BAJA : It’s Really a Big Pain Disguised as Big Party, but It Keeps Running

Geologically, the Baja peninsula began breaking away from mainland Mexico about 20 million years ago. Currently, the peninsula breaks a little farther away each time they allow hundreds of motorcycles, trucks and cars to race its length.

Last weekend, the 20th anniversary Baja 1,000 endurance race was run.

The Baja 1,000 is the race that launched the sport of off-road racing. It spawned in deserts around the world. It used to be a longer race, 1,000 miles from Ensenada to La Paz. This year, the course was a 689-mile loop beginning and ending in Ensenada.

Although the race was shorter, though, the name was longer. It now is called the Presidente-Sauza SCORE Baja 1,000--perhaps a sign of its hard-earned affluence.

No matter. To those involved, this race will forever be known simply as the Baja.

True nightmare for a Californian: To be in a place where AAA doesn’t provide service.

This is it. Almost anything goes in the Baja. When it comes to rules of racing, there aren’t many. A vehicle must cross the finish line with the same transmission and engine that started. Everything else may be changed, and often is.

A vehicle may be towed any distance during the race, but not within one mile of the finish line. Assistance takes many forms. A few years ago, Roger Mears wheeled around a corner and found himself stuck in a large pit.

Before Mears had time to consider what he would do, two ranch hands happened along, looped lassos around the cage of his car, and pulled him out. “I never knew where they came came from,” Mears said. “And they just rode off.”

Help from the locals can be a mixed blessing, though.

Last year, Bryan Staasta took off out of town and followed the course as laid out for him by waving spectators. He flew off a ramp and into an open sewer.

In the old days of the race, the first drivers on the course would get out and change road signs, turning arrows in opposite directions or erasing their own tracks.

Markings on the course have changed over the years. Race officials used to use a sign system to warn drivers of danger ahead. For example, a sign with I meant a hole, II meant a big hole, and III meant a cliff dead ahead.

Now, more often it is the residents of Baja who alter the course, all in good fun. A common hazard is what’s known to the drivers as Mexican speed bumps.

“Kids will take a tree and bury it a bit on the course,” Walker Evans said. “Then they sit up and wait for us to come by. They enjoy watching the trucks jump. It can’t make you mad. I can picture myself as a 10-year-old kid, laughing my head off.”

Mears said that awareness of potential course alterations helps keep the drivers alert.

“You have the constant terrain change anyway,” he said. “I’ve glanced down at my gauges and hit a boulder and blown a tire. I’ve seen the people lay telephone poles across the road, or dig holes. You can’t see anybody, but you know they are in the bushes, laughing.”

Drivers can get angry at this, at the capriciousness and lack of concern for their safety, or they can shrug and accept it. “What’s 10 more obstacles out of 10,000?” said Corky McMillen of San Diego.

Obviously, the spectators come to see the racers overcome the obstacles. Why stand out in the desert for hours just to watch as a truck roars by at 120 m.p.h. in a cloud of dust? Old Baja hands will tell you that the sure sign that there’s trouble ahead is the presence of a crowd or a knot of photographers.

“You see a bunch of people standing on a small rise, and you can be sure that there’s a ditch over the hill,” said one driver.

Most of the drivers run the course a few times in the weeks before the race. That allows the drivers to become somewhat familiar with the course and literally map out the terrain.

These test drives are often fraught with adventure, though. During a pre-run for this year’s race, Spencer Low was involved in a head-on collision with a cattle truck. His truck was towed in and repaired. When Low returned for another try, he got stuck in a wash. It took four hours to dry out the truck’s engine.

Sometimes, as with this year’s race, heavy rains can obliterate landmarks drivers use to keep their bearings. Ranchers may cut down a grove of mesquite trees that drivers are using as a sign to turn left. That is why drivers sometimes get lost for hours. They drive around until they see a house or a ranch hand, then ask for directions, “Donde esta el camino?”

Most years, the drivers are grateful for the meager signs. In the early years of the Baja, drivers were given a rudimentary map with an X for the start at Ensenada and an X for the finish in La Paz. The drivers were invited to get there any way they could.

This roughhousing with the land eventually led to a long-standing range war between the racers and the ranchers of Baja. Drivers drove across grazing land that ranchers lease from the government, often neglecting to close the range gates and freeing livestock to wander around.

