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When we arrived at the "campground" the gate was already locked, fortunately they were still letting people in and someone came to open it for us. What we found was that everyone was bivouacking in the parking lot for the town whale watching pier. We exhausted and were very glad to find that some of the vendors had stayed open late and we ordered some lobster tacos and cold beer. The race control truck was parked close to the tables for the food vendors so we logged into the wifi to check if the scoring was up as promised at the morning's race briefing. Here is what we found.
We were in 4th! We were super excited, we knew we had been getting most of the points but we wouldn't have guessed we were doing that well. Spirits were high and then moments later we checked the individual day scoring to compare the points we were awarded with what we were expecting based on the race sheets we turned in since we noticed a discrepancy on day one.
We didn't get the 6 points for the difficult route, we had completed that one. It was the video I posted near the boulder that almost took out the back left half of the truck. We had multiple GPS logs to contest that with which meant if we were awarded those six points we were in THIRD!!!! Then we looked further down. A speeding penalty on day one...CRAP. That did not bode well for days two and three. We had been having ongoing conversations about our strategy to go faster than the posted day's max speed. Some were more confident than others that it was a good idea but we had all agreed it was worth the risk in order to make up for our slower offroad pace. Day two our max speed was a good bit over the 156 km/hr that cost us 10 points on day one and on day three we had spent literally hours over 120 km/hr as we were trying make up time both before and after stopping to help the motorcycle rider.
Would be be loosing more points for the repeat infractions? No penalty was posted on day 2 yet but the scoring was still provisional.
We were further bummed out to think that we we had made the wrong choice for the afternoon on day 3. We never could have predicted the motorcycle repair stop but with us doing well, pending speeding penalties not withstanding, every point mattered.
The final salt in the wounds was the camping. It was a dusty dirt parking lot and there was a heavy dew settling on everything as we finished our dinner and were setting up camp.
There was a lot of race left but if the penalties came down heavy we would have a lot of ground to make up.
We woke wet, dirty and tired on day 4 but the vendors who had been there the night before were back and the coffee was hot which helped a lot. We had coffee and a stove (and lots of food) with us but hot, ready and made by someone else is nice. Everything was wet from the fog/dew that settled overnight, it had even been enough to cause a drip inside one of the tents. The morning race briefing was at an almost civilized 8 am so we had some time to let things dry. The organizers ended up camped next to us.
That huge pile of stuff in the back was not our packout for running, it was a junk pile to keep things dry and out of the dirt. I don't have a good photo of it loaded for racing but it was level with top of rear seat back and secured with multiple straps and allowed for access to the cooler and food bin underway.
The maroon Nissan Armada with a bunch of extra antennas was the wifi hub for the data loggers. I was up early and so was Andrew, the race founder and head official, who came over to grab a photo for instagram of our truck and compliment us on the Martini/Tecate bit from the start.
He asked how things were going. I said great and shared our surprise and happiness to find we were doing so well in the scoring. We chatted a bit about the Cayenne, why we picked it, how it was doing off road and the awesome engine noise. Then I took the opportunity to mention our strategy error with speeding based on our misinterpretation of his pre-race briefing. I told him we had also exceeded the 120 km/hr limit on days 2 and 3, that we would accept our penalties without complaint and it wouldn't happen again. I doubted this would soften the penalties but figured it was worth a shot and more importantly owning up to our behavior felt like the right thing to do.
Here is how wet it was.
At the race briefing there was mention of the speeding being wide spread and he said that the penalties were automatically applied by the scoring software. That had us scared because the penalty on day 1 had said both our speed and the duration of speeding. We had broken the ton on day 2 and as previously mention we moving (too) fast for hours on day three. Nothing to do but move forward which meant scoring every point we could get. Here are the race sheets for day 4. I've redacted more than usual so as not to give away the events of the day before the story is told.
The route was briefed as long fast baja dirt roads, a bit of beach driving and much shorter than the previous two days. We decided on a bit of R & R, we dodged the start point and headed into town for a full hot breakfast.
