High-Flying ‘Night Hawk’ Giles Is Way Off the Road : Motorsports: After becoming the first black to race in the Baja 1,000, he supports others while waiting to drive again.

Felix Giles has received recognition in the House of Representatives as the first of his race to drive in a desert off-road race, but to his fellow drivers he has become better known and more appreciated as “the Night Hawk.”

“I am proud to rise today to salute Felix Giles, a former Clevelander and outstanding race car driver,” Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) said in a speech before Congress last Feb. 21.

“Felix recently changed the pages of history by becoming the first African-American to race in the Baja 1,000. This represents an important achievement, and I take this opportunity to applaud this young man’s efforts.”

Giles, 40, who lives in Anaheim Hills, downplays the achievement.

“It was something that was inevitable, like being the 1 millionth customer at Disneyland,” Giles said as he discussed his new role in High Desert Racing Assn./SCORE off-road racing. “It was going to happen. I just happened to be the one.”

Giles has driven in only that one race, last November’s Baja 1,000, as co-driver in Rick Sieman’s modified Ford Bronco. In it, Giles earned himself the nickname “Flipper.”

“I had ridden shotgun in the Nevada 500 out of Parumph (Nev.), but the 1,000 was the first time I got behind the wheel,” Giles said. “I had just been hauling along a dry lake bed, going about 125 (m.p.h.), but my mind was only going 100 when I smacked a rock outcropping and rolled. Another guy had rolled right in front of me, although I couldn’t see him for all the dust, and a few minutes later, Robby Gordon rolled three times. All in the same spot.”

Giles and Sieman, after picking broken glass from their bodies and beating out a few dents in the Bronco, climbed back in the truck and, with Sieman driving, finished fifth in their class.

“When you’re the only black guy out there, you know everybody is watching, so everybody knew what happened almost before we got the truck back on its wheels,” Giles said.

“When we got to Ensenada, the first thing (series champion) Ivan Stewart said was, ‘Hi, Flipper.’ Coming from him, I thought of it as a compliment. Later, I found out that’s what all the flippers get called after they flip.”

That was the final race of 1990 and when rules changed for 1991, Sieman’s truck became obsolete, leaving Giles with nothing to drive while Sieman had a new one built. But Giles and his wife, Susan, who drove a chase truck across Baja while her husband raced, were hooked on off-road racing and couldn’t stand the thought of not being part of the scene.

“I told (team owner) Dick Landfield that I wanted to stay in racing in some manner, and he said the BF Goodrich team was looking for a volunteer to fly around during races and keep in communication with their drivers,” Giles said. “Frank D’Angelo of the Ford Rough Riders team knew I’d been in submarines, so he thought I might be crazy enough to stay in the air 18 to 20 hours in a Piper Cherokee.

“After I agreed, someone said they had to have a code name. A lot of ideas got bounced around when someone suggested Night Hawk. It was really a joke at first, me being black and some of the flying being done at night, but I liked it and it stuck.”

Giles has been at every HDRA/SCORE race this season, flying over Baja, southern Nevada, the Mojave desert and other desolate areas where off-roaders run.

“We fly around 9,000 feet, continually circling the course and taking close looks at problem areas,” Giles said. “The Night Hawk is working for BF Goodrich, but when he’s in the air he’s working for every driver and team in the race because we are in a position to receive and send signals to anyone in distress. Sometimes, when there is a breakdown or crash in a canyon or ravine, the radio signal can’t be heard by the crew, but up where we are, we can hear it and relay it along.”

Stewart, last year’s HDRA/SCORE champion and winner last Saturday of the Nevada 500, lauded the work of Giles and the Goodrich team.

“We have our own spotter, but it’s comforting to know that the Night Hawk is up there, too,” Stewart said. “A lot of the teams don’t have anyone looking after them, and he acts as sort of a collection agency in addition to keeping working for Goodrich.”

All the excitement is not always confined to the racing. Once, for instance, Giles’ pilot had to go the bathroom and decided to set the plane down in the middle of the desert.