Often, too, drivers hit cattle that lumber onto the course, especially at night. A compromise was struck on this matter. Squads of soldiers swarmed the course, putting up signs warning the drivers to watch for livestock. “Drive with caution” the signs read, a message if there ever was one.

This problem with gates was not a small issue with the ranchers, though. They threatened to shoot any man or machine that came near their gates. The Mexican government stepped in, promising to install cattle guards at the gates. The promises were never kept and the ranchers began to hold angry meetings.

Emotions ran so high in 1984 that the race was moved to Barstow.

Race officials say things are better now. Still, last year one rancher locked her gate, and parked a bulldozer in front of it, minus the battery. As an added measure, she stationed herself at the gate with a shotgun.

The drivers, ever resourceful, drove beyond the gate and cut the rancher’s fence.

There has been chicanery from both sides these 20 years. No one seems to mind the estimated 10,000 people who surge into town a week before the race.

Ear-blasting noise from race engines? No problem.

Sleeping eight to a room in hotels? No problem.

Round-the-clock partying? No problem.

Excessive spending in the local bars and restaurants? Absolutely no problem.

The lucky ones get hotel rooms. Others sleep in motor homes or campers or in the beds of pickups. That is assuming anyone sleeps at all.

A common scene on Ensenada’s main drag, Avenida Lopez Mateos, is a crowd of people, usually drunk, hanging over the edge of a hotel balcony and dropping something, usually liquid, onto the pedestrians and vehicles below.

When parties in Ensenada run out of horizontal space to spread, they move vertically. Often, a tiny hotel room balcony is jammed with one guest in a chair and a dozen revelers standing on the balcony edge.

So obnoxious were the balcony pests that a city ordinance was passed and now no one can be on a balcony unless he is sitting on a chair. They tried to pass an ordinance that said no one could be served a drink unless he was also served food, but that seemed inhospitable.

Hussong’s Cantina has blossomed with the race. It has gone from a grungy watering hole to a multi-national corporation now serving its own brand of beer. Down the street at the Tequila Connection disco, there’s a full house early Friday morning, only hours before the start of the race. Seemingly, the drivers and spectators resign themselves to sleep deprivation for the entire weekend.

By starting time, 6:30 Friday morning, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that after 10 days of torrential rain, the race, apparently, will not be rained on further. The bad news is that the course is mud-locked. The dry lake beds where drivers had hoped to pick up time are now nearly impassable bogs, the already narrow mountain roads have eroded and in the ravines and washes huge boulders have tumbled onto the course.

As if adhering to some sort of cowboy code, drivers do not let on that they are concerned for personal safety. “Hell, I’ve seen worse,” says Walker Evans, who after 16 years of Baja, probably has.

Roger Mears, who has raced stock cars, raced at Indy and in nearly every sort of vehicle, is concerned about the mud. “There’s not much I’m afraid of,” he says. “But getting stuck is one. I think it’s easier to crash than to get stuck. It’s the one thing that scares me.”

Keep in mind that Mears, who once drove Baja with both arms broken, is not easily frightened.

At the start and scattered around the course are more than 100 journalists from France, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain and New Zealand. Among the stories they will follow:

--Japanese novelist Jugatsu Toi and motorcycle racer Masahiro Uchida. They wear riding outfits bearing the name El Coyote. The pair is on its way from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Buenos Aires on motorcycles, 17,375 miles. They detoured here to document the prehistoric migration of Asians who may have been the ancestors of North American Indians. Documenting them are scads of Japanese television crews.

--A group of 26 Frenchmen, 12 of them motorcycle racers. These tourists are on a package trip that sent them first to Palm Springs to break in the bikes, then on to Baja. After the race, they may take the bikes home with them. The cost of the junket: 75,000 francs, or about $12,500.

--A rowdy and willing group of Australians who brought their trucks from home. They wear shirts emblazoned, “Aussie Assault, 1987.” We wonder if they know their steering wheels are on the wrong side.

--Riding with Mike Falkosky will be Don Belt of Washington. Belt is a writer for National Geographic magazine and will provide the magazine’s first coverage of the Baja race.

The professional motorcycle riders are wearing weatherproof gear, including extensive chest and leg protection. The not-so-rich riders are encased like sausages in plastic trash can bags. Factory-sponsored, professional drivers, who have complete pit crews and as many as eight chase vehicles, line up alongside a couple of guys from Bellflower who work on their truck on weekends.

The course, the weather, the unknown are the equalizers.

