Slow Baja - Mr. Dune Buggy Jim Chamberlain

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

Jim Chamberlain has been preparing Dune Buggies for Baja since Bruce Meyers invented them in the early 1960s. Chamberlain prepared the legendary "Old Red" for its record-breaking run from La Paz to Tijuana that preceded the first National Off-Road Racing Association race in October 1967. Chamberlain was also a noted racer -while often found behind the scenes, he was the 69th entry in the 1967 Mexican 1000 -an electrical problem kept him from taking the green flag. He was instrumental in the VW buggy racing scene at Ascot Speedway and led the charge of Baja racers at Pikes Peak. He entered the second NORRA Mexican 1000 in his stock 1965 Volkswagen Van and said, "if you subtract the eight hours spent sleeping due to sheer exhaustion, our finish time would have been good enough to win the class!" Learn more about Meyers Manx here. Follow Jim Chamberlain on Facebook. Follow Meyers Manx on Instagram

Hello, Slow Baja listeners. I am delighted to be back at Slow Baja HQ after a couple weeks and 2,400 plus miles of bouncing around Baja back roads, working with the NORA team to figure out where the Slow Baja Safari class was going to go for the upcoming Nora 1000 in the end of April. We're going to have a beautiful course. If you're on the fence, if you've been thinking about, hey, I'd love to do that.

I'd love to drive around Slow Baja with a few like-mars. and folks, well, you ought to jump in now while you still can. That's all I'm going to say about that. A little housekeeping here. I've got some folks who've dropped some tacos in the tank, so I'm going to run through that. Peter, thank you very much. Sarah, Jose, Tucker, you're the best. Thomas, Walt, and Stefan. I truly appreciate your generosity. So thank you for dropping a few tacos in my tank and allowing me to keep on doing what I'm doing. Today's show is with Jim Chamberlain. Jim Chamberlain is Mr. Dune Buggy. He goes way back to the origin of Bruce Meyer and the Myers-Manks.

He actually prepped the very first Myers-Mex that set that speed record from La Paz to Tijuana, beating the motorcycle record that had been previously set by Dave Ekins and Bill Robertson, Jr. And then he worked on the very first manks that won the first. the Nora 1000 in Norah Mexican 1000 in 1967. So he goes back. He's got the memory. He's a guy who is there. He doesn't look old enough to be there, but he is there.

So enjoy this conversation talking about cool old Baja stuff, bouncing around Baja in a stock 65 Volkswagen van when people just did cool stuff like that before the roads were paved. Jim's got some great stories, and I hope you enjoy them. So stay tuned. Jim Chamberlain, doing buggies. Here comes. 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 Benchmark Maps.com. Let's get right into it. Slow Baja. What are you doing? Jim Chamberlain. What the heck are you doing, buddy? I've been slow at Baja my whole life. Well, I'm tickled to be here. We're at your house in Fallbrook, California, and you were kind

enough to make some time to talk Slow Baja. And as I said to you just a second ago before we started taping, I kept seeing you at the Nora 500, and you were with Lyman, Scher, and the Toad, T-O-W-A-Postrophe D. Is that how that's written, correct? It's Toad, T-O-W-D, and because on a toad, there's a tube underneath the hood that a slide-in tow bar goes into, to pulls out, pins, and pick up the front end and put it on the itch and drive off. So that was a Manx, Myers Manx offering, meant to be towed behind your RV truck, what have you. You take it out to the desert and have your fun, hook it back up and easy, pizzy your back on.

Right. The toad was probably the simplest piece that Myers put together as a simple out to the sand, out to a run, hooked on them behind your car. Basically, it wouldn't even need lights on it in the daylight because all your tow vehicle was totally visible over it, just like some of the little trailers back in the 70s. So it was lightweight, had no hood, had the metal tube that was part of the steering mechanism and that you attached your switches onto.

It made a simple, lightweight critter just to hook up and go. Maximum fun. Maximum fun. We've already gotten off on a tangent, and we're probably going to get off on a bunch here. But I just wanted to say, I kept seeing you at the horsepower ranch, and I'd say, dang, I got to talk to that guy. There's that guy with that Lundberg Stetson again. And I don't know if they call those Lundberg Stetsons here in Southern California, but up in San Francisco, if you were wearing your white hat that you had on,

that would have meant that you had an association with the waterfront. So you had been a longshoreman or you'd been a merchant marine sailor or something. So when you see a guy wearing a hat like that in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a proud, probably retired these days, waterfront worker. And he's trying to signal to everybody else. That's right. I made my living on the waterfront. Well, the waterfront's where that hat came from down in Newport Beach.