We also had taken the time in the morning to mount the species unknown carnivore skull we found on the rock dune
True to the briefing the day started with this.
If we hadn't been worried about cows and horses in the bushes we would have had to watch that we not break 120 km/hr.
Last edited by cameron110; 02-25-2019 at 12:36 PM.
We made a fair bit of ground distance wise on the fast track but it didn't last long in time before the track took a 90 left turn and became seemingly endless 2 to 3 foot whoops.
This is what a fully built trophy truck can do in those whoops:
We had started at the crack of 10 after a great breakfast cooked by the abuelitas in restaurant with the massive fish
Here are the first few waypoints of the day.
We didn't grab a picture of the animals on the gate.
The Bronco in front of us in that pic is the same one we were chasing through the whoops in the video. We were actually a pretty close pace match to him in most terrain despite how heavily modified his rig was. We were pushing a good bit harder though.
The observant might have noticed that part of the right mirror housing was gone in the photo above. We caught the arm of a cactus at speed, the mirror slammed back so hard it sounded like we had blown out the passenger window. Thankfully we only had broken the mirror glass and a bit of housing. Parts of the track got pretty narrow. I can't imagine running them in the raptors that were over a foot wider than the Cayenne.
After the first 5 waypoints we came to the shortest distance challenge. We had been doing a fair bit of hunting on the satellite imagery and had found a gamble we felt was worth exploring. We found an old track that did not show as a road on any of the maps but could be seen on the imagery as a way to cut the hypotenuse of the two obvious roads which intersected at 90 degrees to make the route between the two waypoints.
Here are the two points that were the start and finish to the shortest distance challenge. The team traveling the shortest distance got 10 points. The next shortest distances got decreasing points, 8 then 6 then everyone else who got both points but in a longer distance got 5 points.
Between these two points you can see a very faint track that makes a strait line and forms the hypotenuse of the triangle. This is what we were found on the sat images and thought would be unlikely to be noticed by any other teams.
We didn't grab a picture of the animals on the gate.
The gate was pretty small. Here's a crop:
After that completely crappy overnight, with semi-overpriced food and horribly overwhelmed bathrooms (with an attendant wanting money for each visit), and sleeping with the knowledge that we could be in for massive penalties or disqualification for egregious speeding, the discovery that our penalties were over (combined with a warm sunny morning in town) really boosted our spirits during the long, lazy breakfast. However, we learned how much that kind of time expenditure would hurt us later on.
The points for the day generally lay along the coast as we went south from the whale sanctuary down toward Todos Santos. There wasn't really a whole lot of strategy to the day; we just needed to keep going enough to get to the finish in time although there was one 100km detour on the 1 that we could avail ourselves of if we were running behind. But the SHORT was an area which we thought deserved some extra effort. It's the section just to the left of middle in this pic of the overall route, with the box shape in the middle.
Cameron mentioned the scoring for these: top points for the winner, sliding scale down to 50% for the field. Since we realized that not many teams were trying to excel at the difficult stuff, we figured that ANYTHING we could do that slightly shortened even the most obvious route would give us a good chance of doing better than 50% and maybe even winning it. We even cut the shortest corner we could leaving the little village where the starting point was. The red route below was the obvious one, but we found two possibilities to cut corners and they are shown in yellow. Going for one meant skipping the other. The beach was technically an option too, but we had seen how unpredictable that was and there was no guarantee that we could get back off the beach without long detours that would add all of the distance back. The red route looked predictable and the yellow shortcuts would save us the distance to get us extra points.
Obviously (from our track above) we went for the second one and it didn't work out quite like we had hoped. We stopped where the track supposedly started and there was hardly anything to be seen although the track looked a bit more solid on the map a bit farther away. So as shown by the screenshot below we did a bit of driving around, blasted through some sand pits, and rejoined the track at a later point to find... there was just no way we would be able to drive that for 10 meters, much less 10km. Baja is covered with old tracks that seemed to have been established on some sort of major grid system long ago, and which either survived or didn't based on whether or not they were needed. This one apparently didn't serve a purpose and didn't get used, although every single day we wondered what purpose most of the tracks served.
