aPhantom.net Carrerra del Golfo al Pacifico
Part Two - The Race
Click any photo to View Photo Gallery
If you have driven a road rally before, then you know it’s not about being there first, going the fastest, or beating everyone else to the finish line. Road rallies are more about finesse and strategy, but most of all they are about not getting lost. The idea is to follow a precise set of driving instructions at a precise speed. There are checkpoints along the way where officials record the exact time you pass. if you pass a checkpoint just a second before or after your correct time, it counts as one point. You win by having the least amount of points at the end which means you have passed the most checkpoints at or near the correct time.
We had only driven in a few rallies before. Most of the routes were a few printed sheets, with the rally lasting two to three hours. The Route Book for the Carrera del Golfo al Pacifico was 118 pages long with twelve to fifteen instructions per page. Each instruction was listed with a graphic drawing of the maneuver and the precise odometer distance in kilometers. If you drove the route and arrived at all of the reference points at the ideal time it would take you nine hours and thirty minutes the first day and seven hours and forty-five minutes the second day. When we received our Route Books the night before the race began, our group retired to the hotel lounge to ponder rules and strategies. Some veteran competitors painstakingly calculated the time for each reference point others marked only the turns or instructions they felt were important. The rest of us rookies just sort of stared at the Book in disbelief. My navigator called for another shot of tequila and retired for the night. We were just hoping we could find our way to lunch and the hotel the following day.
Thirty-seven cars started the race the following morning. We received a list of the cars in the order we were to start. This was also the starting order for each stage of the rally for that day. The first car left the starting line at 8:31am with one car starting every thirty seconds after that. A large crowd had gathered at the hotel to cheer on the competitors as we left the starting arch and headed out of Veracruz. We managed to get through a snarl of road construction just outside of the hotel but missed a major highway turn about five kilometers into the race. Already we were dodging traffic to make up time.
The race was divided into many different “stages”, twenty-five on the first day and twenty-seven on the second day. A stage could be as short as one kilometer or as long as sixty kilometers. There were four types of stages and they all had their own rules.
The most difficult stages were called “regulated stages” and they required you to drive precise speeds for exact distances. You may be required to drive 86kph for one kilometer, 80kph for the next kilometer, 75kph for the next and so on. These were the stages with the most checkpoints and were generally on curvy roads through the countryside with limited opportunities to pass other drivers. If you got behind slow traffic on one of these roads, your rally points would start accumulating at an alarming rate.
Transit stages basically got you from the finish of one stage to the beginning of the next stage. During this time, you might be navigating through a town or village, passing the ubiquitous toll booth or stopping for lunch or fuel. There were no checkpoints during the transit stages so, provided you didn’t get lost, you would have ample time to make any stops and be at the beginning of the next stage at your exact starting time. Some of the stages required mandatory stops at the beginning or end. There was also the “flying kilometer” which required you to accelerate as fast as your vehicle would go for exactly one kilometer. A separate prize was given for the fastest “drag racer” in each class.
We were instructed to start our stopwatch at the precise moment we crossed the starting line and use it to compare our actual elapsed time to the times noted in the Route Book. This is the critical timing element in the rally letting you know if you need to speed up or slow down before the next reference point. About one hour into the rally, on a particularly tight turn, our stopwatch flew off the console, landed under my foot and promptly reset our elapsed time to zero. As all times noted are based on the elapsed time for the day, this was not good news. After some discussion, we decided our only hope was to base our starting times for the remaining stages on our friends who had started two cars ahead of us. They were veteran racers and the navigator had carefully calculated the ideal time for each reference point. Our start time for each stage should be exactly one minute after theirs. We set our GPS to kilometers and used it to track the distance and speed for each stage and reset the analog car clock to twelve o’clock to estimate the elapsed time. It wasn’t anything like having a rally computer but seemed the best we could do under the circumstances. The good news was that we weren’t lost so we still might find our way to lunch.
Our lunch stop was a small town called Tehuacan. It seemed the whole town had turned out to fill the central park with their own hot cars and to mix and mingle with the rally cars and drivers. There was music and dancing and another fiesta had begun. We enjoyed our box lunch in the shady park with a few extra minutes to recuperate. Another cheering sendoff and we were on our way again. We had six more hours of driving to reach our goal for the day.
The rally route included some of the more interesting challenges of driving in Mexico. One of the particularly twisty mountain roads was also a well used truck route. To allow the large double trailers coming downhill enough room to make the tight turns all traffic going uphill was routed to the opposite side of the road through the turns.