Bruce Myers has always worn one and I got two or three of them from him a couple of them signed a couple of them signed and now that's all faded away because they've been washed too many times well it looked good on you and I kept every time I saw you I'd get distracted we had a number of niggling little problems with our truck a huge fuel leak and some other things so every time I saw you and thought I need to get my gear out and talk to

this fellow. I know this guy's got a story. I didn't know who you were, but I knew you're with the right crowd, and I knew you had a story. So I'm delighted to be here. Let's get into it. Can I ask how old you are you? 78. 78. Well, you look freaking great. So I was wondering how you were playing with all these things in the 60s, given how young you look. Well, I worked for Bruce Myers. I'd met him in 63, and when old red was just getting both together, worked for him, 66 had a shop from 67 through 69 building cars of all kinds and that's where I built the first winning car for the Mexican 1000, the number 10 Myers-Manks. Well, I don't think there's any reason to not get onto that right now.

So you're a Southern California kid. Can you tell us about, we've got a helicopter flying. We're going to give that just a second to clear out. We're right in the flight pad. Oh, I know. We'll get it. I mean, listen, I record through anything. So Southern California kid, you said you were born in Newport or you grew up in Newport.

Born in San Anna. Close enough. Yep. Laguna Beach, Newport, Coast of Mesa. Okay. So early 60s, you meet Bruce. Was he already, excuse my ignorance, was he already in a dune buggy by then? Had he already created the Myers-Manks by that time?

And he started it in 1963. Okay. And completed it in 64 and pulled the first molds off of his shape that he had made and built Old Red the car the first one. And then had 12 friends that wanted buggies. And so they made some more. and found out that it was difficult to put together at first. It was a complete tub, and you could fill it with water, and it would be a hot tub.

Filled with people, gasoline, on wheels, there's a doom buggy. So the original Myers-Manks was quite a bit more difficult than the ones that came after it that mounted to a Volkswagen pan, shortened, and kept up. the ground clearance because of the shortened wheel base and was so maneuverable that you couldn't not have one. So getting on to the 67 Mexican 1000 put on by Nora, which was a brand new organization. Bruce helped form it. Right.

So that kind of stems a little background here. A couple of guys pretty well known, maybe not so much today if you're not into off-road racing. but a record that was set getting from Tijuana to La Paz. And then Perlman thinks he's going to break the record in his hopped-up Jeep land cruiser. Yep. And as I understand, there was also an attempt with Bruce in a manx, correct? Mm-hmm. All right.

So fast forward to now there's... is it going to be a race? And October of 67, there's going to be a race. When did Bruce decide he was going to race this buggy that he had built? And how did you get involved? And I understand it was not very much time between deciding and doing. Summertime is when Bruce and five friends got together and said, we can make this run and we can do it in what they thought was under 40 hours.

And they took a trek down the peninsula to La Paz, figured out how much fuel they had used to get to the other end. And the biggest problem in Baja at that time was no fuel available. Yeah, finding fuel when you needed fuel. Right. ranchos, somebody's truck, whatever. So they reconnoitered around in La Paz, got one-gallon jugs, and on board with the side pods that you see on old red,

green oxygen tanks is what they were. Right. Turned into gasoline tanks that somebody could hit and not hurt. One on the front, one each side. 12-gallon built-in tank, and the rest of it was. a total of 65 gallons overall stacked in that buggy, not much gear, just a lot of gas. So they didn't have to stop. Well, that's one way to solve the problem.

The motorcycles had the problem of finding fuel because they had to have it trek down and drop for them by airplane so they could come in and fuel up to be able to keep going. And they had made the trek down and done 40, 43 or 44 hours. I can't even remember exactly what theirs was. But Bruce and Ted Mangels, when they turned around and came back up from La Paz to Tijuana, checked in through the telegraph office, left coming up, and basically made it in 37 hours.

But it took them an hour and a half to find somebody at the telegraph office. to get them there to sign them in. Of course. So it was basically almost 39 hours. So they'd beat the bikes by four hours of overall time. Right. And then the Jeeps, they had never made it under 50 hours. And the bikes said, oh, we can beat you.

And there was multitudes of other people who said, hey, this is a happening. This is what, a race? And once it went to publication through a couple of the big magazines that handled sports cars, rallying and things even in Europe, it spread, and they had 69 cars entered in the first race. Now, you used a curious word, it's a happening. It was a happening. It was.

