The Big Race 2023 – Conclusion

I get out of the car and it starts raining.  Mark gets on the satellite radio.  The stub of the broken axle was half buried in the dirt and rocks.  The was no axle sticking out of the middle where you attach a wheel to.

I get the spare out, jack out, chock the three good wheels since we were on a hill, and jack the car up from the middle.  Mark struggles to get positive radio communication.  We needed a mechanic.  This repair was a bit above my pay grade, though I was determined to attempt it.

What we did not know was that our chase truck with our pre-run vehicle on the trailer had broken down 60 miles away.  This is how they would get to us to help us.  Dustin gets Mark’s message.  He knows the only hope is to get in contact with Javier who does NOT have a satellite radio and is on his way back to the finish line in Ensenada with his truck, pulling a trailer with his UTV that he brought down to prerun some of his sections.  But there is no phone service.  

Dustin stares at his phone, message composed.  He gets one little bar of service and presses send.

I put a big rock under the swing arm and let the jack in the middle of the car down which raises the swing arm.  I move the jack to the rear corner of the car and jack it up again.  Ready for someone to work on it.

Javier gets the message from Dustin 30 miles away.  He pulls over, unloads his UTV, and starts driving back to the dusty town of Ojos.  He meets Victor who jumps in.  They follow the race course towards us.

Every ten minutes or so a race vehicle comes by us and we have to flag them with flashlights so they don’t come around the corner and hit us.  The rain continues.  The tools are in the mud.

We wait for Joe to come by.  Surely he’d be passing us any minute.  We were still in the lead.  Joe’s tracker starts working, but we had no way to see it.  What others saw was the two leaders in our class stopped, 15 miles apart, one being 22 miles from the finish.  

It was a race.  Whoever gets their car fixed first, will likely win the Baja 1000, 1311 mile race.

I walked back down the hill with my cell phone flashlight to look for our missing wheel.  Last race it rolled over the cliff into oblivion and nobody found it.  

I find it.  The lug nuts are still on it, and the hub is still attached.  The brake rotor is bent like a potato chip.  I roll it back up the now muddy road.  We separate the rim from the rest.  I unbolted the spare axle and the spare hub we carried.

A vehicle approaches.  It sure sounds like Joe.  We are screwed.  But no, it’s Javier and Victor!  

Javi kneels down and studies the situation.  He never worked on a Honda.  He asks where Jason is.  Victor speaks to him in Spanish – something like “You can do it!” probably.  Javi goes to work.  I help at every turn I can to get it fixed as fast as we can.  We changed the whole axle, used the old hub, and decided not to put the spare brake rotor on the car to save time.  The caliper was badly bent but we didn’t want to open the brake system – we had no extra fluid.  We will only have three brakes.  Good enough for 22 miles.

The wheel goes on.  We jump in and leave Javi and Victor in the rain to clean up all the tools and spare parts that were in the mud.

Joe has not come by.  We are still in the lead – aren’t we?