Now we were kind of screwed because we'd burned up a few km trying to find this route and we ended up with two even longer options back to the established road. Oh well, we would still get 50% just for trying so we didn't necessarily lose anything but some time. And looking at the points for the day, it seems we probably still got better than 50% for this challenge. We opted to keep going south to evaluate the beach, quickly rejected that idea and got back to the main route.
Yeah, we should have looked harder at the first (shorter) yellow option.
Having learned some lessons on day three about when to stop chasing points in favor of managing the day as a whole we gave it a shot then bailed. In hind sight we did a decent job of balancing giving it a fair crack then moving on with our day. As you can see from the purple track in Anton's last post we tried a few ways to access the hypotenuse track then we cut our losses and moved on to south to access the next viable route which was to head a bit further south down the coast then take a different east bound road to the obvious bigger route. We still aren't sure how this played out from a scoring standpoint because we didn't grab a screen shot of the final day's scoring but based on the totals it seems like we did well enough to get more than 5 but less than 10 points.
On a personal note, I apologize for the slowed pace of posting. A 10 hour work day that has been more like 13 due to patient acuity in the last two weeks and a 2 1/2 year old in sleep pattern regression has sucked up a huge amount of time and energy. Thanks for the patience, between Anton and I we'll get this story told.
Once we were back on an established route to the end of the SHORT, we continued toward the wash that you can see on the satmaps above, where we had to find our way through a small farm and then across the wash that was fairly wide. Nearly all of these wash crossings had established tracks across them which were re-established (possibly in a different place) after every major rain. The obvious way in and out wasn't always represented well on the satmaps, but looking out the window fixed that and then you had the fun of getting back to something you had been planning on.
At this point we were 5.5 hours into a 12 hour day that we had gotten a late start on, having covered MAYBE half of the distance required toward our nearly $300 luxury resort lodging for the night, and with several beach waypoints ahead. Furthermore we were hearing more and more signs of distress from the front suspension: the right side knock that had been with us since the beginning was definitely worse, and some of us were hearing something new from the left. Given all of this, we did what any sensible team would have done and pulled off onto a beach for a nice lunch and a swim.
That's Jake prepping lunch, with Cam and Marshall in swimming mode. But the hood's up, because we noticed fluid dripping off the engine onto the sand. Not what you want on a remote beach below the high tide line. The car had always had a coolant smell, and before the trip we had replaced the coolant reservoir with a new one because there was a pretty clear crack in the side of it. Still the coolant smell persisted a bit, but we couldn't be sure it was new. Now, we were sure. After some investigation, we concluded that coolant was bubbling out the reservoir cap and running down the side of the reservoir, but wasn't coming from a more worrisome place such as the water pump or an inaccessible hose. All we could really do was keep fluid in the reservoir and keep an eye on it.
We left the beach, and continued south along the race route. From now on, the route remained fairly close to the coast, often directly along it.
The evening sun was glorious, and the only people we saw were in small encampments near the beach, maybe a few RVs or pickup campers. That, and the occasional rally vehicle such as the trio of side-by-sides that we leapfrogged with for the rest of the day. We would usually see them stopped fairly close to a waypoint, and we'd collect it and a few minutes later they'd roar past in a cloud of dust. Then we'd see them stopped again. They were just having a great time, enjoying the gorgeous evening as were we.
But we were on a mission... despite our dilly-dallying, we were actually on a time trajectory that could get us in within the time window, even if we stopped for every waypoint. The beach waypoints were huge unknowns, but we just kept at it. We could often see the SxS team ahead, and encounter their dust, and then maybe take a different route through one section that brought us closer or even ahead of them.
We just kept going. There were only a few WPs before we got to the next section, but there was no other route. Plus, it was just a lot of fun.