It wasn't a happening. It wasn't a race. It was a happening. It was a happening. And, you know, I recently just watched 27 hours to La Paz again, which is pretty... I did too. Pretty stellar, big, bold documentary with big bold voiceovers and, you know, epic filmwork and just the names of some of those folks who were involved in that first event. Bruce Brown did 99% of all the film work on that. Wow. And he also did the 1 in 68, which got on Wide World of Sports with Chris Oconomackie. And yeah, there were some of the major names in racing in those races. And to see the diversity of cars and to some degree, the diversity of preparation. So you had European rally cars, sobs and. Volvos and whatnot.

A stock Porsche. A stock Porsche. $356. Buggies, you know, and rancheros and all sorts of vehicles that people thought, well, let's try this. You were involved

with an ideal vehicles, as it turns out, and you were involved in the prep. So pull back the curtain. Let me in on how you attack this. Well, Vic Wilson, who was the sales manager for Bruce Myers at the time

and a good friend of mine since I was 16 and I'd worked for him at his gas station in Costa Mesa and he was into jeeps, drag racing, hill climbing, you name it, and just off and driving in a Jeep. But he wanted to build a buggy in order to get something that was more maneuverable, better riding that he had a better chance with

than a Jeep. So he called me up because I just opened my shop and he said, would you bill me a car? And I said, sure. And he says, it's got to be a stock manx

because we want it to be in that type of class. And I says, well, there's much else we can do because there's not a lot of things going on for Volkswagen and the way of racing parts, a few Porsche parts and pieces, but that was about it, something that was a little bit better.

So cut the chassis and reinforced tubing underneath the bottom belly pan, tied it into the front end, drilled and bolted the body all down. It had a 67 carmangea transmission in it, and a 66,500 motor, stock carburetor, all stock parts, a Manx sidewinder extractor exhaust, which Bruce and I had designed when I worked for him. And the tires and wheels, you had a six inch set of front tires and wheels and an eight inch set of rear that normally would go on a Jeep. The car was clean and simple, finished out with the wiring just for the basic of gauges and switches and a few lights and an extra light on the front for driving. A map light on the dash, one down below, so you could see to do anything under the wiring under the hood if you needed it.

And there it sits. It's what people call today a stock manx. Well, it sounds to me like you reduce the amount of things that could go wrong. Basically, that's it. The Volkswagen parts were mated together and were not a problem. The motor didn't have so much horsepower. It could break the transmission. The brakes would stop the car because it was 800 pounds lighter than a stock vehicle.

So it had stock brakes. The engine didn't need any extra tuning, removed a little bit of sheet metal off of it. Carboration was stock, a better air cleaner system up out of the dirt, and down the road you go. And so what was learned from the summer trip that Bruce and company took, that you were able to apply to your build now? You're on probably a pretty tight timeline to get this thing built for the... October event? Well, the reinforcing a tie rods is one of the most important things. And make sure that the steering box bolted in properly and you have good movement and your suspension. We didn't overdo the shocks. We put a good set of little cony shocks that were

off of a Porsche, but they were stock and you could adjust the valving in them just by compressing them, turning them, gave us a little chance to play with those. And they ran in their mid-range, so it damped it a little bit, but not hard, and made the car ride and handle really well. It wasn't much asphalt on this end, and there was 100 miles of asphalt at the other end, and the rest of it was pure dirt. So you're fighting, especially in that first one, before speed became such a factor in Baja, you're really fighting the, the, the trend. rain. You're fighting the place. Right. And trying to keep your car going down the road and go slow enough to win, so to speak.

Well, there's no street signs down there. There's treks, tracks, and trucks. And the trucks make the biggest tracks, and that's the ones you want to follow. Except sometimes they can't get through areas that maybe you can go around. And that's what Vic Wilson, had mangles, Bruce, they were avid trekkers of the Baja Peninsula. And they knew a little bit better ways to go that would save a little time and maybe even some rough ground. So for folks that aren't really up to speed on that first race, there were just a couple of checkpoints. And you had your own method to get from one checkpoint to another. Right.

It wasn't like today with the score races where they have everything sort of. marked off with pink ribbons and whatnot tied here, here, arrows, this is the way. It was get to here, get to there. However you get between here and there is on you. That's correct. Today's race has GPS. You get off the trek, you're going to get penalized. You miss a checkpoint.

