Jerry McMurry

"Come on boys, you need a chow-wear. Come on I'll get you some soaps."

Yes he was right! We needed showers. Bruce Cranmore and I had been driving down the Baja peninsula of Mexico for 4 days, camping by the roadside, cooking over wood fires, sleeping in bags on the ground. Showers would feel darn good here in La Paz; but could this primitive-looking little RV park really furnish such a luxury?

I was even more leery when I saw the cheerful chubby Mexican fellow (he told us later that he was actually a Greek immigrant) grab up a double handful of kindling wood and rush around to the rear of the shed labeled "Showers." Curiosity forced me to follow him and I found him kneeling in front of two strange vertical tubes 8 inches in diameter and 7 feet tall, stuffing the wood into little doors at the bottom. I gaped as I tried to figure out the Mexican-made "Rapido" water heater, until he saw me and waved me toward the shower door. "Go on boys, get een there! The water will be hot in only a minute!"

He was right. And it lasted long enough for a nice relaxed shower. I have always wanted to get one of those wonderful water heaters just because they are so ingenious, even though my own home is equipped with the usual water warming device.

The purpose of this trip down to the beautiful city of LaPaz was to make a "pre-run" for the upcoming Mexican 1000 Off-Road Race of 1970. My first entry in this race had been the previous year and I didn't want to repeat the mistake of heading south in the blind.

In 1969 I had been invited to co-drive with Jimmy Jones in his four-wheel drive International Scout. I was dumbfounded when Jimmy had invited me to go with him. We didn't even know each other very well. "Me? Drive in a race? I've never driven in a race!" I had to ponder it overnight. It was just a role for myself that I had never considered. I finally decided to do it based on the logical argument of, "Well, why not?" It turned out that Jimmy had chosen wisely because in me he saw a sucker who could weld and was a good mechanic. I worked like a slave on that car getting it ready. In the last few days before the race in 1969, we had only a few hours sleep and we started the race exhausted. We came in thirteenth of thirteen finishers, but we did finish.

When we started the race we had never seen the course and had only the sketchiest of maps with which to find our way. At times far down in the southern part of Baja, we would drive for hours and never see anyone. A couple of times we met a racer going the other way and both cars would stop so we could put four heads together to decide which way to go. Later on in the seventies, they started marking the course at about quarter-mile intervals. That was a big help, although these markers became a favoured souvenir of the local people near towns.

Our Scout was wearing fat "implement" tires -- the kind that are smooth with only four little grooves that run longitudinally around the tread. That was only one of our many mistakes. Even though we carried two spares, these tires had to be repaired more times than I can remember before we got to LaPaz. Off-road racing tires have come a long way baby, since then.

Well, I don't intend to take you on a chronological step-by-step re-enactment of all the racing I did between 1969 and my last race (so far) in 1986. What I would like to do is give snap shots of events that stand out for me, and that show why I love the people and the land of Baja California, Mexico. But first a little more background.

The Baja racing can be experienced in several ways. You could work with the officials and be part of the team that runs the race. I did this one year. You can build or help build a car and race yourself. I did this for several years. You can be part of a pit crew and service race cars in all sorts of out-of-the-way places out in the boonies. I did this for 27 years. Or you can just go down and watch them go by. I managed to do this a couple of times.

"Si senor, que necessitas? (what do you need?)"

"Ummm, do you have an inner tube, umm... una camara, for this truck?"

"Hmmm, si, es possible."

It was November 1971 and we were on our way back from El Arco, a small but important town almost at the halfway point between the north and south end of Baja. We had set up a Magnificent Seven pit (the name of our pitting/racing club) there and had taken care of about twenty-five vehicles of all types. I had gotten a flat tire in the one and a half-ton van I was driving, and we had no spare. I thought just having a tube would be a good idea. We had stopped in the tiny village of Rosarito where there was a crude sign that said, "Yantes" (tires).

