BajaNews - 2-19-2006 at 12:05 AM
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FM...
By Mike Mulhern
MATOMI WASH, Baja, Calif. - Somewhere deep in this most gorgeous canyon run of the Baja, a couple of central-casting characters from Mad Max are
eating steel-can Beanie-Weenies next to their now-silent runner, stuck off in the maddening sands.
"Need some help?" Robby Gordon asks, pulling alongside.
It's just the "pre-run," several relatively leisurely days of GPS course-mapping, not the 1,000 itself, so Gordon is mellow and obliging, and ignores
the whispers of "Dueling Banjos."
"Outta gas."
Ooh, one of the cardinal sins... one of the few, really, in this outlaw race, where there is no cheating because there are no rules, and where the
easiest way to pass is simply to knock a guy out of the way, down the hill if necessary. The horn is a bump, and there is no second chance. Move over
or fly.
It's nearly 3 in the afternoon, 75 miles still to go today before steak and cerveza at Mike's Sky Ranch, that legendary watering hole halfway between
Ensenada and everywhere else in the Baja.
Knowing Gordon is coming up in your Baja dust is akin to seeing Dale Earnhardt in your rear-view mirror: Something's gonna happen, so get a grip,
because it probably won't be nice.
Gordon, a three-time winner on NASCAR's Cup tour while driving for Winston-Salem's Richard Childress, is now an owner-driver in NASCAR and starts in
Row 10 in today's Daytona 500.
Much like Junior Johnson in his early NASCAR days was known for blazing speed and a devil-may-care attitude, Gordon is known throughout the Baja for
amazing car control at ferocious speeds as he careens wildly down rugged mountainsides and slaloms violently through impossibly silky sands. Jeff
Gordon may relax on his yacht, Tony Stewart in his dirt car, Rusty Wallace in his airplanes, Kyle Petty on his motorcycle, Dale Earnhardt Jr. with his
posse. For Robby Gordon it's this - crazy off-road racing in the barren solitude of a vast desert wilderness.
This is the King Kong of the Baja, a heavy-metal rocker, today in a shark-nosed 2,400-pound Star Wars Land Rover with three-foot-tall shocks and a
"modest" Corvette Z-engine in the rear.
"Hey, Gordon, I was hoping to catch up with you out here," Max One said. "Nice job at Loudon...."
Gordon laughs, rolls his eyes and grimaces. Even here deep in the heart of the Baja, it's impossible to escape the shadows of NASCAR.
Bob Gordon, Gordon's dad and alter ego, pulls up in his own hand-built pre-runner. Max Two squints at him: "Hey, aren't you the guys who borrowed my
Allen wrench set out here two years ago... and kept it?"
Uh-oh.
But the spirit of the Baja quickly returns, in exchange for a siphon.
And Robby Gordon is quickly back at it. He's surfing this powdery sand wash with 500 horsepower and marking the Lowrance 6000 GPS map with shortcuts
he might use for passing. There are a heck of a lot of skull-and-crossbones, for when the 1,000 kicks off and he's at the custom-Mamo wheel of his
real-time 815-horsepower Trophy Truck.
Taking a break
It's three days of playful antics south of the border, a break from his sometimes frustrating NASCAR grind. So when Gordon spots a giant sand dune, he
decides to romp. Halfway up the soft, fluffy dune, the runner runs out of steam, and slowly rolls backward into an untimely tree, whose limbs ensnare
it.
Gordon crawls out to ponder his dilemma. "We've got to cut down those limbs," he said, somewhat dubiously.
Suddenly the Mad Maxes roar around the bend: "Hey, need our help now?"
They laugh as they lumber up the dune to rip the limbs apart. They push the rover into the clear, and Gordon is a free bird again.
This is a world of sorcery, a world of some higher consciousness, pure energy. And perhaps Gordon is a shaman, a shape shifter.
"Buenas noches," the ghostly Federale said, flashlight in hand, M-16 muzzle down, as he peered into the window of the truck.
Noches indeed, a deep, dark, spooky noches, under a veiled crescent moon that lords over a misty psychedelic landscape that requires no peyote to
understand Carlos Castaneda's surreally eerie visions. This is a separate reality. Dorothy, we aren't in Charlotte any more.
Two other military wraiths stand near a small pit fire against the desert chill as he cursorily checks out Chase Two, Gordon's highly modified one-ton
Chevy pickup and its cargo, a lighter-weight pickup, TG3. Military checkpoints are everywhere in the country, but here tonight, maybe five hours deep
into the Mexican Baja, this one seems particularly ominous.
"Red Bull?" the Federale asks, with a nod to the sponsor logos on the doors. "Decals?"
Kyle Robbins, Gordon's wheelman, smiles, hands him two, and is waved on down the deserted highway.
The El General, an open-front taco stand two hours down the road, was close to shutting down when Gordon finally showed up around midnight, coming out
of the shadows, for more of "the best tacos in San Felipe."
"Welcome to Baja!" Gordon said, as gleeful as a 10-year-old on Christmas afternoon. The last weekend's NASCAR disappointments vanish like
will-o-the-wisps. "Two hours from San Diego, four hours over from Ensenada, yeah, that's about right," Gordon said, glancing at his watch.
