Slow Baja - Luck Beats Good More Baja Tales With Pete Springer

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

81-year-old Pete Springer has been a frequent visitor to Baja for over 60 years. He watched the 1969 Baja 1000 and raced a home built-single-seat buggy in 1970. He continued building and running his designs until 1973 when he teamed up with Four Wheeler Magazine Editor Bill Sanders in a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40. The duo won Class 3 in the stout Toyota that Springer had built in one month with a scant budget of $300. "Luck beats good!" has been his mantra ever since. In today's show, he shares some of the stories that illustrate his unique philosophy. I am indebted to Pete Springer as he was one of the two podcasts I recorded on my first day of podcasting in 2020. I love his stories and hope we get to talk again soon. To hear the first show, click here. Check out Pete Springer's writings here. Follow Pete Springer on Facebook

Ola, slow Baja listeners, thanks for tuning in this week. I'm just back, as you may know, from a couple weeks in Baja, which delayed my last show a bit, but I'm back at it and got some great shows lined up here. My expression of gratitude this week goes to my amigo Hayden Roberts. Maybe you've listened to the podcast with him. It's one of my favorites. Anyways, Hayden runs Hello Engine. He restores 1960s British motorcycles.

and Hayden brought three amigos down on 60s triumphs for a test run of what I'm calling my Slow Baja Vintage Expedition. We covered a lot of dirt. It was pretty cold. There was some water. We shared a lot of laughs. And we only had a bit too much tequila fortaleza. Spent the first night at the beautiful, glorious horsepower ranch outside of Ensenada. And it might have been a lot of fun if we had just spent the entire three days.

there, but we pressed on, headed down the coast, and spent a night in Santo Tomas, and then we spent the last night. More gratitude here to Hector Sarabia and his brother Juan Carlos, better known as J.C. Sarabia, for putting us up on Hector's La Granha Esperanza Ranch in Ojos Negros. Hector's been racing Baja for over 40 years, and he won last year's Baja 1000 in class 11. His father was the first promoter of dirt bike racing in Baja way, way back when, and JC brought over some beautiful old black and white photographs of some of those early races, and they were on bikes just like Hayden and the boys were riding. So lucky GT and Jorma had a good, long look at those picks, seeing what life was like down in Baja 50 years ago

in the racing scene 60 years ago in the racing scene. Well, I want to say, you know, I've been itching to get into a class 11 and Hector accommodated. He had his race bug there. And while Hayden and the boys were settling into Cold Servasa and some homemade guacamole, we put on our helmets and Hector took me for a lap on his sort of home test track. And it was amazing. I tried to shoot a little video, but, you know, eventually I just had to put the full. phone down and hang on with both hands. It was hair raising, eye-opening, and a hell of a lot of fun,

and I hope that I have a chance to jump in for a stage on a future race. J.C. Juan Carlos did show me a video of when he got out of his section of the 1,000 as a navigator. He literally kissed the ground. He was that happy to be out of the car. So, you know, I don't know what I'm getting myself into, but I can't wait to do it. Today's show is with my old amigo Pete Springer. Pete and I met a couple years ago when I started this podcasting thing. He was part of the two podcasts I recorded on the first day ever of podcasting. Sarah Beck, a mom's guide to traveling Baja and Pete Springer. Pete ended up getting to air first.

And he won the 1973, his class of the 1973, Baja 1,000 in a FJ 40, just like mine. he had a month and 300 bucks to build the thing and they won their class and Pete's just got a lot of great stories he started traveling to Baja in 1960 or so um he's got great recall he's got self-deprecating sense of humor and I just love hearing his stories uh listen closely and you'll hear him talk about a turn egg omelet yeah that's right they used to just go take steal turn eggs from an island and make omelets for the gringo. So yeah, that's first I'd ever heard of it, a turn egg omelet. But Pete's got good stories and he talks about it and I'm glad I got to record it and it's good to see him 81 years old doing great. Hope to get more stories out of

the old timers while they're still around. So enjoy the show. I'll be back with something fun next week and here we go. Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Hey, I want to tell you about your new must-have accessory for your next Baja trip. Benchmark Maps has released a beautiful, beautiful Baja California Road and Recreation Atlas.

It's a 72-page, large format book of detailed maps and recreation guides that makes the perfect planning tool for exploring Baja. Pick yours up at Benchmarkmaps.com. Just talk to me a little bit, Pete. Well, you know, this performing on cue is kind of tough to do. In fact, I've been quite nervous about this podcast because I told you all my good stories. Oh, man. I'm sure there are more.

Well, hopefully you can make up a few. And I thought maybe I'd tell you about finding that guy with his wheel off on one of the, Baja races that I was spectating. It was down there a little bit south or north, I think, of Coyote Cals near Arrondara, about that's 65 miles or so south of Ensenada. All right. Well, before we get into that, let's just say hello. You sound great. It's damn nice to see you. It's slow Baja. It's the first week of January 2020. Happy New Year, everybody and I have finally circled back to see my old friend and my first podcast, Pete Springer. Winner of his class, in case David Kier is listening, winner of his class in the 1973 Baja 1000,

a damn nice fellow, a fabricator, builder, Baja lover, and Pete, it's such a delight to be sitting here at your house in Oceanside. We're sitting outside. COVID hasn't killed either one of us yet, And it's just darn nice to see you. So say hello. It's a beautiful day to sit here, isn't it, Mike? It is. It is a beautiful day here. And it's good to see you again.

