Two cars, three flats, two spares. We decide to drive out on a rear flat tire. I couldn’t go very fast. We were losing ground every minute. How far is the road?
Mercifully, we start seeing race fans camping out after just 3 miles. I know we are close to the road near Colonet.
The course turns away from that road. I know it’s 4 miles to the Colonet bridge – all sand whoops. I stop. Mikey pulls behind me. In two minutes I see Rodrigo, one of our chase team drivers, come to my window. “I don’t have any tires” he yells. Oh crap again. Not all chase vehicles had tires.
Mikey decides to take two wheels of his car. He put one on the rear flat we had and the other on as our spare. (If your spare is flat you have to drive conservatively because if you get another flat you wind up in the predicament we are in right now – except without another friendly car behind you to sacrifice themselves for you.)
We take off into the Colonet sand wash, leaving Mikey there with three flat tires. All in all we lost 23 minutes by getting two flats at once.
Randy’s chase truck was on its way north from their position to give Mikey tires to get car #2 going. It would take 45 minutes for him to get there.
I drove as fast as I could to try to make up time. It was early in the race – only mile 150 out of 868 miles this year. Anything could happen.
We popped out along the Pacific Ocean again. Beautiful. Fish camps, a few ramshackle houses in paradise, and the occasional micro town, maybe with a hotel on the water. Fans waved and cheered us on.
We alternate inland up into some hills and rough stuff and back out along the water again, usually on graded roads there. We get the car to mile 210. We were unstrapped as we rolled in. We unhooked our air hoses from our helmets and pulled our communication wires out of the helmet jacks and jumped out of the windows. Mikey and his codriver Nick jump in. Pepe fuels the car from our dump cans. They are gone into the sunset.
We had been in the car for nine hours now, six of them in the race. We were beat. We take 15 minutes as the sun goes down to eat muchaca burritos. Not my favorite but I was hungry. Now that the racing excitement has gone away I feel tired and sick.
The Pre-runner, the “practice race car” is sitting there waiting for us. This is when Dustin and I executed what was maybe the most clever plan during the Baja 1000 race ever devised (for a sick driver)….
I’m excited to find out!