After looking at the size of the tires on our truck (10.50X21) he turned and headed for what appeared to be the back half of an old rusted milk delivery van. As I followed him, he opened up the rear swinging doors and climbed inside onto a huge pile of old inner tubes. Though I could not make out his system, he seemed to have them piled in some kind of order. Sure enough, he found one with the right size printed on its side. He slid back out and we examined it in the bright sunlight. The patches were no problem, but the end of the long metal valve stem was buggered up. Undaunted, he took a hacksaw and cut the end off. Then he ran some kind of threading tools over the inside and outside of the stem and tried to install a valve core. He worked at this job for well over an hour, but finally it became apparent he would not be able to make it work. He looked at me sadly, and I guess I looked at him sadly. I knew that if there was another used tube in there, he would have gone for it. He disgustedly threw the tube down on the ground, turned on his heel, and walked away from me around the corner of a small adobe building. I turned and headed back to my truck, worried about the 450 miles of very bad road ahead. Oh well, maybe they had a tube up the road somewhere. I started to climb up inside.

"Ah. Senor! Senor!" I turned and looked.

There stood the man, holding a sealed cardboard carton in his hands. Actually, he held it reverently on his two open palms like a ring boy might hold the pillowed sacred ring at a wedding. It was a brand-new tube in the original carton! I was surprised. Why would he go to all that trouble when he knew full well that he had a new tube on the shelf? Later I understood. You must not waste a new tube if you can make the old one work. Not in Baja California. He considered it a failure on his part for having to break out the new tube for me. I was delighted.

I paid him his extremely reasonable price and packed the tube in the truck. We never needed it.

The best experience of course is to actually race. It used to be pretty affordable, but nowadays you have to be rich or have sponsors. And sponsors are very hard to find. Baja racing is not the sponsor-attracting spectator sport that so many other types of races are. You are just racing out there in the middle of nowhere and occasionally you'll see a little group of people. (When people pop up out of the bushes with cameras or camcorders then slow down!)

The racing aspect alone is divided into the preparation and the racing. The preparation part is building the car and also preparing yourself for the course; that means, "the Prerun." Prerunning is probably the most actual fun to be had in the racing experience. There is not too much of a time pressure. You can stop and talk to people. For years, there are people that I have only seen prerunning and no other time. And you seem to run into them all over and at all times.

Each time I have started a race, I have always felt most relaxed just before the starter waves the flag. After working for months getting ready, it is finally over. There is nothing more you can do, now. If you forgot something, it is too late. Just relax. And make the car go as fast as safely possible, without breaking it. My best advice to beginners is always, "Drive Slow!" They give me a puzzled look and then take off, driving too fast; they don't get far.

Actually, this is the essence of this type of racing. After all, the course you are driving on is intentionally chosen to be rough on the vehicle and the people in it. If you want to race on the smooth, then you don't want off-road racing. So you are really competing against the course, the terrain, the environment, instead of against the other racers. This actually makes the racing safer for the people because the terrain keeps the speeds down, compared to something like the Daytona 500, or Indianapolis. There have been a few killed over the years, but you can't have the terrible accidents at 60 mph that you can at 200.

THUNK!

WOGGLE, WOGGLE, WOGGLE, WOGGLE!

"Uh-oh, Frank, looks like the upper ball joint let go this time!"

Frank pulled the car over to the side of the track and shut off the engine while I released my seat belt and unplugged my airhose and communications cable.

We were about 600 miles along in a 1000-mile race; the Baja 1000 of 1986. It had started in Ensenada the day before with the car's owner, Ed McLean and his brother Hugh, driving. Frank Ball and I had taken over at about the 1/4 mark, and Ed and Hugh were driving around on the pavement to take over again at the 3/4 mark. But they wouldn't be able to take over if he couldn't figure out how to get the car going again.

We stood there and stared at the dangling front wheel. This car, a Challenger class racing buggy, used basic Volkswagen parts, including the ball-joint front suspension of the later model VWs -- the weakest part in this class. The lower right ball joint had gone out earlier and we had welded it back together in our number 6 pit about 150 miles ago.

The road was smooth and sandy and we were surrounded by thick light green trees only about twelve feet tall. The trees gave off an aromatic oily fragrance. It was one of the prettier and lonelier parts of the Baja Peninsula. No other race cars went by for a half hour; this far down in the race many are already broken permanently, and the field is also well strung out.