So you're 80, 81 now? 81. I talked to you, I think, when you were 79. Yeah. You don't look a day past that for sure. Yeah, time travels. We just didn't know any better when I was starting this podcast deal and I came down to see you. we sat in my forerunner.

I think I sat in the front seat and you sat in the backseat so we'd have a little space between us. Yeah, yeah, that was... The windows up so we'd get good sound. We met at a bar, but it was too noisy in the bar to have a podcast, so we went out. And this turned out to be a good thing, what you're doing with all the podcasts of personalities of Baja.

Well, I'm trying to save some of the stories from some of the adventurous folk like yourself who went and did fun things. And you're, you know, I don't know if you thought you were doing the moonshot in those days, but I kind of think of it as the same thing. You just hot-rodded stuff and tried it out and some stuff worked and some stuff didn't. One of the things about getting in on the ground floor of Baja racing was that there was no performance. suspensions that were already figured out. Every car had a different problem. And you didn't go to a hot rod house and there were 15 different solutions for the problem. Your problem was going to be solved in your shop. And you know, I was of the idea that lighter is better.

And I went with a single seat, doom buggy, but never in my wildest dreams that I think a 5,000-pound trophy truck would end up being the fastest thing in the off-road. You know, I just saw the 1000, the Baja 1000 in November, and I was close enough to a trophy truck who took an inside lane when we thought it was going to take a different lane and it turned out to be the winning the winning truck Rob McCackering and Pete I could have reached out and touched that thing and it was doing 100 miles an hour and it's absolutely hair-raising I liken it to when the blue angels fly over and you feel that when you viscerally feel that amount of mass and

speed going by and noise and noise and skill i mean that that driver put that truck six inches off of a tripod leg of the videographer that was standing in front of me can you imagine being on those motorcycles that are getting passed by those guys in the same two ruts and you can't get off the road when you're motorcycle because you're in a rut Sponsored by Pampers. And he can only get, and he's wide. Oh, my God. Well, we've jumped right into it.

I got caught one time with my street bike down there on the trail that goes from Highway 1 up to via Trinidad. And it was on a high section of one-lane road where it was built up about three feet, off the surround, and that was only wide enough for one vehicle. And I'm up here on this thing as far to the right as I can be. I can't put my right foot down because it's off the bank. So I'm just about, I can't lean to the left because that takes too much room. And here's coming a trophy truck. pre-runner, roaring from behind, and I hear him coming.

And how he missed me, I don't know. But it was a minute of horror in my life. And, you know, that's what Baja is. A minute of horror to minute of horror. So, you know, we're just going to have a rambling conversation, Pete. And I'm just, again, I'm going to say it. And I'm delighted to be here. So folks, if you're not up for a rambling reminiscences where Pete reaches back 60 years of Baja travel.

But I was just in the Nora 500 driving in my 1971 land cruiser, Slow Baja, in the new Slow Baja Safari class. And we somehow got kind of mixed up with a, I don't know, mismatch, mish mash of race vehicles. So you say, hey, it's Nora that, you know, they're not racing. They're racing. They're really racing. And when you're on one of these one lane roads, dirt roads, looking, you know, 100 yards ahead, 200 yards ahead, 300 yards ahead for a little place that you can pull out because you can hear the thing coming. You can't see it, but you can see maybe a dust trail over the mountain or this. And you hear this, you know, engine at full roar coming to you.

Yeah, two miles away. And you know that they're going to be around that turn and on your. ass and you're going to be a huge surprise to them and so it was hair raising and and ted my navigator said to me dude you hear that truck do you hear that truck i'm like i think you're playing with me because i'm looking in my rearview mirror i don't see a thing and he said do you hear it so i shut my engine off to like just get to the silence and we heard it then you're starting thing up you know it's kind of dumb to start to shut the engine off but we wanted the silence to hear And then, you know, we're literally flooring it and kind of launching off the side of the road into some rubble just to make a spot where this, it turned out to be a class 10 just to get by us, you know.

But that was a, and he was hard charging, you know, and didn't expect to see me for sure. Yeah, that's, yeah, when you go down to watch a Baja race or anything, or you're in the Baja race or you're pre-running the Baja race, it is a hazard. It is a big hazard possibility. So let's refresh a little bit here. Obviously, you're aware you're relocated from Ohio as a kid. You were living in Southern California. You spent some time in the service, and you're working for your dad's shop, working on cars, and you're doing some welding and fabrication.

67, the first race comes up. You, I think, went to the 68 race, am I right? 69, to watch. spectate. Yeah. Yeah, I went down to San Aniz at, uh, always have trouble with Catavina. Catavina. Beautiful space. Beautiful place. Yeah. Catavina was almost a nothing place. And the, the big deal down there was, uh, Josefina de Suneinga's Rancho San Aniz. I mean, that's where everybody went. They had gas. And they had an airport, but Catavina didn't have anything.

So do you recall what you drove down in those days? Yeah, it was a 66 Chevy pickup truck, two-wheel drive, and I'd widen the wheels because I was getting into widening rims and making roll bars. So I'd widened four, eight-hole split rims of the day. Those were the heavy duty truck rims. Well, those all required intertubes because they were two-piece rims. And then you get into Baja and because of the dune buggy experience, it rides so much better with light air pressure.

