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For whatever reason, the race sheets tended to say "Panoramic Selfie" and we learned that in Pano mode you can get pretty creative. In the shot above, we did not use a selfie stick... it was all handheld. Some of the pano selfies from the next day are even better.
Oh, and on the lean-to camping in the last pic... there was a steady breeze that night, but it was pretty warm as the gulf side tended to be. Jake and I initially shared a tent but I can snore pretty badly, so at Lopez Mateos Jake bailed and slept in the Cayenne (there was also water dripping into his side of the tent). Here at the beach, Jake slept under the lean-to and I was in the tent. After this, I slept in the Cayenne because I was just never warm enough in the tent. I simply didn't have the right stuff for me in that climate.
Oh, and since no one should post without bringing a pic to the table, here's a nice old Scout that joined us when we were gathering firewood. We were parked right on the WP but I'm sure he was within 25m of us.
Dig the lap-only seat belts! And he was running these crazy expensive Hella mining lights that he got for a song because they were obsolete. Looking on the roof, you can see he was carrying spares for one of the moto guys.
Race briefing was at a leisurely 8 am as this was intended to be another "short" day.
Scoring was still only posted through day three. We knew we had yielded points on day 5 by skipping the mountain but we wanted to stay in the hunt. We circled all the points we thought we could get even with a bit of time spent in La Paz chasing some suspension bushing repair options.
Sorry for the delay in getting the next post up. My 2 year old went down with the flu this week. The Day 6 morning briefing included and admonishion that the first section afforded limited opportunities for passing and if you broke down the team behind might have to push you into the sea to get past. So we packed up and headed up the route...
one of the first waypoints we came to. This one was placed out of order on the sheet and the team in front of us was parked looking around for the wrong clue. We decided pretty quickly that we were better off pointing out their error so we could get on our way. The day's route would take us through La Paz and we had things to do there.
We had noticed that our fuel jug had cracked. It was old when we started the trip so brittle plastic was probably the main issue. It split at a the seam below the handle, the bungee probably didn't help either.
We had gotten the radiator cap already so that was sorted. The suspension bushings were still every much drivable but we wanted to explore our options for repair as we knew the rate of wear was compounding. We had talked with an employee at one of the Auto Zone stores in the city via WhatApp from the beach in Todos Santos and had been told that they had new aftermarket replacement front lower control arms available for about $160 each. We were definitely considering picking them up so we could get back to running 8/10's all the time
We decided we would first go grab our points in town and then chase the parts. There were a couple photo waypoints so we took the opportunity to have some fun with the photos.
We weren't confident that one was clear enough so we grabbed the obvious one too.
With those in the bag we made a b-line to the Auto Zone. It turned out the A arms were over at a hub on mainland Mexico and would take two days to arrive. That was out. Good to know we could get them if things went really badly and we needed to get home but we weren't ready to give up racing just yet. We checked out gas can options and they were junk,a few were already cracked on the shelf. We found a few random rubber bits that might be useful to bodge a bushing repair. We also tested the limits of my very rusty and pretty basic Spanish and with the help of a patient counter guy tried to come up with some ideas for bushings they would have on hand that might be close to the same size. While went through a few boxes of the obvious choices like leaf spring bushings from pickups Jake hit the parking lot and street to crawl around under anything he could find to see if there was a visual match. A track arm on the rear of a early 2000's Ford Expedition had a great match but wasn't available. We tried a few other things as well before giving up on Auto Zone in favor of Home Depot. On the way over to Home Depot we decided that the best way to keep it from turning into a huge time suck was to turn it into a timed limited scavenger hunt. Here is what we came up with in 10 min.
in addition to that we found three different diameters of commercial grade garden type hose that was sold by the meter and picked up some bits of that as well.
Here is another shot of the left front lower shock mount bushing.
We spent a bit more time than we wanted in La Paz but we felt good that we had found some good supplies to keep us in the race with the failing bushings. Just out side of La Paz there were a couple way points that were just out and back runs from and back to the pavement. This is where stratagy and having multiple guys in the truck who could nav in motion really came into play. At this point in the race we had developed a solid sense of what to expect on the ground based on the satellite imagery and most importantly what pace we could maintain over that terrain. So we crunched some numbers.
To save you some scrolling here are the challenges we were looking at.