Eventually we got through that long section and started to pass more villages and farms. There had been a few easy WPs along the higher ground along the coast, but now we needed to dip down to the water and get three WPs that were out on the beach. Having seen how well that worked out the day before, we knew we needed to figure out the system and be efficient at it so we would still finish on time. After working our way through a neighborhood of small farms and crops, we got to the beach road and looked for our chance to get out to the WP. There was a tall dune between the road and the beach, meaning that even if we got over it we would need to get back up it to return to the road and of course it was so dark we could not assess beach conditions anywhere other than right where we were. As you can see in this screenshot, we attempted to cross the dune to get to the WP but it was too sketchy. Too hard to get up, huge unknown about getting back. We kept going until we found a lower opening in the dune, then went back for the WP. To keep from having to stop, we drove a path that clipped the WP at the end of a U-turn and got back to the road without stopping.
We repeated this for the second and third WPs, but the third one wasn't quite as straightforward. Changing terrain had required some rerouting:
And that little feature next to the WP itself had us pushing a bit.
You can hear how hard the engine is working in the deep sand. It was always like this, and every time we got off sand we could hear the coolant bubbling. If we shut the engine off we would lose a lot of coolant, so we learned to leave it running if we had to stop to air up or something. We had to top up the reservoir again after this last beach WP.
While we were on the beach we could hear the SxS crowd go past. Any time we saw vehicles like those we always figured that we were in the thick of the points chase with them, but they passed without stopping and as time went on we realized that we were taking this more seriously than most. And that was OK with us.
After getting off the beach and watering up we were back on a major road which took us past increasingly commercial density, onto pavement which led us into downtown Todos Santos where we had the last waypoint of the night.
411. Make a Team Selfie with Hotel California. 3 points.
Yes, that is supposedly the Hotel California of Eagles fame. It was a classic photographer's nightmare of balancing flash and ambient light to get an exposure that showed everything, but we got it and got back in the car. It was close to 9:30, but the finish wasn't that far away and we had at least until 10:00 to get the eight finishing points. We hit the finish (which was on the road into the resort) well before that, then set about figuring out how to get some dinner. Although the poolside restaurant was closing, they stayed open long enough for us to squeeze one last order in and then we sat down to relax a bit.
It was a truly epic day and we were really pumped about it. We worked our assess off, figured everything out and hit every single waypoint on the sheet. We drove through beautiful scenery: rugged coastline, warm beaches, lush oases (in pitch darkness). Only two teams outscored us: the two who would eventually take 1st and 2nd place overall.
We settled into our house for the night with the Martinelli team camped on the beach in front of us. Tomorrow we needed to assess a few things with the Cayenne, specifically the suspension and the cooling issue.
BTW folks, if theres anything you want more details on, just ask while we still remember. We have plenty of pics, too. Otherwise we will just keep doing what we’re doing.
Last edited by AntonLargiader; 03-02-2019 at 07:50 PM.
Day 5 started as a wonderful sunny morning. We were in a house at Cerritos Surftown, just south of Todos Santos and not far north of Cabo San Lucas, directly overlooking the ocean.
It would be a short day, so the drivers' meeting was late. We made breakfast in the house and started to plan the day as the Martinelli team got towed out of the sand yet again. This was needed pretty much any time they encountered sand, and no one seemed to mind.
I threw down a tarp and crawled around under the Cayenne looking for trouble. Here's what I found:
I don't have a pic of the other side to compare, but it's easy to visualize how far off center that bolt is. This is the left lower shock bolt which supports the entire weight of that corner of the car, and it's very close to being metal-to-metal. The right side bolt was still centered in the bushing, but I noticed what seemed to be signs of excessive movement on the front right subframe bushing. Some were dirty in the gap, but that one seemed to be rubbed clean. Everything else - ball joints, sway bar links, inner control arm bushings - seemed tight. I couldn't get any motion in the subframe bushings either, but looking at how that subframe is arranged I don't think it would be easy to reproduce motion if any existed. It remained a question mark; there was something going on in the right front.