But tubes won't last with light air pressure. You'll just work holes in them. You don't, you know, they just... Yeah, so what's... They wrinkle, wrinkle, wrinkle, wrinkle in pretty soon there's a hole. What you're saying to translate light air pressure, your air, you're air, you don't... down. Yeah. So you're running a low pressure. 20 pounds, 15 pounds?

15 probably. Yeah, 15. So the truck was light. Yeah. And the tires were big. And So you've got a chance then you're going to burst a tube. Yeah, I didn't know that. There's so much to know. Yeah. And so the first flat was

just a flat that was just a flat tire that I took apart and patched the tube and put it back together. But within 10 or 15 miles, I had another flat. It was like they had lasted the 50 or 60 miles, and now we were going to start having flats.

I mean, there were probably 100 places that were beginning to be a flat in that inner tube. And finally, we did, or somebody told us that you just have to remember. more air pressure. You can't run tubes with low air pressure and something that's heavy. You could in a dune buggy, but your dune buggy only went 15, 20

miles on a weekend, you know? So, you know, we were doing, well, from Ensenada to, that's 250 miles to Rancho San Antonio. And how much of that had some pavement or passable dirt? There was 80, it was 80 miles south of Ensenada that had

paved. So the rest of it was dirt and so we had flats all weekend. That was also the race where a couple of guys came in driving a wampas kitty, which is just a VW buggy. And they came in in a Jeep station wagon with some Mexicans. Their car had lost its steering. box somewhere between El Rosario and Rancho Sanei and Niz, and they didn't know just where,

you know, it was two hours ago or three hours ago, depending on how much, anyway, but they didn't know how many miles that was. And so I offered to go pick up their race car for them in my pickup. We'd put it in the back of the pickup. So we had to, so we had to, ended up my wife and I, and we took the two guys with us, or at least we took one. Maybe we had all four of us in the front seat to go out and we looked for this pickup truck, or this Wampus Kitty, and we never did find it that night. I'd filled up with gas at San Anise, and we drove half a tank of gas out in my pickup truck. I'd never found the his car and as far as I know it was the first

doom buggy that was ever stolen in Mexico but that's uh that's not unheard of at all if you abandon a race car down there and the Mexicans come along they you know one out of a hundred will probably get stolen well I just did a podcast on that with the Baja 500 a guy you know first time racing built a built a class 11 in his garage COVID project brought it out from Florida and his first time in Baja, you know, lifelong dream. Mike, I hope you're listening. And the race team's idiot racing.

And I just love it. But, you know, they had a lot of problems. And the last problem, you know, basically his team let him down and left him. And he had to figure out how to get the car and, you know, didn't leave the guy in the car and go back with to get the truck, the this, the that, what have you. They came back for the, they came back for their class 11 and it was gone. Yeah. And the amazing part of the story was how the community of folks rallied to find that car and get to get him reunited with his baby.

And the funny, not funny. The Mexican community. The Mexican community. Rallied. And, you know, they did find the car and just a couple of inexpensive things had been stolen off of it. You know, some harbor freight lights or something, nothing of substance. Uh-huh. But he got it back.

And his take on it first-timer, you know, like it's the one bad apple, but the barrel. Got spoiled. The truckload of great apples that came along to help him out was the amazing part of it. So we're bouncing around. We're going to bounce around. Bear with us, folks. Pete, you're onto that first trip. You can't find the guy's buggy.

but you say to yourself, I think I can do this. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've been to Baja before I said to myself. You'd travel there with your dad? I'd travel with my dad, and we'd been down to L.A. Bay, and that's as far as we'd gone, and only one trip. And although some lesser trips, but it's kind of I felt comfortable in Baja. And I thought, well, this will be easy.

This will be easy. Build your own car and race it. Yeah. And I mean, the trucks that I had been to Baja in were in my dad's 1940 one-ton dodge. That's 1940, folks, four-zero. With what was the problem, Pete? In 1960. And it had a coil that would be faulty if it really needed all the power.

It would just fall on his face. Well, we got down and we got back, but the real point is, even in my 66 Chevrolet pickup truck, 10 miles an hour was a good average on those kind of roads. And now here I'm thinking that I'm going to build a race car. Although I had some dune buggy experience, so I knew a little about driving on dirt roads. But I didn't come from a mechanical family or, you know, the racing was not in any part of my upbringing.

You know, no motorcycle racing, no. So, you know, if you come out of that racing environment, you have such a much better idea. I mean, I didn't even know how to keep a nut or bolt tight. You know, you'd tighten them up. Maybe you missed a few. And all that was possible in my first several years of racing. You did to actually go, because you don't drive your race cars around very much. There's no, it's too hard on them to test them.

So, you know, if you test it for 10 miles somewhere, you've made a pretty good test. Yeah, I like this. Yeah, yeah, I like this. But, you know, you really haven't. tested any longevity of any of your ideas. And I would guess at the level that you're building as you're learning as you go. Absolutely. I'm learning how to weld as I go. So you're learning as you go on every aspect, but you're also working full time.

And you're building this thing after hours, weekends, what have you. So I would imagine that there was very, very little spare time, you know, to test. and try this or try that or figure this, you know, between budget. Testing was 100 miles away out to the desert. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, we didn't test very much. The car probably wasn't even running, you know, until two weeks before the race. So, and then maybe you had a weekend that you needed to go and pre-run.

Well, you got something else ready to go pre-run. You didn't pre-run in the race car. And, you know, you might have a weekend you could get out to Ocatea Wells and try some things. But, you know, you were running out of money. You didn't have money even for gas to get out to those places. You know, if we had $100 in that pocket when we went to Baja to do the race in the early days, gasoline was covered by the race organization. for the race car.

