met our team at the finish, did our interview on the podium, and rolled forward and got out to celebrate.  We had finished fifth of seven after losing four hours when the wheel came off.  

I had done most of the driving, and I was beaten up, and sleep-deprived,  It had been 30 1/2 hours since the green flag dropped, and we were up for four hours before that.  But sleep deprivation was not my major problem.  Hypothermia was.  We took celebratory photos and I began quaking.  Not just a little shiver, I lost control of my body.  My legs didn’t work well.

I went back to the hotel room and got in a hot shower, but I still was shaking violently for a long time.  The team wanted to go out to dinner.  We got there, but I could not hold my head up and had to leave.

The next day when we went to see the official results, we had been disqualified for going backward on the course.  I was so disappointed.  In the end, it didn’t matter much.  We finished.  We weren’t racing for points and we would not have gained or lost any positions in this case anyway.  It was still disappointing.

We didn’t have a great result, but we did make great memories and had a great experience together.  To win, you have to get into the game.  If you don’t get out there and try, nothing happens.  And most times you will not achieve glory. But you got in the game.  You did something.  You tried.  You learned.  

Thanks to my team.  The longest continuous off-road race in the world, the Baja 1000, in the books.

An extraordinary life of shared experiences. 

1914, 2022.