The fastest vehicles start first. Motorcycles are usually the overall winners, although each driver is really competing against drivers in his own class. With 29 classes of vehicles, there are many winners.

As the motorcycles roar off a starting platform and out of town, the crowds lining the course are already beginning their own celebration of the race.

Schools are closed to allow children to participate. They do, many by throwing rocks and dirt at the speeding cars and trucks.

By the first checkpoint at Ojos Negros, 30 miles into the course, most of the vehicles are still working out the kinks. The noise is remarkable. There are no mufflers, only straight pipes. The bikes pop-pop. The cars and trucks sound like machine guns.

Here are the huge lakes of water that the drivers must crash through. Some cars stall in the water. A big boat of an Edsel sedan is forced out of the race here. The driver and his friends picnic on the hood. Drivers later report that when they have their lights on, the muddy water burns grime onto their headlights, causing them to cast a yellow light.

Many spectators choose this spot to watch the race. It is spectacular. Children play a game of chicken near the water holes. They dodge the splashes but are not always successful. Mothers look on, seeing not a game but only dirty laundry.

Here, as at any area where spectators congregate, there are sellers of burritos and cold beer. Sales are brisk. Sunday, after the race is over, others will sell race photographs to the drivers. It is part of the entrepreneurial spirit the race engenders.

The race wears on. Pros, such as Mears, have eight pits set up around the course and are in radio contact with any of the eight chase vehicles following, ready to rush replacement parts to their drivers, or pull them out of gullies.

The rest limp along as best they can. They jury-rig radiators and lash spare tires to roofs and coax their machines over some of the most unforgiving land in the hemisphere.

Meanwhile, official radios crackle with reports of injuries, lost drivers and helpless vehicles.

Mud on windshields becomes a major problem. McMillen says he stopped 10 times in the last hours of the race to clean his windshield and refill the cleaning fluid. Others have problems with foggy windshields. Scott Douglas and Chuck Johnson plug a 12-volt hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and periodically blast the windshield to defog it.

Some drivers solve the problem by removing their windshields.

One driver, George Earl of Huntington Beach, splits his dune buggy’s gas tank. He rigs a five-gallon gas tank to a fuel pump and runs the rest of the race that way.

The father-son team of Gale and Matt Pike of Huntington Beach experiences overheating problems, as do many of the cars and trucks. Mud clogs the radiators. The Pikes fight the problem and, finally in desperation, pour Gatorade over the hot radiator. “That did the trick, we had no problems after that,” Matt says.

The National Geographic reporter gets out of the truck he is riding just in time. The truck loses oil pressure and driver Falkosky waits four hours for his chase vehicle to catch up. He uses flares to chase off a herd of wild horses and some coyotes.

Rob Gordon radioes his crew that he has no brakes. Elsewhere on the course, Gordon’s father, Bob, has his own troubles. He drives much of the race without power steering.

One motorcycle rider, Chris Haines, breaks a headlight bracket late in the race and rides the last 15 miles holding the headlight in his hand.

Night and the temperature fall together. The Mexicans light bonfires and toast the brave drivers. Pit crews are anxious, waiting for their riders or drivers to come in. These crews, mostly friends, drive for hours to get to their remote outposts. Then, after camping for days in the middle of nowhere, their car or truck or bike roars up, is gassed and leaves 1 1/2 minutes later.

In McMillen’s crew are a hand surgeon and a San Diego Superior Court judge. It’s the glamour that attracts them.

Despite the factory-sponsored drivers, this race is really about volunteers. Baja Express, a team from the Long Beach area, is typical.

“This is not a big-money operation,” Doug Wagner says, sitting at a remote spot on the coast of the Sea of Cortez. “We are small. We just have a lot friends.”

Shirley Moore of Costa Mesa is the official in charge of checkpoint 6 at San Felipe. She’s been doing this, as a volunteer, since 1972.

“We’re just crazy enough to do it,” she says.

Another volunteer, the paramedic assigned to the checkpoint, has pulled lighter duty. He is on the beach with his girlfriend.

“We’ll call him if we need him,” Shirley says.

It is important to keep perspective on life in the Baja. The racers may hurtle themselves across the peninsula at breakneck speeds, and charge up and down mountains with abandon, but after the 20 or 30 hours of the race, they will go to the beach with their girlfriends.

Three hundred and fourteen vehicles started the Baja 1,000 this year. One hundred and eighty limped across the finish line by Sunday.

The thing about the race is, they’ll all be back.