But, I mean, we were really stretching things to even make it to the starting line. You said, I think, in our last conversation, you were sleeping in the back of your truck. Oh, yeah. In town. There was no hotel in the budget. You said it, and I still laugh. We were low-budget people. We were low-budget people, making $2.50 an hour.

And as you say, you weren't worth much more than that. anyways and I wasn't worth anymore well set the scene to take me to that first race 1969 you went as a spectator right 1970 you're you're a racer now so probably two months after that race we started building a race car this we're building our first my first steel tubing race friends I had raced a Corvair tunnel buggy once before and found out that wasn't strong enough. A tunnel can't race off-road. So that gave me an idea that I really needed a substantial tubing frame with a roll cage,

upper and lower bars and ladder stiffeners. You know, I'd seen that from other buggies that you can see. So I started the build. of the build. And I had a partner in the beginning, but in a month or so, he decided that, no, that was a bad idea. He bailed out of the project. So then it was all on me. And I worked three hours at least after work every night and at least eight hours on a weekend, if not, two eight hour days on Saturday and Sunday. Getting ready. pre-running, testing whenever.

But I mean, this buggy didn't get ready till maybe 30 days before the race. Then I remember we took it out and ran it some. I don't remember where, but it was beginning to, if you have it in third or fourth gear, it would creep. Like the clutch was, you couldn't, I mean, with the clutch in, it would creep. So it turned out that a couple of what happens to a VW transmission, if you've got a little extra horsepower, we had an 1800 instead of a 1600. A couple of gears in there will start to spin on their press fit and they'll separate a little

bit and that'll take care of some of the clearance and you have gears rubbing. They're not engaged, they're just rubbing each other. Well, I mean, we're a month before the race or three weeks before the race, and I don't know anything about VW transmission. You know, I just bought a stock transmission and put it in. But one of my buddies worked at a foreign car, a German foreign car, and he had a, there was one mechanic there that drag raced VWs. And he told me about, he said, you got to take those gear sets out and weld them together. Oh, so, you know, that takes 10 days or so of getting the transmission apart when you don't know anything about it. And welding the thing back together.

And, you know, of course, those 10 days were completely, that was extra work. That wasn't scheduled. You know, you were already hard pressed for getting. getting ready for the starting line. And here somebody comes in and says, you gotta spend 10 days of your after work and weekends remedy in this transmission problem. So those are the kind of things that budget.

Out the window. Budget people have to go through and that's why many of them don't finish and that's why it's hard to win one of these races. But we did, we got it back together and made the race. I remember somewhere in my design I had a swing axle VW and they have a very pisspour differential joint at the transmission for the axles. They have something that's called falkrum plates and spades on

the axle in and these if you I had designed this buggy to for maximum travel in the rear the wheels would go all the way and I wanted to be able to hit a bump and have most of my travel wheel going up before it hit stops well that was too much down and that that those falcon plates caused too much heat doing that much universally and about 15 miles out of Ensenada. The car started jumping. What the hell is? And this is the first time I've been at high speed with this car because we're on the pavement

and there's no traffic back in those days. It was not all of Ensenada out there. It was open highway. So we're doing 80 miles an hour or so, and this car starts jumping in the rear. What the hell is causing that? And so I slowed down, trying to figure out what it was. And then the jumping went away. So the slowing down allowed the grease to get back into places.

But Jesus, those falcon plates and axle ends were chewed up bad. Well, where did it end in 1970 for you? Well, so after that incident, we continued on and got to the dirt road. Once you got to the dirt road, then you were going slow, and there were no more trouble with that. And we went on, on and on. We made the halfway point at El Arco, and I got out of the car, and my race partner got in. And he made it all the way past San Ignacio, that's 600 miles. and we decided to go the inland route down there

it's either the inland route or you go out on the mud flats south of San Igno down to San Juan Eco and but the inland route was a lot rougher and apparently where I had welded my frame onto the front beam of the Volkswagen had been getting beat up pretty badly. And about 40 miles out of San Ignacio, the whole front beam fell off the car. And apparently it didn't fall completely off it.

It probably broke one beam loose and twisted, and it was obvious that the race was over, I think. My go-driver was able to limp into a Sears pit point. out there, so he wanted a lot of there by himself, but he was done. Then we had the, my race partner had an airplane, which was at El Arco. So we were going to get in the airplane, and he had a, he bought a pilot, had a pilot with him. So we were going to fly into La Paz and pick up our winnings. but unbeknownst to us

we weren't going to win so as we went down well the first thing happened is we flew over we didn't have enough gas to get to La Paz so we had to go over to Mulehaye and gas up oh Mulehaye didn't have any gas we had 12 three of theoretical minutes of fuel left

when we got into Mule Ha But they said that just across the bay over at Punta Chivato, which is 15 miles, something like that, they have gas over there. Pucci Javato was a fairly new hotel tourist joint. So we took off and we made it to Punta Chavato, got gas. Then we headed on south. And we stopped at La Peresima, because there was an airport there, and there was also a checkpoint, and we wanted to make sure that Tom had gotten through there, my co-driver.

