Our border crossing was really smooth, the hardest part was finding enough pens to fill out the Tourista Passes which are necessary to travel to Baja California Sur. On the ride down I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with the GPS we had installed in the Hyundai. I also figured out how to properly load the files we needed so I knew we could fix the other ones down the road if need be.
Once we pulled into Ensenada it was race central, the town was bustling with tourists, locals, racers, and crews. Normal vehicle traffic was mixed with chase vehicles and trailers, racecars, and then of course dirt bikes and pit vehicles. We found a place where we could park all of the vehicles left a gear guard, and then off loaded the racecar and got it in line to get it through contingency and tech because the line was long and tech was scheduled to close at 5:30 pm.
The contingency area was a blend of car show, street fair, and party. As soon as the racecar was in line I took off to take it all in. The racecars were all swarmed with people collecting STEEKERS (race teams bring hundreds of stickers, often of their primary sponsor, and pass them out wherever they go.) The few teams that passed out posters and or t-shirts literally had people climbing all over them, and their racecars. While checking out the crowd I also looked around at the vendors’ t-shirts, and picked up a 40th Anniversary shirt with Big Oly on it for my girlfriend but the optimist in me decided to wait until Cabo to get some for myself.
While I was out and about in the crowd, Brie suddenly remembered that we had to register with SCORE as co-drivers and get our wristbands. We rushed back to the racecar and found Pete Raffo, Chris’ son. Pete took us up to the SCORE reception desk and the woman there gave us a hard time about coming through piecemeal, apparently Jeff came through the night before, after she had closed shop for the day. Pete and I were able to diffuse the situation, this was all solved with a smile and quick swipe of the credit card, I was not going to let a small misunderstanding get in the way.
After several hours of wandering the crowd and getting registered with SCORE, the racecar had not moved all that far and still had a ways to go to get to tech. Luckily there was plenty of great food and cervesa available so no one succumbed to malnutrition or dehydration. One local man even provided a little entertainment as he tried to maneuver his car (some rather large malaise era chunk of Detroit iron) past the racecars in the contingency line and through all of the spectators, he damaged at least one vendor’s trailer and the hood of his car in the process.
While in contingency row John Holtz took his GPS to the PCI Race Radios booth and they set him up with everything, (back in San Diego I erased all other files on his GPS to ensure everyone was operating off of the same thing, this was before I knew what I was doing.) Chris took the one from the race car to PCI Radios and had them set up his as well.
Once through the contingency portion the line weaved through a large field between two stages with live music. Then before we realized it we were at the gate to go into tech inspection and they only allowed two people to enter tech with the racecar. Brie was driving it and John Holtz went along, but no one could find either of the Raffos.
After a long wait on the far side of tech, we found out that the roll cage inspection had expired and had to be conducted on site. Brie took care of that, and also noticed that even though the vehicle had been inspected no one had signed off on it. The cage and the rest of the vehicle passed tech, but we had to wait to get the race transponder mounted to the vehicle.
In previous years the highway portions of the racecourse were like any other portion of the course, open competition. This was hazardous though because of all the regular traffic which includes heavy over the road trucking, and the chase traffic. This year all highway portions were limited to 55mph, and this would be tracked with vehicle mounted transponders, and vehicles that exceed the speed limit on highway portions would be penalized. The old mount was on a piece of Plexiglas that had been replaced on Sunday and was probably on the floor of the shop in San Diego.
So 45 minutes and $5.00 later Roberto drilled a few holes in the roof of the truck, mounted the transponder, and we were good to go. At this point everyone else had gone to get dinner; Brie and I, the two folks Chris met over the internet, were in downtown Ensenada with his racecar. The amazing thing about Mexico is that the racecars just cruise all over on the city streets. So Brie fired up the Blazer, I guided her through the parked cars and the crowd and then jumped in to work the horn for the ride back to the trailer. Neither of us had ever been to Ensenada but we had a good idea where we were going even though we got directed down a different street than the one we had come in on.
Once we got back to where the vehicles were parked we joined a few others for dinner. After a taco or two and a cervesa or two, or three we came back out to find only the Holtz’s Jeep. The sun had been down for over an hour now and the temperature was dropping, but everyone’s bags were in the other two vehicles. Dennis Chencharick (the third driver and the engine builder) came back a short while later with the dually and the trailer so we were able to load up the racecar and huddle around the engine compartment for heat, but we were still waiting for the Raffos to get back from the drivers meeting. Because of some miscommunication the Raffos went straight back to the hotel. That meant we needed to load up every one in the dually. There were five of us in the cab, two in the bed, and two in the racecar on the trailer. I jumped in the racecar not realizing that the dually would spray the puddles from the previous day’s rain, directly into the cab of the racecar. That was some funky mcnasty water for sure, but I have endured worse and it was only a 15-20 minute ride.
As we pulled into the Estero Beach Resort, it was clear that they catered to the race crowd. There were two or three helicopters that had landed on the beach just outside of the hotel and a small test track with jumps for vehicle shake down. After we registered all of the vehicles with the hotel, we parked the vehicles next to Robby Gordon’s, and got one more night’s sleep in a bed.