“We were just about to land when we were hit by a wind shear,” Giles said. “The plane tipped over on its side, and it looked like we were going to be thrown into the ground when the pilot gunned it back to parallel, but too late to get airborne. We had about as nasty a landing as I can imagine. It really bent the plane up, and I told the pilot, ‘We ought to put a number on this plane. We might as well be in the race if we’re going to bounce around (on the ground) like that.’ ”

Then there was the time they had to land in a fog bank in Ensenada without radar.

“We were running low on fuel so the pilot said we had to take a shot at hitting the runway,” Giles said. “We heard another pilot talking in Spanish, but my guy spoke only English. When we popped out of the fog, the other plane was right on our tail. I don’t know how we missed. It was pretty scary.”

Giles’ most memorable incident was a bittersweet one. It was his first race as the Night Hawk, and he spotted an accident out in the middle of nowhere.

“We couldn’t tell what happened, but we saw a truck had missed the road and hit a canyon wall so we called down and the driver (Mike Lund) said to call for paramedics, that his rider was unconscious. The pilot contacted an emergency helicopter, and we stayed hovering over the accident to act as a beacon for the chopper. It turned out we didn’t save a life, but it proved the value of having the Night Hawk in the sky because we helped the crews to do all they could in a rescue attempt.”

Buzz Combe was riding with Lund in a Nissan Pathfinder when the accident occurred. Combe died instantly; Lund was not injured.

“A couple of months later I was in Ensenada for the Baja 500 and Lund’s wife introduced me to Peri Combe, Buzz’s widow,” Giles said. “She said, ‘I want to thank you for what you did. I know everything that could have been done to save Buzz was done,’ It was a very emotional time for me.”

So what brought a black man from Ohio--holder of a second-degree black belt in taekwondo and a veteran submarine sailor--to the deserts of the Southwest with a dream of driving a race car?

“After 13 years in submarines, I was getting bored with the Navy,” Giles said. “After Vietnam, the all-volunteer Navy wasn’t the same as it had been. It became more attractive to be on the outside and work as a technician for companies involved with defense contracts. I went back to college, got an engineering degree from National University in Irvine and went to work at Rockwell International.

“While there, a friend of mine, Ruebin Herndon, got me interested in going prospecting with him in the Chocolate Mountains, down near the Salton Sea. We called him ‘Boony’ because he was always going out in the boondocks, camping.

“He bought a four-wheel-drive truck and we went to the desert as often as we could. Another friend, Les Barnett, went along with us, and before long he bought a Bronco and said he wanted to go racing. So Boony and I became his support crew, banging around in the desert as a low-bucks privateer team.

“We formed Freedom Racing and attracted some attention when it became known that Les was from South Africa and his No. 1 crewman was a black American.

“Barnett decided to get out of racing . . . but I was hooked and so was Boony. He knew Rick Sieman had a Bronco that he raced now and then so he told Rick we’d like to work as his crew.

“We started spending every weekend working on the truck, and one day Rick said, ‘Anyone here who does their share of work will get a chance to drive.’ Well, before the 1,000, I said, ‘It’s my turn,’ and he said ‘OK.’ That’s how I became the first black to drive in the Baja, even if I did get called Flipper before it was over.”

When McDonnell Douglas, where Giles was working as an engineering liaison with the Federal Aviation Administration, had a cutback last fall, he was let go. He is now with Cubic Defense Systems in San Diego as a senior engineer, aeronautics weapons specialist.

“It makes for a long commute between San Diego and Anaheim Hills, but we want to stay in our old house because Susan works nearby in an escrow office,” he said. “Cubic is a wonderful opportunity because they allow me to set my schedule around off-road races.”

And now the Night Hawk has a choice to make. When he walked into a nightclub after a race recently, the patrons cheered him for his exploits as racing’s eye in the sky. But he still wants to race.

“I’ve been getting a lot of recognition as the Night Hawk, and it’s great for the ego and it’s very satisfying to know I’m appreciated,” he said. “But if I’m going to be known as the first black off-road racer, I’d better get back to racing, hadn’t I?”