So there's no communications, folks. No, no. That's the other part of this. Yeah. You're now looking. Right. If you have trouble, you've got what's known as stuck stubbs, and you've got a little notepad and a pencil, and you're supposed to write.

your problem down on your notepad and give it to a passing racer. And he'll hand it in at the next checkpoint. Well, that's still no information. I mean, the next checkpoint doesn't have any communication. At least they know somebody

is stuck somewhere behind. Right. And if somebody were to go there and ask them, yeah, they'd hand you the information. But it isn't like you go to call and find out where your car is. In anything under a week. So anyway, we found out that he wasn't there. There weren't any stuck stubs. So we flew backwards along the course and we knew we knew that he was, he had

pre-planned to take the inland route. So we followed the inland route at about 200 feet of altitude. And we saw the car. And we got the hand signaled across the throat that meant we're done or there's no help or you know you got to go you somehow you got to come get me so we flew back to San Ignacio and I hired my wife was with me we hired a a box of five-ton box van. As I recall, we made a deal with the driver. A hundred bucks he'd go out to La Coraanda and get us. Now, and we'd go out there with him. And so we did that. And it took five hours to go that 40 miles in that box van. It took a round trip of 10

hours to get him back to back to San Ignacio and then then my wife and a co-driver they flew off and went home to California and they left me there

to get the car fixed and drive it home so no chase vehicle no chase trucks yeah you just right we had a chase airplane which might have been seemed pretty high tech

yeah I mean we were feeling pretty good having the airplane but you know there was we had we didn't have a wrench to fix something hey Pete we're going to take a break right there I'm going to deliver a message for my good friends at Baja Bound and

tell folks how they can join me on the Nora 1000 and we'll be right back Haiti wish you had joined us on the Norah 500 well here is your chance it's double the mileage double the fun double the parties double the dirt it is the nora mexican 1,000 we're going to drive by day we're going to party by night i'm pouring fortaleza tequila april 30th through may 6th 2020 we're driving the entire peninsula you don't want to miss out on this one again if i can do it in my 1971 Toyota land cruiser totally stocked

You can do it in any modern 4x4. The Nora Mexican 1000 is the happiest race on earth. Check it out at nora.com, n-r-r-r-r-a-com, or on Slow Baja. Here at Slow Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruisers out of the border. When we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound Insurance. The website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at Bajabound.com. That's Bajabound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994.

for. Hey, well, I'm back here with the amazing Pete Springer, just talking about crazy stories from Baja racing in the early days with no communications and no chase vehicles and no pre-running and no nothing. Stuck Stubbs, baby, stuck stubs. I saw one. I was with Elisio Garcia, and he was showing me the entry kit for the 1970. You had a little Spanish handbook, courtesy of Brian Chachua's Jeep dealership, and you had a, stuck stub and you had a, you know, whatever the sign you were supposed to show the other guys if you were having trouble as they raced by you. Was there a sense if you saw a broken down vehicle and your vehicle was in good shape and

racing that you would stop for a second and find out what's going on? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was pretty standard back then. So that's just par for the course, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, if they were on their lid, I mean, you'd see if you could help the people. Right. But if you needed 30 minutes to fix something, you wouldn't go to do that. You'd say, good luck.

Find somebody. Well, maybe in the slower classes that were going to be two days getting to La Paz. They might have given you more time. But I was going to win it. Ignorance is bliss, isn't it, youth and ignorance. You're going to win your first one out there. I love it. Yes. Wow.

And I mean, I was thinking back, I was so far from even being competitive, although I got to admit, my car may have been the fastest car in the race in those days, in the first days. Because it was the first car that was that light, had big tires all the way around. We're going to wait for a second here. Got some neighbors passing by. So, Pete, you were saying that your car could have been the fastest. You may have been the most ignorant builder, racer, but your vehicle, you may have actually constructed the fastest vehicle

because of its lightweight. I might have. You're revolutionary. I remember at one time I passed Johnny Johnson in the early part of the race, and Johnny Johnson was one of the premier race. racers of that day. Let me interject here. I think Lynn Chenweth said he won 112 races, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm remembering from six, eight months ago. It seems like an awful big number, but he may have. He really was probably the smartest. I mean, he was a good businessman. You know, he promoted himself well. and he was just good at everything it took to be an off-road racer. Good enough to have George Plimpton jump in his car and race with him and do a documentary special on it.

And God knows what Plimpton paid for that opportunity. Well, he went right from sitting with Jackie Stewart in Monaco to Johnny Johnson and LaMesa or El Cajona, where the heck he lived, talking to he and his wife in the garage. and then pretty soon he's in the race car with him in Baja. It's a beautiful film. Yeah. At the wheel. I think it's at the wheel with George Plimpton.

You can find it on YouTube. Yeah, I watched that last month when it hit the Internet here recently. I hadn't seen that before. But right after I passed Johnny Johnson, because I was running, like I said, big tires all the way around. And I could get away with... five pounds of air pressure, which gave me another six inches of wheel travel. Yeah, suspension. Suspension.

But about five miles after I passed Johnson, I pushed one of those five-pound rim or tires off the rim, had a flat and had to fix it. And so I was looking good there for a second, but then it went away. But if I hadn't tried so hard, if I'd have been a little smarter and driven slower, the whole way. The front end wouldn't have fallen off, but probably would have run the race. It's the tortoise and the hair, right?

Exactly. It goes all the way back to Aesop. Oh, exactly. The ancient fable. But, you know, Malcolm Smith said the same thing. It took him a long time to figure out how to just slow down so he could win. Parnelli Jones, let's just get on to that. Yeah.