You'll be out of the race. But you're also going to be found if you're upside down or rolled or something else. Very true. Eventually. Eventually. Somebody's going to know where you are. In the early races, there was a little bit of chase crew, not much. And they all basically took the same route.

There was an 8.5 by 11 map, very small for the 1,000-mile-long peninsula that had a few towns. Excuse me. Excuse my laughter. Yeah, an 8.5 by 11. There you go. That's all you need. That was it. What more do you need? AAA had maps, but nobody knew it until after the race was over, because that was as big as you could come up with. And it was out of a book that came out of the library and blown up.

Well, Malcolm said that he had taken that book out of the library and studied it intimately and told J.N. to do the same thing, and he didn't. Which is why Malcolm says that's why he didn't get lost. Jan may have been the reason that he got lost. I'm not sure. Until the second year. Yeah. Yeah.

But essentially, they were looking at a book from the 40s to get their mapping, which is astonishing. Given today's electronics and SATs and everything else. It was a map that was not a scale, that things looked bigger than they were. A pencil line was a mile wide. So it was easy to get lost. except the wide roads took you north to south. Right. But it was also lead you east west.

The wide tracks. And if you got off on the wrong one and you ended up near a body of water where there was no surf, you knew you were on the Gulf. And if there was surf and the moon was going down, you knew you were on the Pacific. So you want to keep the Pacific on the right and a Gulf on the left and get to the other end. That might be a bumper sticker. someday in the future, Jim. Talking about the early days of Baja racing. Well, did you have any relationship with Baja prior to this momentous happening?

Yeah. Did you go down there when you were a teenager or as a kid or any of that? I've been down with my dad down to San Felipe, Portocetus, not very far down. Do you remember what vehicles your dad was using to get down there in those days? Yeah, he had a Jeep wagoner. Oh, neat. and had another little Jeep, had the forebanger, slab-sided, simple, big four-door Jeep, and we towed our boat down, went fishing, wandering around, and it was neat.

It was a whole different world, so much different than just this side of the border. Right. It's desolation on our doorstep compared to those days. it was a happy group of people to go down and experience life with. Yeah. Yeah, so you didn't have any real fears. You knew a little bit about the place that you were going to. Only getting lost.

Yeah, well, I mean, you weren't blindly ignorant, like so many who went to Baja and said, we're going to go do this and had no idea. At least you'd driven some of those dirt roads and had the lay of the land, so to speak. That's correct. I bought a bus in 1965 VW bus brand new and spent many hours going down there with that and towing my dune buggy to the sand and it was a Volkswagen.

I'd had a Volkswagen sedan before that and traded it on the bus. It's simple. It's air cool. No water to worry about. No power to worry about. No power to worry about. But you got there, always. Poco A Poco.

You got there little by little slowly. One, two, three, four cylinders, they all worked. Super slow Baja. I drove a 78 Westphalia in the 80s down to Baja a couple of times. And that's, I mean, plenty fast and much, much faster than what you were doing. And then you were towing with your bus. Just tells me it was a different era. You had the tools that you had, and you used those tools to do what you wanted.

to do to recreate, to have the fun to get you where you want to go. And it must make you laugh some days when you see the amount of equipment and horsepower and whatnot that people use to go to Baja today to do essentially the same thing you were doing then. Well, like I say, I had my shop up in Fullerton and 67, and that's where I built Wilson's winning car. I also built an oscelot from the company who was just around the corner. from my shop and a guy brought me motor transmission, chassis and everything and he said, I want to race this and I want you to co-drive. So we were the 69th entered vehicle in the first 1000 but didn't get to run. In those days, almost all the Volkswagen were six-fold.

The newer stuff, 65 and later in a carm and gear, and then the variant square back wagon, they were 12 volt. And then the bus in 66, 12 volt. You could get the generator stand and the generator. Well, my bus in 65 had a great big 6-volt generator. When we built this car, it was, the motor was supplied two. us. We bolted the accessories on it and it had a big generator and the generator was rolled in such a fashion you didn't see that it was only a six-fold generator. And we were set up for the 12-volt system and it caused a dead short through the wiring from the regulator

to the power up front and made it a dead short through the system. burned the wiring. So we didn't get to run. We were down there four hours after the start, and they wouldn't let us start. So we said, okay, we ran it in other races. The following year, I had four cars at my shop to build, two manxes,

a steel tube frame buggy we call the kangaroo rat, and another burrow. borough and I got them all together and they said hey guys how about we enter Jim in the race Jim you can bring the tools to fix us as we go and we'll enter your bus so my 65 bus was entered in the Mexican 1000 I was the only one that made it to the other end wow that's saying something if we hadn't been so tired my driving buddy and I and slept for eight hours going down and got there in 52 hours, we'd have been a 44-hour time, which would have been first in utility class.