Suddenly out of the trees, a young well-dressed Mexican man strode up and stood next to us gazing down at the separated ball joint. "Buenos tardes," we all greeted each other. Then I got an idea: if we could get a piece of chain, we could wrap it around and put a bolt through the links and make it hang together a while! We had no chain in the car, so I asked Frank if he knew how to say chain in Spanish. No, he didn't. So I turned to the young man and said "Chain? Necessitas chain. Comprende?" He did not understand my mixed language, so I drew a picture of chain in the sand. (In no other case can I pinpoint the exact time and place I learned a new Spanish word.) "Ah! Cadena!" he said, nodding. I mimed how I would wrap the chain around the upper swing arm and his face lit up with immediate understanding.

I have used these gestures, expressions, shrugs, and sketches many times in Mexico and find that they have a great affinity for this way of communicating. I was surprised during my stay in Japan to find that it does not work there. Although there is no lack of intelligence or willingness to try to understand and help with the Japanese, somehow the culture or language stands in the way of communication.

Anyway, the Mexican waved me to follow him. He said there was a rancho nearby. I asked how far. The answer to a Yankee question of distance was answered as always in Mexico with the more practical measure of units of time. "Cinco minutos," (five minutes) he said. What good would it have been for me to know how many miles or meters? Time to get there was far more important to know. I keep learning these things when I travel in Mexico.

Presently we got to a sprawling little ranch hidden over a hill. I never would have guessed it was there. He called out: "Oh-la!" and repeated it several times. Presently a very sleepy-looking older man came out of the house; he had been taking siesta (another marvelous latin custom). Quickly the young man told the older what we needed. The man unhesitatingly went to a small tree from which an empty bird cage hung by a thin chain. Oh no, too small, we told him. So he turned and led us to a long chain lying on the ground. It was large enough to anchor a small ship. Oh no, too large! I was reminded of a certain childhood story about this time. Finally he went to the back of a beat-up pickup truck and there was a short piece of chain of just the right size fastened under the bumper. "Ah! Si! Perfecto!" The man got a crescent wrench and undid the bolt that held it and smilingly presented it to me. I thanked him with real sincerity and from past experience resisted the usual impulse to offer money. We headed back to the race car, and the ranch owner with a cheery wave headed back to his siesta.

The chain worked far better than expected. We thought it would get us to the paved section if we were careful. But as Frank testingly added more and more speed, we found that the wheel was actually going to hold together all the way! This same chain was presented to me two weeks later at a finishing celebration party at Hugh McLean's house. It had been painted gold and mounted on a mahogany plaque.

I'm an engineer, so of course I get a lot out of the challenge of engineering a car that can take the punishment. Over the years, cars have evolved to carry a greater and greater number of shock absorbers. Typically the fast single seat buggies might have three or four on each rear wheel and two on each front. Not to mention two more duct-taped to the frame somewhere. These are special shocks too, costing around $100 apiece or more. Racers have many pet special things they do to their cars. You can tell that one guy had a voltage regulator fail one year because he will have two mounted side by side next to the engine. I always ran two electric fuel pumps. I don't know why. I never had a pump failure. It just seemed like the thing to do. It was always something else that failed me when I was put out of a race. A universal joint, a suspension control arm, a steering arm. Once my engine was moving enough on its rubber mounts so that the oil pan hit the frame. The first I noticed that I was out of oil was when the engine jerked to a halt with a sickening screech.

Ah, racing, racing! I'd like to go back there again. Say, you know anybody that would like to sponsor a good car and driving team?

Text: © Copyright 1995-2005, Baja.net - Beachfront Holdings, LLC - All Rights Reserved

Jerry McMurry says that his major claim to fame is that he is the son of the man who invented the "Pie Slicer... which no one outside of the cheese industry ever heard of. ". We, however, suspect that he may be valued as an engineer, race car driver, sail boat enthusiast, amateur astronomer, and an occasional resident of Baja, as well as a practicing father, grandfather, and husband... who is now learning to surf fish.