He's a guy who liked to go so hard at broke or he rolled or what have you, and it took him a bit to figure out how to just go slow enough to win. Slow enough. doing. Well, let's get on to one of the things that has stuck with me since we first spoke, luck beats good. That's going to be on a t-shirt someday, attributed to you, slow Baja, the luck beats good. Maybe I'll put it on my next bumper sticker. I tell you, that, I mean, you know, with my airplane incidents and running out of gas down there and just, I've got a, You know, rolling a sports car out in the mountains behind San Diego and the car going down in the ditch

and dropping us, the driver and myself, out the top of the sports car into some brush, you know, not a scratch on us. I mean, luck beats good. is it's not just this smart alecky remark from me. It's a big portion of my bind. Words to live by. Words you did get to live by. Yeah. I mean, I took a lot of chances.

And, you know, no guts, no air metal. But, you know, not everybody survives them to be 80 years old. Yeah, so do you want to talk about racing through San Felipe and a motorcycle with no headlights because you just wanted to get there when you're going to achieve your dad's 1940, your dad's 1940 Dodge one-ton flatbed? Let's set that scene for me. We've ridden this, or my dad and I and a couple others, had driven up 1940 Dodge, one-ton flatbed down to L.A. Bay. and the idea was to leave it there.

My dad was a good friend with Ontario Diaz, the major domo down there, and he would watch it for us. And then we'd fly in with the local charter guy who'd run airplanes. Francisco Munoz, the famed. There's a couple big names you just dropped there, Ontario Diaz. Yeah, and Francisco Munoz. We'd fly back in, and then we'd take the truck another couple of things.

hundred miles down into Baja and fly out. Anyway, we'll do the complete Baja experience over time. So that never, after we got to L.A. Bay and left it there, I don't know. It just never panned out to go back again and do some more trips. So we got to wondering about, well, we ought to go down there and get that thing. Can you, can you give me the approximate value of that truck? in that day. And are we talking early 60s here?

60, 2, 3? Yeah, 60. 1960. So you've got a 20-year-old one-ton truck that, remember, folks, it has a little bit of an engine issue that Pete will bring on a little later into the conversation. Yeah, it was, we probably bought it for 300 bucks. And one of the guys that went down on that trip was an engineer, and he brought it up to snuff as far as

radiator and cooling in new belts and they put six two or it used just four tires but it had two good spares and I mean all new rubber and they got it really ready to go and at that point then it was probably worth a thousand dollars

so not insignificant not something you're just going to leave sitting in be a de la Sanchez well it was worth something and you know and going down to get it was partially adventure Sure. It wasn't all about bringing the truck back.

Doesn't take much to get me to go to Baja, folks. So I'm drinking in the bar one day with some boys, and I said, let's go get that truck. And I'm talking to guys that are dirt bikers. They're running a her and hound, 50-mile races out in Nocatia Wells. And one of them says, yeah, that sounds good. And they took my word for it that I knew my way around Baja. Because they hadn't been to Baja. And other than the Ticcati race that used to happen every year,

that's as far as they got to Baja. So, okay, fast forward another month or two. And I've got a 500-cccella set dirt bike. I probably never started out to be a dirt bike, but all the lights and everything got taken off and before I got it. And so that's what I've got to go down. No lights, no brake lights, no nothing.

But you don't need that stuff, especially in those years in Baja. And the one guy that went with me, Stretch Halmerson, had a Jawa, that he'd got 250 Jawa. My wife took us down to Tijuana in our pickup truck and we we took off from there and before we got to Ensonada one of the nuts and bolts that I neglected to get tight came loose off the rear torque arm and I

come screeching to a halt as the brake shoes all wadded up inside the rear drum so I mean we're 30 miles out of Ensenada or Tijuana and so we took all the brake shoes out of the rear drum and said, okay, you got a front brake. And we went on. And then we went through Ensenada and down around Santa Tomas somewhere. I hear a horrible scrowling. So I shut it off. It turns out that the oil line had broken that goes from the oil tank to the,

goes from the oil tank to the engine. And so, but old motorcyclos had roller bearings and that probably saved the engine. So we cut a piece of the hose off and stuffed it back on and we both had a spare quart of oil. So that was plenty of oil. We go down to San Vicente and stop for gas. And then when we've gassed up, we find out that I got a gas tank leak in where the gas tank goes over the hump right down at my crotch. So we went, we found a mechanic, and he had oxyacetylin.

And we were able to, he wasn't there, but the 10-year-old kid was there, showed us how to turn the oxyacetylene on. And the acetylene was carbide powder that you put a little water in and it produces acetylene gas. Well, we didn't know anything about that, with the 10-year-old kid got us going.

And damn, we didn't get that fixed. So, I mean, we're, that's 100 miles from Tijuana. We've had three major catastrophes. Capital A adventure already, folks. Anyway, we ended up getting to, oh, near L.A. Bay that night. We were driving a total of 13 hours that day. But we hit the turnoff to LA Bay and it's like 45 miles to LA Bay. We got an hour before it's going to be pitch black.

And we're thinking, and, you know, it's a bad dirt road like all the rest of them. We're thinking we can make it there for a motel room tonight. So, so we get, you know, that means we've got to be doing 45 miles an hour. or something like that if we're going to make it. And you can't do 45 miles an hour in an old motorcycle. I mean, especially if you're not a good motorcycle rider. In the dark. Yeah.

On a lousy road in Baja. And so as we started running and watching our watch, watching the sun go down, we better go faster, so we're starting to go faster. Perfect. And it's getting darker. Perfect solution. Well, the only solution to this is to go even faster yet.