In a Volkswagen bus. My Volkswagen bus. Your 1965 Volkswagen bus. Yep. Amazing. Totally stock. Everything. So, again, it comes down to some of this is not the 40-inch wheels and the, that.

the 40 inches of travel and the 1,000 horsepower that trophy trucks have now, then it was just not breaking. That's true. Going slow enough to finish. Going fast enough to not break it. Yeah. Yeah. And never running at 10-tenths because single roll bar wasn't going to keep your head from getting flattened, but it was all that was required at the time. And out in the barn out here, I've got the dude.

duplicate of the number 10 race car that was raced in the 67,000 that a friend of mine who lives in Louisiana built and brought to the 40 year 2007 get together they had in Long Beach. And I met him at Bruce's because Bruce called me and says, hey, I need you to come up here and meet this guy. He's got a car you can probably help him with. And I said, okay, went up and walked. in and went, wow, this is great. Yeah, I can help with that. Bruce introduced me to Richard Brown. Richard goes, well, what do you know about this car? I said, well, I built the original.

Oh, okay. Have I done things right? And he had. He had done things and kept them simple, stock manks, stock everything, all the pictures that he could find, everything, everything, was correct. Amazing. Got the upholstery work done, stock seats lowered, same thing that I'd cut and put in there. He got the side curtains made for it that just kept the dirt out of your face and a back cover that kept everything covered in the back end you needed, lunchbox or whatever, because in those days, they didn't take off even thinking they were going to need anything to eat on the way down. You know, we're just going there and we'll get there tonight.

It's a different time. Or the next night. Yeah. Well, there's a photo of Vic and Ted on the wall at the horsepower ranch in the canteena there. And I saw it five or six years ago. I was down there. And I really looked at it deeply and just looked out how tired and dirty those guys looked. And I was driving my old land cruiser, which is a tough vehicle to drive.

but when you saw those guys you saw the jackets and the stuff and the you know they had the raccoon eyes from the dirt around their goggles I took a photo of it on my phone I still have it and it's just been a touchstone

for me about how much larger I don't want to say better but just tougher other generations were yeah you had to put up with a lot and you didn't think Too much of it.

Yeah. It was just one of those things you went to do. And racing at that time was in an hour and a half, two-hour races, six-hour races. And at the time, they were still running the longest race, the 24 hours of Le Mans. Rally races were a day-to-day event, not start here in close at the end. You know, a thousand-mile race, all in one shot was very unique. The people that put it all together were Jeep, car, dealers, people from magazines, Bruce, Vic. They were part of the head of it that led it up to Pearlman.

and Ed says, okay, I can do this. And, yeah, we'll make it happen. Here's the date. What do we do now? Well, let's take a quick break here. And I'll get to read a little ad for our friends at Nora, and you can join us in your non-race vehicle if you want to. So we'll be right back.

Hey, do you wish you had joined us on the Nora 500? well here is your chance it's double the mileage double the fun double the parties double the dirt it is the norah mexican 1 000 we're going to drive by day we're going to party by night i'm pouring four delays at 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 stock 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. Their website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at BajaBound.com. That's Baja Bound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Hey, we're back with Jim Chamberlain. talking about the, my, my adoration of earlier generations and what they put up with to, to take on these, these feats like racing a thousand miles. And Jim was saying that, you know,

there were events that were long and arduous events in racing around the world, but not anything like a thousand miles on what passes as a road in Baja. And I had a nice chat yesterday with Mary McGee, who drove in the very first race in 67 and a Dotson, and she had raised Goldwing Mercedes-Benzes and Porsche spiders and Ferrari Testerosa's in the 50s. I mean, the hottest, hottest, hottest stuff that one could race, racing for, you may know him being a Southern California, and Vassick Polack and his Porsches, and she was a hot shoe. And she got into Baham, I said, what did you think? She said, by far the hardest thing I've ever done.

toughest thing she's ever done. She went on to race motorcycles and soloed the 500, which is a pretty amazing feat. I hope to talk to her about that, but we're talking to you. So you're touching on the miraculous finish, the amazing finish, the finish of your Volkswagen bus in the event,

and you actually slept for eight hours and rolled in in 50, 52 minutes or 52 hours. So that's quite something. The cutoff time was 50 hours. Okay. So we were just short of Villa Constitution. I turned the driving over to my driving partner and laid down in the mattress we had in the back of the bus.