The finish was only 5 points and we had already written that off with our time spent looking for parts in La Paz. The thing we needed to make the call about as we were leaving the city was if we could make 605 and do all the other waypoints along the way. 603 and 604 were not inside the two points for 605 but they were only 2 points each were out of our way and we knew we still had a lot of racing left to do if the 6 hour zone was still ahead of us. We decided to go for it. The out and back routes were not clear at all on the various GPS maps so the satellite imagery came into play again. Out side of all the towns and cities there were multiple roads that were used as the local dump. These points were right out through one. We amused ourselves spotting things that we could use to cob the suspension bushings and found a particularly alarming looking dolls head that found it's way into the truck for later prank use. Despite the amount of trash we drove over we managed not to get a puncture.
Shortly after the two out and backs we had the decision point of race the rest of the points for the day off road or take the 1 into camp at Ciudad Constitution. This was an easy call. We had parts and tools and we were still in the points hunt. The race route took us north up the coast of the Gulf of California. The road was paved for longer than we had expected which was a pleasant surprise.
Then we hit a gate, and not your typical farm gate but a huge industrial gate with guards at the entrance to a mine. This was inside the 6 hour waypoint so were were worried we had made a grave navigation error. A large backtrack would have cost us those 20 points. We stopped well short of the gate to assess our options. One of the workers in cover all's and a hard hat came out and waved us forward. We pulled up, rolled down the window and he asked if we were in a race and if we were headed north. We said yes to both. Then he asked for some stickers. Which we had, we brought a bunch to hand out to the kids. We hoped that would get a through the gate. No such luck, it did get us info on which street into the little town a couple km back we needed to go on to get around the mine. So off we went.
The road went literately right up the coast.
The road was maintained by the mine company so it was perfect and we had to watch our speed to keep it under 120 km/hr
We were moving fast enough that we didn't get any great photos along that stretch.
Once we headed west from the coast and up into the mountains we got to the location for 606. Another panoramic team selfie.
The number 6 bronco was there at the same time and couldn't quite tell what to make of us running, trading phone holders and moving the truck while taking the picture.
Up in the mountains we passed a school where the number 6 Bronco had stopped to hand out some stickers, we joined the good will mission for a moment.
At this point our time calculations had us pretty tight for making the 6 hour segment. The steep uphill into the mountains was pretty rough in places and cost us a lot of time.
The sun was setting as we crossed the waypoint starting 607, the average speed challenge.
We were still way up in the mountains and pretty far from any villages which meant the route conditions were unpredictable. In the previous average speed challenges we had been able to bank enough momentum into our average that we would actually stop for a couple minute before the finish waypoint. On this one we had a much tighter margin were able to slow down towards the end and exited with an average of 30.1 km/hr.
At this point we still had two photo waypoints to hit and for one of them they had not provided the location, just the name of the church. We had used the cell signal in La Paz and a bit of GoogleFu to have a pretty solid idea of where we were headed. The time however was getting tight for the 6 hour widow so we didn't have time to hunt if we were wrong.
First one in the bag but the sign was hard to read in the dark and we didn't have time so we just grabbed a bunch of photos so we could work it our later.
We had been right on where to find San Luis Gonzaga, it had been there since the mid 1700's
We grabbed the required selfie, no time for antics on this one
Then we booked it for the ending point for the 6 hour challenge.
We made it with 22 min to spare.
From there we had about 10 more mile of dirt and 10 miles of tarmac into camp. We had long since blown the day's 10 hour finishing time so we stopped for tacos and beer on the way into town.
When we pulled into camp we found the vespa guys had made it and the Gambler 500 kids in the volvo were hard at work trying to fabricate a motor mount.
The handwritten table of roads, conditions and speeds might be a bit hard to decipher if you weren't there. Heck, it's a bit hard for me to reconstruct now but I can still shed a bit of light on it. Basically we were trying to see if it was worth doing the whole offroad loop from La Paz to Ciudád Constitución. If we were just too slow with our compromised suspension, we wouldn't get the 20 points for 605, wouldn't get the finishing points, and might not get the 30 KPH section. If conditions were truly awful in the mountains, we could theoretically have done an in-and-out for 605A and 605B (the first and last points in this section), skipped the mountains completely and just hauled *** on the 1 to get to camp. Here's how the day looked from the nav perspective:
The two points just to the left of La Paz were 603 and 604 that were out past the dump. I estimated ten minutes in and ten minutes back out. It would have been great to find a way straight out from 604 to the 1, but there just wasn't anything we could see. The real math happened right after those points, where the 1 split from the coastal road. The chickenscratch basically says the time estimation to the junction south of CC was:
That indicates 295 minutes of driving time, basically six hours, plus stopped time. The 605 section was that minus the purple, blue and half of the yellow, or 240 minutes plus stopped time (which is not inconsequential). Plus errors in estimating distance or speed, which is DEFINITELY not inconsequential.