So sometime, about five miles before we got to L.A. Bay, the road did a left-hand jog and a right-hand jog all in about 30 feet. And I didn't make that first left-hand jog. I went off the road, and I hit a boulder. I'm probably only doing 10 or 15 miles an hour by this time. Finally, I see the problem. Over the anobars, they go. Annel bars are all bent up. And that was it.

We gave up. We gave in. We spent the night right there. Did you have sleeping bags with you and some preparations? Or were you just jackets on in the dirt, Pete, trying to see that picture in his mind? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I know we had a couple of cans of fruit.

It was only 60 years ago, Pete. Come on. Yeah. I don't think we had a sleeping bag. We might have had a blanket. Had a couple of cans of fruit. I don't remember we having stuff that kept falling off the bike, which would be most likely the case if we had that stuff.

So, yeah. Anyway, we went on into. in the LA bag the next morning. Oh, and I had lost four of the five or five of the six lug nuts that hold my rear tire onto the bike hub. And I noticed that about in Lake Chappala somewhere. So we'd done the last 80 miles with one lug nut. And we would stop about every three or four miles and tighten that lug nut because it would be work. and it's way loose.

And then after we'd do that for four or five times, we'd say that lug stud is probably getting tired because it was a nut on a stud. So we'd switch studs to one of the other studs. Let it wear another one out. And we did that all the way into L.A. Bay.

Then once we got into L.A. Bay, we had that wheel welded on to the studs. That's a solution. And then we'd load it. loaded them up on the truck. We had to find a battery and a fan belt that had been borrowed to use somewhere else. Sure. Which is normal.

I mean, yeah. Anyway. Any means necessary. And then there was a Mexican mechanic who'd been down there working on Antaro's Augustine 1 or Augustine 2, his personal working. boat on the diesel engine. And he wanted to get back to San Felipe. So he talked us into going to San Felipe because that was an easier route than going to Ensenada.

And for the most part it was, except for the three sisters south of Puerto Cetus. Can you describe those a little bit? Three sisters were 18 miles of mountain. that just went right down into the Sea of Cortez, starting right after Portocetus and going for 18 miles. There were three major climbs, and one was the worst. And these roads were just, there wasn't an ounce of dirt on these roads. These were just blasted out of the rocks.

And a typical rock road like that, You know, you can granny grind. You got good traction up and over these rock ledges, but if you don't have a low granny gear, you're going to be slipping your clutch tilt. Anyway, there would be one inch ledges, or one foot tall ledges that you'd have to just crawl over. And by this, by the time we got to,

to these mountains, we had retied our motorcycles onto our stake beds 25 times. And that's, that was probably, ah, we're 125 miles from LA Bay. And one of these, one of these damn, oh, that problem we're having the truck. If you'd get down real slow, and really hard pull on the engine, it was just that spark would start jumping to ground right out of the coil. Maximum load, when you needed the most, it gave you the least. And this one of the three sisters did that to us. And we made two runs at that damn thing,

trying to get a little speed at the bottom. And this is a three-speed standard transmission column shift of all things. And boy, you'd get up there and you'd get maybe only halfway up and this thing would lose its power. And back down the middle of the night it was dark, about 10 a.m. or p.m. as I remember. Or p.m. as I remember. wind was blowing no moon dim flashlight backing down these whole we read two runs and didn't make it and finally decided we had to unload the bikes and of course the two guys my partner and the mexican they just walk up the hill but that third run and empty we made it up up the hill and uh We got the bikes back on there and loaded them up. And I mean, we're tired. It's been 20 hours already.

I can remember one time that Mexican hollered in from the, he'd been riding in the back. Asked what time it was. K.S. Laura. And so I tried to answer him in Spanish, and I was told him it was Solas Olse or S. slo-lost dose, I got confused about how to say that. And my buddy, Jim Halmerson, says, just tell him in English.

He speaks better English than you do Spanish. But, I mean, and it was, I mean, it just shows you how the stressful time makes people at each other's throats. I mean, I can laugh at it now, but at the time it really hurt my feeling. And it was one of the incidences that after the sun came up in San Felipe and we drove on home, that once we crossed the U.S. border, we both looked at each other and we said, I ain't ever going to Baja again. And we had said, I had said that before, and I probably said that for the next 10 trips to Baja. Every time I got out of Baja, I felt like I'd escaped.

So, you know, I never quit going back. It would take about six months and you'd start telling the story and the smile would come to your face. and you'd be thinking about what a good time it was on those three sisters. It's funny how the mine plays tricks on you, isn't it, Pete? It really is. Well, we've been at it nearly an hour here. I've enjoyed it immensely. You haven't even told me about landing a plane in the road

or winning the year class in the 73 Baja that you... Well, we covered that last time, didn't we? sure did and I was just going to say you got another story hanging in there. Well there's a story where I know I gave you a week this time to think about things before I showed up. And I went through back I went in my blogs that I've written you know I've got 75 stories that I've written on blog. Lots of them are motorcycle rides in the states and going to Alaska and but there's a 10 of them that are Baja stories one of the Baja stories a short one is is Lake Jopala in the early days was just a dust bowl I

mean it was it in in the people's minds that had driven through it it was a bigger dust bowl and anything you'd ever seen but thinking back about it on the way to Vegas at Prim. That's a much bigger dry lake out there. But Lake Chappala was a, was a, on the north side, was just a Kalichi bed, and that thing would, would, went for two or three miles of leading into the lake of a wash area. And the, in the trucks, The traffic had made a dust bed out of that, you know, 75-yard wide. It was complete. You know, there were probably 25 routes, trails.