Smart play. And instantly went to sleep. And he knew he was too tired to take over, shut the bus off, came back, laid down. next to me and that's where that was at midnight and eight o'clock the next morning the sun hit us in the eyes and went oh my god that's exhaustion yeah that's how many nights of all-nighters before you left and the amount of time it took you to get down there and then you start and you go through that incredible arduous process and then i mean to just go lights out like that and sleep eight hours straight yeah because our our run was not to be a race yeah our run was you're supposed to

To fix, support, go, much as you see in the Dakar rally today with those chase vehicles. Right. We were one of the first chase vehicles. And what happened to us was motoring down as we would to go to Baja any other time, run a little faster. We caught up with Pat Wayne and his buggy. We chased him for about five hours. Imagine that guy. South of Lake Chappala.

Imagine that guy looking in his rearview and seeing your bus. Well, he didn't know it was a bus. He thought it was all he saw was a dust cloud. And when he broke, we came around the corner just as he broke and stopped and said, hey, everything okay? Anything we can help you with? No. And he says, you know, are you that dust cloud that's been chasing us?

Well, yeah, probably. You're the only dust cloud we saw. Well, I'm feeling really bad, he says, because I've been caught by a Volkswagen bus. I said, yeah, but a good one. Yeah, so let's get on to it. You did some racing after that. Yes, I did. You want to jump into some of the highlights or low lights or however you want to describe your racing career?

And I understand your wife's a pretty hot racer, too. Ah, that she is. That she is. beat me three times in a row at Pikes Peak. That's saying something. In the dirt. Yeah, yeah, when Pikes was all dirt. Yep.

How did that come about? And tell me what you were racing. I started the association in 1972 for sprint buggies and Baja Sedans at Ascot Raceway and Corona Raceway. Corona's up in Corona and Ascot, Gardena, and L.A. As famous as a racetrack gets in Southern California. Worked with the La Perrys at Corona and worked with Agagianian at Ascot. And the sprint buggies at that time were pretty brand new. We started racing in 69 with another organization.

And one night I went out and modified the course by removing a bunch of logs. that they had us bouncing over that were bending everything. And I had a group of guys go out and we moved 10 of these things off the course. And the guy came up to me and he says, you don't mess with my course. You want a course to race, go get your own. Okay, I can do that. And did. We took the racing away from them because they were just making things a little unhappy

and not a lot of fun to go race. Agaghanian asked us to come in and run it. We said, great, my father-in-law, and good friend of his was president, vice president, mother-in-law was the secretary, my wife was one of the scorekeepers. It's a family affair. And yeah, and it was all volunteer, Southern California Independent Drivers Association. We had Rick Mears, Roger Mears, Gary Lee Kanoir, Gary Potter, the best. of some of the off-road and short-track races that had ever run. Rick was a very fast kid at

the time and it took him until 78 to do really well in open-wheel indie cars. But in 76 and 77 he got into the smaller versions with the VW It was a 1600 C.C. class that they had in Open Wheel. And then stepped up in 77 to run with Teddy Yip and didn't qualify for Indy. But in 78, he was with Penske and put himself up in the front row. And four wins at Indianapolis and many, many wins in all the rest of the races. And still a super nice guy until seeing him today. And he says, you know, racing all together was really neat

and a whole part of my family's life, my life, and a lot of friends that all came from Ascot. Engineers, technicians are all on those teams in Indy cars today, still today. Amazing, isn't it? Southern California Hot Rodders and racing buggies at Ascot. That's it. And Rick says, hey, racing Ascot was still the most competitive and the most fun. Some of the off-road was okay, but you were never racing car to car.

And going to Pike's Peak, he won Pike's Peak in 76, and his brother in 77, and Gary Lee Kanoir in 79. My wife is the fastest woman in open wheel and holds the record up the hill in unlimited open wheel. That's with a Volkswagen motor or 914 Porsche, sort of a Volkswagen. But the cars we ran were run at Ascot, running San Jose, running a lot of the dirt tracks. were running unlimited. We didn't say you couldn't run a V8, you couldn't run a Porsche, you run but you can bolt to the back end of that

and come out and be competitive. But still the Volkswagen Motors were outrunning the Porsches, the Corvairs, Fourbanger, some of the Toyotas, and a couple later Hondas, the Mazda motors, A lot of it had to do with driver. I was going to say, so what do you attribute that to, Jim? Yeah, well, that was a lot of it. Who couldn't lift their foot off the gas?