While I was checking that out, Jake was looking into the cooling issue and discovered that the coolant reservoir cap was broken. There was no O-ring, and the lip that retains the O-ring was broken away. This was the original cap that was on the Cayenne when we bought it, because the new reservoir did not come with a cap.
This precipitated a round of phone calls with the help of the lovely Sophia @sof_bm who was down there photographing surfers and whales. As if anyone would have Porsche parts down there, we were instead looking for Touareg parts but needed a VIN so it took me about ten minutes of flaky-internet eBay searches to come up with a decent Touareg VIN. The race organizer meanwhile posted from the Cabo San Lucas Autozone about a starter he had just bought for someone, but he was too early for us. By the time we knew what we needed, though, we had connected with another team that was heading into Cabo so they were tasked with getting us a cap. A lower control arm would have to wait another day until we passed through La Paz, where the Autozone folks indicated the arms were in stock.
At this point it was practically noon and we needed to do something about, you know, the rally. Here's how the day looked:
There were 46 points, of which 22 were on the initial leg through the mountains. The finishing bonus was only five points, so there was no crushing need to get there on time although we had no intention of being out for the entire ten hours allowed: that would be 10:00 PM. The first section of the day was usually the roughest, and our fresh discovery of the bushing issue had us very hesitant about committing to a long mountainous stage. Skipping the initial stint over the mountains (which could have ended up being very, very slow) put us on track for an estimated 5:15 of driving time to get to our beach camping at Bahía de los Sueńos. That was 100km of highway past Cabo, and then the balance on mixed terrain. There were some interesting spots to hit in the afternoon, so off we went, south to the expressway around Cabo. At the airport (Las Veredas on the map) we got back onto the 1, which took us north until we turned inland to the town of Miraflores, where we would take a route toward our photo waypoint at the Cańón de la Zorra waterfall. But in town, we pulled over behind the race staff's Crown Vic and got suckered into going out into Nowhere and shooting some video with them involving some high-speed passes and an overtaking situation with inches to spare. I don't think we cracked 120 KPH but I assume we would have gotten a pass. We did get a nice still from it, which is my avatar. Maybe we'll see the videos one day.
From there we went to the waterfall and killed time that we didn't really have, as usual, then took a pretty straightforward route past some cool inland stuff and eventually out to the coast past some very cool gulfside houses and, at one point, a group of men inexplicably hand sweeping a section of concrete road cleaner than you can imagine.
We got to the bivouac, set up camp, and found the guy with our new radiator cap. You can see the difference (missing O-ring and flange) here.
It was a nice warm evening, and a mariachi band had been brought for two hours to celebrate the birthday of Victor, one of the race staff. Excessive excess of alcohol flowed. The Martinellis were stuck in the sand again. Life was good.
Last edited by AntonLargiader; 03-04-2019 at 07:51 AM.
Here is Anton checking out the suspicious right front "clunk" while I used the factory on board spare tire inflation set up to air up to 45 psi for the tarmac blast around Cabo
Task 509 said "take a Panoramic team selfie with the lagoon"
We decided to follow the instructions literally:
This was a beach waypoint that became a lunch and firewood gathering spot. The morning race brief mentioned that we should plan to haul in some wood to the beach camp if we wanted to have a fire.
We arrived at dusk so camp got set with the help of the rack mounted floods.
02-24-2019, 08:56 PM
Not what you want on a remote beach below the high tide line. The car had always had a coolant smell, and before the trip we had replaced the coolant reservoir with a new one because there was a pretty clear crack in the side of it. Still the coolant smell persisted a bit, but we couldn't be sure it was new. Now, we were sure. After some investigation, we concluded that coolant was bubbling out the reservoir cap and running down the side of the reservoir, but wasn't coming from a more worrisome place such as the water pump or an inaccessible hose. All we could really do was keep fluid in the reservoir and keep an eye on it.