And, you know, everybody was looking for one that wasn't so dusty. So they all became dusty. And dusty meant, you know, a foot of dust, a foot of that poof-chus. Choking silt. silt so we were you know

it was a big deal getting through Lake Chappala because if dust got in your distributor and we all ran distributors if a little dust

would get between your points they would arc they wouldn't points are supposed to arc once when they touch and once when they separate but if you get dust in there they arc for seconds

you know and you can go into a dust bowl and not come out the other side if you get dust in your points so anyway it caused a lot of trouble well of course you can't see in the dust either and this poof dust would poof out in front of you and then you'd drive through your own dust at five ten miles an hour well I wore glasses and nobody made goggles to go over glasses that would seal the dust out of your face. So, you know, this is one of those items that you're having to figure out how to do. But, I mean, in the beginning, you weren't in traffic very often, or you weren't really racing, like the 67 race and things like that.

You got to a dust bowl, well, you slowed down. I mean, but once racing got to be in a little faster, you weren't doing any slowing down if you didn't have to. So dust was billowing out in front of you and it was becoming more of a problem. So I decided that I found out that I had to have glasses and that I could get oxyacetyline welders goggles. And you could get prescription lenses for those for about $10. box plus the three four dollars for the goggles well hey that was a thing well they're they're hard plastic where they go up over your nose and they don't fit your nose real well so there's air leaking in there well I attempted to reshape that a little better

until I thought yeah that's pretty good you know that's good enough well once I got on the road, I found out I was getting air into my eye and I wasn't able to, it was causing me to tear up a little bit. That wasn't really a problem. I just was tearing up. I was something that I noticed. Well, when I got to that dust bowl, that dust went right in whatever that goddamn hole was and just blinded me. I mean, it was like somebody threw a bucket of dust in your face with your eyes open. And, I mean, I couldn't do a thing until, and I couldn't take the goggles off. I couldn't clean my eyes out with my hands. I couldn't.

The only thing I could do is tear and blink my eyes until I could see. But I still had dust in my eyes, but now I can see. And then the next 50 feet, another batch of dust goes in there and blinds you again. I still don't know how, all I can remember is that was the longest, longest half an hour that I ever spent in a race car trying to get that two miles into the center of Lake Chapala where the dust quit. I think I remember crying for my mama in that two or three miles section. There's not a lot of forms of racing where in two miles you're crying for your mama. I can't imagine that that's happening on local racetracks here and there.

That is Baja distilled. I tell you, it really... really makes a, you know, you start feeling like a boy in a man's world. And I imagine they're going some of the guys over in Dakar, this during the Dakar race. The Dakar rally's going on right now, folks, and we've all been lured into the world of the internet to watch that craziness. Are doing the same thing for some reason. There's some folks crying for their moms there, I would imagine.

You're absolutely right, Pete. in the middle of the night their car's on its lid it's getting cold they're not having any hope of being rescued till the next day yeah i mean and a year's worth of effort has been wasted because they're out of the race now well on that kind note folks pete springer dang it so good to see you so pleasant to uh to be here in your place and have you share a few of these AHA memories? I tell you, you tell these stories, and it's like living them again. You know, as I get older, they're fading.

Like Mike asking me about the sleeping bags on the back of the motorcycle, I misplaced that one. Yeah, I would bet you slept right there in the dirt. Yeah, I just slept right there in the dirt, ate our can of peaches. Hadn't eaten anything all day. hadn't been hungry because we've been riding. And Mama Diaz's turn-egg omelets the next morning were the best thing I ever ate. Turtle egg omelet. Turn.

Oh, turn-egg? Yes, the bird, the turn, I was going to say. They had an island out there nearby. It was just covered in turn, and they'd stop by in that island and pick up turn eggs. and that was a major food source for them down there. And the eggs were pink instead of yellow. Wow. Turn, egg, omelet.

You heard it here first, folks, on Slow Baja, where luck beats good every day. Pete Springer, thanks again, buddy. It's been a real delight. Well, thanks for. Thanks for recording this, Mike. You do a great service for Baja with your stories. Well, I hope to get a lot more of them.

All right, folks, thanks. Hey, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Pete Springer. He lived Baja at a very interesting time. I started traveling down there in 1960. And, you know, anytime you can say you knew Mama Espinoza or you visited Rancho Santayez or were out in Bahia de Los Angeles staying with, Taro D.S. and his wife and eating a turn egg omelet probably the morning after you had a sea turtle roast, which of course things have changed, times have changed. We don't eat those things anymore and

that's a good thing, but that was common and Pete lived at a time when that was that was the style of the times, as they say. Anyways, I'm glad he shared those stories and I hope you enjoyed them. If you like what I'm doing, please support the show. I'm scrapping, scrimping, saving, trying to get down for the Nora 1000. So you can drop a taco in the tank. You can go to Slowbaha.com and pick up some merch. Sorry, size, large shirts are still out of stock, but we got some extra larges.

We got some double XLs. We got a triple XL in black. We've got a couple of smalls and white. And then, of course, we've got some hats in stock. So if you like what I'm doing, please check it out at slowbaha.com and support the show here and share it with you. the friend and I'll be back with something fun next week. Have I told you about my friend True Miller?

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