Who could make it through the corner without lifting? That's the thing. That's what Roger said. You know, you don't lift. You know, when you start to lose that tire over the edge, you don't lift. You keep the power on. That's it. That's what was so much fun at Pikes Peak.

So your wife, Nancy, right? Pike's Peak racer. Who drives when you two were in a car? In 77, 8, and 9. And we weren't married at the time. She was living up in San Jose. And her husband fielded the car along with Newman Drager. It was a Newman-Drager kit car.

And came down and ran with us at Ascot. And I talked to her into going to Pike's Peak in 77. Thought I'd never live that one down. But I'd never been before to race, but had been to watch the race many years. And in 71, I'd like to have raced and didn't. But Bud Whitfield and his brother, John, they raced. John won. There was Manx Buggies that ran in in 66 and sports car class. And the buggies with what we built in at Ascot and the sprint buggy class were qualified to run in the open wheel class against Indy cars, sprint cars, you name it. And they had as much as six, seven hundred horsepower in their cars. ours were maybe

two 250 horsepower but they put it all to the ground the cars were light drivers were good weight in the right place running at ascot you turned both directions

and you also went off the jump every time so you were anywhere from two feet eight feet off the ground every lap crazy so

landing Landing and making a corner was no big deal. So Pike's Peak, it just had a wall and nothing over there. Yeah, maybe 10, 12, 13,000 feet down, depending where you were. I went off twice. Well, let's circle back to Baja, which is what I like to talk about on the Slow Baja show. Yep. Where does Baja live for you?

You've had these incredible experiences for decades now with the early racing that you did there. Have you had a relationship? Have you continued to vacation there? Have you continued to race there? I have. And with Bruce Myers as one of my really good friends all my life and going down, chasing the races, I haven't raced in one, but I've been supporting member, part of the supporting cast of doom buggies and chased the races halfway down and then chased them all the way down. And it's been a really good experience. A lot of the cars that are running today are purpose-built mankses. The DSB buggies are long travel, special chassis. They're Subaru Motor and Gearbox in them and prepped right but kept fairly simple and the guys running them are

some of the best around Lyman Shear has taken his toad down there and done well his wife drives most of the races and they've got a sedan that they're running this next year or Sal Fish And it's a copy of the car he ran early in 70s in the 1000. And this is, is this a VW? VW sedan. VW. Class 11. Amazing. Amazing.

Well, that's going to be exciting. John Cleese said you're a guy who's always been in the shadows. I like backing people up that are doing good things. And if I can help, I'm there to help. It's what's been enjoyable all my life. And built Vick's car to start with, and I've built multi-cars since for lots of people. And racing short track, some of the off-road stuff, and keeping the fun in it has always been my, it's been a prominent end of what I've done in racing.

Not to win, to go out and enjoy it, make sure other people do too. And that's a part sometimes that they forget. You get a million dollars in a pickup truck. And it's a road grader rather than a pickup truck digs more deep trenches down the road because they just don't get out of them. And I've got friends in that end too. but it's a thing that I think they really ought to consider when they look at the rest of us that race, when there's 240 or 50 vehicles running, and you've got 18 to 20 trucks that have 40-inch-tall tires

digging trenches way deep that are deeper than we could ever pass over. It has now become a real problem of getting down to the other end without a roadblock of somebody stuck on the only route south. Right. So that's been difficult. Maybe they ought to go to a stock type tire that's run on the street, not special built and so big and so heavy lugged that can't run it on asphalt. because you don't get enough miles out of them. 100 miles out of one of those tires, they'd be lucky to get. Right. And in the dirt, they'll last a lot longer,

but they just do too much damage. But they make them that heavy so they don't pop, so they're not dealing with flats. Mother Earth is a replenishing thing with weather. We've had lots of hurricanes come up across Baja, cut the place almost in two, and they go down and rebuild the roads and put things back together. People are cut off, and the off-road industry has gone down and taken trailer loads of equipment, food, supplies, clothes, donations to the people who are cut off south of Santa Rosalia.