This was done with large white arrows painted on the road surface to let you know exactly when you should be in the “wrong” lane. The lane changes were, of course, on blind turns so your only hope of not meeting a very large truck in your lane was that the truck driver understood the lane change instructions as well. There are also very few stop signs anywhere in Mexico. Someone quipped that Mexican drivers would ignore them anyway. Instead, anywhere that you should stop or slow down, there are topes (pronounced tow-PAYS). Topes are speed bumps running across the entire road and are not like the ones we are used to in parking lots. Sometimes they are marked with a small sign on the side of the road or maybe just some faded white paint on the road surface. Many of them are large enough to rip the entire exhaust system off of a small sports car that attempts to cross at any speed faster than dead stop. Most of the towns and villages had at least three topes with their locations noted in the Route Book and their sizes classified with one, two, or three exclamation points. It was important to keep an exact count of how many topes you had crossed, but you also had to be aware that there might be an extra tope that was missed when laying out the route. An unexpected three exclamation point tope was a force to be reckoned with.
Our destination for the first day was Cuernavaca, a lovely mountain city just forty-five miles from Mexico City. The arrival of the rally cars sparked another fiesta with impressive costumes, music, and dancing. Our hotel for the night was the Sumiya Camino Real, originally an extravagant mansion built by Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworth fortune. It was designed and built by Japanese architects and artists, giving it a sense of peace and tranquility. It was said that Barbara chose this location because of its perfect climate. Taking advantage of that perfect weather, dinner was served on the lawn. The entertainment included a serenade by a velvet clad native singer, and a fashion show with rock music and beautiful women. We ended the evening with a nightcap in the small bar, fountains splashing merrily around us.
The next morning, the first car started at 10:01am from the hotel parking lot. We carefully placed our stopwatch in the side pocket to prevent another disastrous reset. Now that we knew the importance of a backup timer, I also started the digital timer on my iphone as we crossed the start line. The author of the axiom “timing is everything” must have been a rally competitor.
Our route took us past more beautiful scenery and more small towns. Some of the villages had cancelled school for the day, adults and children waving from the roadside as the rally cars passed. We were settling into our routine and actually passed some of the markers at our ideal time. About mid morning we ran into a major traffic snarl as a large truck had slid off the side of a two lane road which necessitated the closing of the entire road to extricate the tractor from the incline. This made rally drivers even more aggressive, crossing the double yellow lines and slipping back into the snarled traffic. Once again we were dodging traffic to make up lost time.
Our lunch stop was at a resort called “Vida en el Lago”. My Spanish Dictionary translated it as “life at the lake”. In fact, it was a large development around a lovely lake near the town of Iguala. After entering the gated resort, we followed the freshly paved roads through a series of roundabouts, each with a fountain and large stone sculptures in the center. Each fountain had a water theme, dolphins, turtles, frogs, and so on. There were only a couple of completed houses in the whole development but the beautiful country club on the lake provided us with another sumptuous buffet.
Our route for the afternoon seemed to contain the most “regulated” stages that we had experienced so far. According to our still ticking timer, we actually passed some of the reference points at exactly the right time. Traffic began to increase late in the afternoon as we approached Acapulco. Tourists, buses, and an amazing number of old Volkswagen bug taxis all fought for space on the crowded highway. A few of the rally drivers were trying to stay together to keep from making a disastrous wrong turn in the traffic. If you allowed just a few inches between you and the car in front of you, several local cars or buses would manage to immediately squeeze in between you and your fellow rally driver, leaving you wondering how your fenders survived. Mexican drivers are masters of the forced merge.
The finish line was at the central park along Acapulco’s “Gold Coast”. As we came through the finish line arch the crowd cheered, shouted, and waved. Our official time was recorded and we were handed cold Coronas in celebration. We had actually made it! The celebrations continued and finally moved to the Hotel El Cano, our home on the beach in Acapulco for the next two days. Our gracious Mexican hosts once again invited our group to dinner at a beautiful restaurant overlooking the bay. We commandeered a line of the small taxis for the ride to the restaurant as driving anywhere without our Route Book seemed impossible.
We spent the next day recuperating on the beach, drinking pina coladas and other drinks with umbrellas that were delivered right to our beach chairs. The awards banquet that evening was another delightful buffet with more entertainment. Finally, the awards ceremony began. Our American group took few awards, outdone by the veteran Mexican drivers, well-prepared rally cars, and rally computers. At least we weren’t dead last. (There wasn’t a prize for that either.) But we were hard pressed to think of an event where we had had a better time. As one of our new friends said, “This is a once in a lifetime experience that you can have every year.” We’re thinking we just might go again next year.
View Photo Gallery