It is dark and very desert-cold by the time the modest sign appears on the side of the road: Mike's Sky Ranch, with a big arrow pointing off into the
gloomy night.
The road to Mike's is one of the most famous stretches of every Baja race. In part because Mike's is the only place within miles to bunk down, in part
because the 6,000-foot uphill run to the classic hacienda-hotel features about 50 razor-sharp blind-hill corners, framed on one side by brutally
impenetrable rock walls and on the other by a deep, dark abyss. It's a philosophical statement about the Zen of all this.
Bob Gordon - is that a wicked grin on his face? It's hard to tell in the darkness - makes the black-night run up in a brisk, rock-spinning 25 minutes
of sheer terror... including a stunning bit of brakesmanship to avoid three very large cows that wander out into the middle of the trail on the blind
side of turn. Fortunately the four high-intensity Xenons on the roof picked them up in just a nick of time.
But as bright as the Xenons are, they only serve to emphasize the vast darkness over the edge of the trail and the Twilight Zone beyond.
Mike's Sky Ranch is in an ancient caldera, surrounded by steep canyon walls of the Arroyo San Rafael, at the end of an incredible 25 miles of bad dirt
road and several water crossings. The Pichacho del Diablo - Peak of the Devil, hangs over the horizon.
Mike's is famous among the off-road crowd. It has only 27 plain rooms, surrounding a pool, and a classic Spanish dining room with regal high-backed
chairs... and an infamous bar. The generator is turned off promptly at 10 p.m., plunging all into darkness, save for the flickering flames from the
oil drops in each room's oil-can heater, circa 1962.
"Yeah, it's like Pikes Peak," Bob Gordon said of the heart-stopping sprint. "But the dropoff is a little more daunting."
He's been doing this stretch for 30 years now, and his confidence is invigorating, if frightening.
"Now in the race we'll all be running this stretch about twice as fast," Bob Gordon said later, in Mike's big dining room over a couple of Pacificas.
It's definitely a multi-cerveza kind of day.
Hard to get a seat
It is a rare honor to get a seat in a pre-runner with the Gordons, and it takes more than a bit of courage to accept. So they were both determined to
provide as many thrills they possibly could. "Oh, now, I was on good behavior, most of the time," Gordon said with a grin. "How did Bob treat you?"
Gordon, Bob said, has made a career of being the underdog, determined to show that whatever the venue, whatever the challenge, he can go it alone and
beat the big guys. "Toyota in 1998 came into the Baja with a ton of money, set up pits every 25 miles. We had only four guys. And we came within eight
minute of beating them. And we would have beaten them if we hadn't had a steering problem the last 100 miles."
For Gordon, it isn't enough to win, it is to win against the odds, that's the challenge.
A cool streaked-pink sunrise over the Bay of Cortez quickly develops into a searing light. There's nothing like a breakfast of tender cactus with hot
red sauce, or a shrimp-and-octopus omelet in smoked oyster sauce, or stingray machaca to give a picture of the surreal. This is not Darlington or
Daytona.
Bob Gordon is having a leisurely breakfast on the veranda on the San Felipe beach at El Cortez, a modest Aztec-flavored resort on the bay, a four-hour
mountainous hike over from Ensenada, that famous Pacific coast town that long ago sprawled from quaint to urban. Gordon is sleeping in.
It is the morning of the second day of a three-day pre-run for the Gordons, in anticipation of another Baja 1,000, the family's 30th.
Late in the day's run, the right-rear shock begins spitting oil, too. Bob wraps it in red rags to keep the oil, spraying wildly into the dusty
c-ckpit, from burning anyone.
These race shocks are big, 150 pounds, three feet tall, five inches in diameter. The Gordons specialize in designing these things, a reason for
embarrassment when two shocks break during the 1,000 while Gordon is charging up through the field.
Tires, too, are also key part of this deal, and the corporate battle has been B.F. Goodrich's for a while.
This is Gordon's Baja.
TMW - 2-19-2006 at 11:50 AM
Overall a good read. It's funny how reporters and announcers will play things bigger than they are. I guess it adds to the myth and legend of people
and places. Being a North Carolina reporter he's probably never been to Baja let alone an off road race. The road into Mikes is usually a pretty good
run that smaller motorhomes can make and Mikes is 4000 ft, not 6000. I remember the ABC telecast of the 1987 Baja 1000 with their grapic showing the
summit being 8000ft when it's less than 4200ft. As for Robby knocking slower racers out of the way, he doesn't do anything different than the other
racers do. Everyone gives a love tap before the punch. I've had Robby come up on me when I raced MCs and I thought he was as clean, careful and in
control as they get.
thebajarunner - 2-20-2006 at 01:10 PM
Robby tried to knock down the Daytona wall yesterday and still finished 13th!!
As one of his constant critics, may I take my hat off to his fine effort, especially with all the banging and ugly stuff going on out there.
(maybe this will convince him to concentrate more on the task at hand, and less on the "fun stuff")