North of theirs where the hurricanes will come across and cut the roads in half. Can you touch a little bit on the people of Baja? You don't really hear a lot of good news coming out of Mexico when you live here in the States. It's usually bad news. In your experience, now 60 years on, what do you like to say about the people of Baja? 99% of them are really super people. And you get away from the borders where drugs, whatever, illegal activities of one kind or another are the mainstay.

And get south, they are the most helpful, honest people you'll find. Down in Bay of LA, one of the neat little stops down there that just a few years back didn't exist. But they said, we're going to build this up and make it as nice as we can for what we've got. and it's built right on the water. And until four years ago, nobody knew it was there. We went down and stayed and went, why does nobody come here? It's a little bit north of the main part of the bay. The race goes in.

The Bay of L.A. has not caught up with the rest of the world. Yeah. But they help all they can. Yeah. Is that Campo Arshelon, is that area that you're talking about? Right. there just north of Bia di Los Angeles. I think I'll be there next week with the Nora folks.

We'll probably before this, I'll be there before this podcast airs. But hey, again, you've been very kind and generous with your time. Is there part of you that's laughing a little bit? I see you in your Manx t-shirt, and I'm looking around at some of the buggies that are here in your yard, and we're going to take a look in your shop and take a look at this. Is there part of you that's just laughing a little bit that you've lived? long enough to see Manx buggies at Pebble Beach

and selling for big bucks on auction, digital and in-person auctions that the oldest, most correct, simplest ones are the ones now bringing the biggest dough and people like you are probably brought in for authentication

experting. That's true. The cars are simple to build and the parts and pieces that we used to use were the simplest to come up with. And what they have today is 300,000 fiberglass buggies around this world

that saved 300,000 Volkswagen's from death. Now they have parts and pieces. I still have some in my shop out here that came from my original shop. And that's been 1967. So there's really a lot of parts and pieces that Volkswagen put together that are still needed today to put a car together. And some of the manufacturing of parts is coming back to Myers because they had the best parts and pieces and accessories to start with. and for the years that Bruce was away from it and then came back in the 90s to put new cars together

and to get people to go out and enjoy what he was still enjoying from Europe to the States and now the Manx Club when it was started had 12-14 people and then it stepped up the following year, doubled that, and so things have doubled and doubled and doubled. Now there's 5,000 people in the United States that are members and part of the world of the Myers-Manks Buggy Club. I ran into a bunch of them when I was on a cross-country drive in Fredericksburg, Texas. There must have been 50. And they were just out for a little fun run.

It wasn't a big show or anything. It was just fun running lunch. And there are buggies everywhere. People getting together to help each other put something together that they enjoy, whether it's a copy of a manx or real manks. The real manxes are step above, and the copies are some of those are catching up. They've got nice finish work on them. They've got a lot of good parts and pieces, and a lot of good people driving them.

and everybody wants to have a manx, but a buggy is a buggy and fun is what it is. Well, I think we're going to leave it right there. Jim, I think fun is something we all ought to be striving to have a lot more of these days. Life is stressful enough. I say slow your role. If you can find your way in a buggy or a land cruiser or a Jeep or whatever you've got, get yourself down to Baja, and I hope you and I cross paths again, real soon. I'm sure we will

and amen to that. Will you take me for a walk through the shop? Sure. All right, thanks. Have I told you about my friend True Miller? You've probably heard the podcast but let me tell you. Her vineyard, Adobe Guadalupe winery is spectacular. From the breakfast

at her communal table, bookended to an intimate dinner at night. Their house bred Azteca horses, Solomon, the horseman will get you on a ride that'll just change your life, the food, the setting, the pool, it's all spectacular. Adobe Guadalupe.com. For appearing on Slow Baja today, our guests will receive the beautiful benchmark map 72-page

Baja Road and Recreation Atlas. Do not go to Baja without this, folks. You never know when your GPS is going to crap out, and you're going to want a great map in your lap. Trust me. Well, that was fun. Jim Chamberlain, Slow Baja in before Slow Baja was a thing. I just love talking to folks who have that experience who did things way, way, way back in this case, almost before I was born.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here on Slow Baja, I always appreciate your support. You can drop a taco in the tank. There's a link at Slowbaha.com or on Instagram. It's easy, click it. Really, anything you can share, spare helps me keep on doing what I'm doing. And believe it or not, there is. some new merchling into the store. Finally, that supply chain stuff is real,

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please punch that order button. Everything helps me to bring you these shows week after week after week. and without further ado, thanks for listening, and I will see you soon with a new show. Cheers.