And for perspective, the non-points route was 114km of pavement, partly twisty and partly straight. So doing in-and-outs for 605A and 605B would have been ... this is left as an exercise for the reader. *
Obviously we took the points route. We didn't record all of the information we needed to fully audit ourselves, but you can see from the chickenscratch that our actual times weren't that out of line with the projections with the exception of the orange section, where we took 75 minutes instead of 45. The very end of the green started a very steep and rocky climb that took us from sea level to 1200 feet at the photo waypoint, but the projection had allowed enough time for that. The orange leg included our stopped time for the bonus (where we found more overheating, which wasn't a surprise) as well as the rest of the climb to about 1800 feet. After that you can see that our projections were pretty close. Very close, in fact, once you account for stopping. Here is a closer look at the climb, with topo lines.You can see that the last section of green before it turns to the waypoint is brutal.
Here's a re-route that I remember pretty clearly because I was navigating at the time, pretty typical of the on-the-fly decision making that we had to do. It was dark, we were approaching 608, and the planned route deteriorated. We had turned off a more established path onto a less established one that seemed to go where we wanted to go, but it quickly got narrower, rockier and more overgrown. Not good signs and we were tight on time. The map made the planned route look better, but the view through the window didn't agree and I could see another connection, farther along, to 608. "Turn around. There's a better way." "Turn around?" No one likes to turn around; it represents the worst kind of wasted time. Fortunately, reality did not let us down and as we got close to 608 we could see where the original path came in. It did not look good. The thing to remember is that there are other people driving to these places all the time, and they are getting to those places on some path other than an overgrown one. If your track looks unused, there is probably a different one that the locals are using instead. Talking to another competitor that evening, who had stayed on that track, we REALLY made a good call there.
I left a bit more margin on this screenshot because you can see how we built the routes in twisty terrain. The tracks are too small to be routable in software, so we'd manually place the route, zigzagging as best we could, overshooting the apexes to try to account for the errors. Obviously the orange track is our actual route, and the blue is one of the planned sections.
We don't have a picture of it, but once we were on top of the ridge we encountered one of the Crown Vics (yeah, I know) just off the trail with the right front wheel protruding at an alarming angle. The lower ball joint had broken, collapsing the front suspension. The guys were all smiles. "Yeah, it broke a little ways back and we battery-welded the top lip of the socket to try to keep the ball in but it only lasted a few hundred yards. The other guy rode into town with another team to find a new control arm. We're fine." This is on a rocky mountain top trail FAR from anything at all, and it was getting dark. When we finally got to camp, that other guy was there around a campfire: "Yeah, that's kind of funny. I'm the one who broke it, and here I am with a beer while those guys are stuck up there. They're crafty; they'll be fine." And about an hour later, here comes the Crown Vic into camp. They found some scraps of metal and battery-welded them around the top of the socket to do a better job of keeping the ball in, and completed the route. I tell you, THEY are the guys you want with you when stuff goes wrong.
* OK guys, quiz time. Based on what we "knew" after leaving 603 and 604, how would taking the 1 from the split have compared, points-wise and time-wise, to taking the mountain route?
Last edited by AntonLargiader; 03-10-2019 at 12:47 PM.
The three photos above were cross posted from the public facebook group for the BajaXL rally, if they are your photos and you'd rather them not be posted here please let me know and I'll be happy to take them down.
Thanks for posting!
Hopefully ULSD diesel will be available in Mexico soon. Several very interesting events are held throughout the country.
___________________________ https://rennlist.com/forums/cayenne-...meet-otis.html
I was thinking just the other day that it would be super fun to try to run this with you guys and they guy from Oregon with the Cayenne turbo on 37's and a 6 inch lift in 2021. I didn't realize there was a diesel grade issue down there. There is a petrol issue as well we ran 87 octane at least a third of the time during the race and the first year they ran stages were significantly impacted by a complete lack of available fuel regardless of grade. About a decade ago Jake and I went down to help a pit crew for a trophy truck for the Baja 1000. That team took $28,000 in race gas across the border to run the race. A piece of trivia we were privy to because everyone transporting any of it had to carry a copy of the receipt and we were hauling 10 gal just in case the race truck ran out and we happened to be closest to them at the time.
Closer to home and on a MUCH smaller budget, I think I'm gonna run the Golden State Gambler 500 at the end of April in the Baja955 wanna come south for a weekend of ridiculousness?
We were very happy with how day 6 had gone despite having missed the taco party the organizers had hosted at the camp on night 6. We woke before sunrise to see what we could do to address the clunking suspension with the supplies found at Home Depot the day before.
In the hopes of being ready to leave right after race briefing we worked through a cold and dewy sunrise on this:
We ended up deciding that it wasn't bad enough yet to pull them all the way apart and redo them with sections of rubber hose. We packed that gap at the bottom with a strip of hard rubber cut from the pipe junction in the picture since the fork legs at the bottom of the front strut would hold it in. You can also see that the Crown Vic with the broken ball joint came limping in at some point in the night.
Race briefing was at a leisurely 8 am, we were finished with our "repair" and had only a few minutes of packing left to do to be on the road.
Here are the race sheets for the day. I've heavily redacted them so that the (few) avid bored followers of this tale can try to figure our what they would do given the same information.
What we did was decide we wanted to try to sneak into town without tripping the start for a hot breakfast while we planned the day since we were ready at 8 am, it was a 10 hour time limit on the day and the briefing made it sound like it was all doable in 10 hours.
Trying to sneak around the start point was achieved. But not easily. Anton might be able to post a track of our attempts.
After a very rejuvenating breakfast including fresh squeezed orange juice and some time to work out our strategy for the day as well as agreeing on how hard to push the truck in it's current condition we hit the road at a slackerly 10:30. The time off the road was great for moral so it was time well spent.
There was a short run up tarmac to where the route took us back east and into the mountains.
701:
As we were headed up into the mesa's one of the other competitors came back out at us which caused us to go through a lot of what if's about how we would progress forward on the route if the road we were on was impassible. There was no option except a huge detour on tarmac all the way east then back west up into the mountains. If we had to do that there would be no way to finish the day in the 10 hour limit. Given this we decided to press on and not turn back unless we had to.
As we climbed out of the lowlands we came up into a beautiful large canyon and it was obvious why the missionaries had chosen the area.
On the way up the canyon we had an average speed section, which you can see as 706 above. The thing you can's see from how I blocked out the race sheet is that they did not provide coordinates for the start or finish. They simply said from 36th Km to the 60th on the road to the mission. We had been tracking distance from the tarmac up carefully but that turned out to be wasted effort. Once we were about 25 km from nowhere up the dirt road Km markers started to show up. The road was pretty unpredictable from the satellite images, there were sections that were pretty strait and fast but t also crossed the wash a bunch of times which was often very slow going. With this in mind we banked even more speed than before. In doing so we caught up with the organizers who had stopped for another photo and video shoot. They asked us to if we would be filmed again and we agreed since we had so much momentum buffer built up. We stopped mid average speed section while they drove ahead to set up. Once they were set and called us on the CB we blasted bast them at full v8 song with dust flying. We didn't however slow down or stop to see if they wanted more shots, we were still in a race after all.
The mission founded in 1699 was gorgeous:
The points for the mission waypoint required a photo and also that we spend 20 minutes there. I think this was a great way for the organizers to force the race category teams to stop and smell the flowers a bit.
The road that came east out of the mission and back down out of the mountains was paved and lovely to drive. The Cayenne was super fun on the paved sections where we could push the pace a bit without having to worry about breaking the 120 km/hr speed cap. On the way down the hill the way points was a "SAVE" meaning that the information we collected would be needed as a part of the clue to another waypoint during the day. The question was "How many bolts hold the regional information board?"
Take a close look above and you can just see the marks from some lower bolts that had been removed, its very obvious from the back.
The route was scouted and race sheets made months before the race, were all 6 bolts there when they planned the route? Had they been there this morning and removed by an unscrupulous competitor? There had even been mention of this type of cheating being caught in previous events with the stern warning that it would result in disqualification (as it should). We would need this number later so we made note to ourselves that it might be 3 or 6 so we could try both as a part of the clue that come up late.
The route took us through Loreto where we stopped for some taco's to go and then a little bit back up the 1 on the coast before heading back onto dirt tracks. When we passed the wreckage of an old burned out car that was a waypoint with the question "How many driven axels did this car have?" We actually had a bit of a debate about what we should put. It was a front wheel drive car with independent suspension, we considered two but decided they likely weren't being that tricky about it and went with one. That brought us into a shortest distance challenge. The difference in points between winning the shortest distance and simply passing both waypoints was only 5 points so we had decided we would give it a shot but not beat the truck up on burly rocky tracks or waste time there by loosing out on the 5 points to finish the day within the time limit. Just as we were reaching the point where we would need to decide about going back to the tarmac the way we had come we heard a holler from another competitor for help, they were just off the main track. We went over to check out the situation, they were broken down.
03-04-2019, 07:24 PM
