Slow Baja - Pete Springer Winner Of The 1973 Baja 1000

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

80-year-old Pete Springer has been traveling to Baja for over 60 years. As a spectator, he attended the 1969 Mexican 1000, raced a home-built single-seater in 1970, and won his class in the 1973 Baja 1000. He shares tales from his many years of Baja adventures in this conversation. Highlights include; driving a 1940 Dodge Flatbed to Bahia de Los Angeles, running out of gas while flying a small plane and landing on the road near Santa Rosalia, crashing his motorcycle in a pitch dark desert, and building off-road racecars through seat-of-the-pants engineering and a lot of trial-and-error. I recorded this podcast initially in January 2020 --my second podcast! As I head out to cover the 2021 Baja 1000, I am pleased to share this freshly remastered version again. Check out Pete Springer's writings here. Follow Pete Springer on Facebook

Hey, slow Baja friends. Today's show is one from the vault because I'm out the door to cover the Baja 1000. I'm going to bring you my slow Baja perspective on that crazy 1,000 mile peninsula run. I can't wait. But today we're going back to my very first podcast, a conversation with Pete Springer. He started racing the Baja in late 60s, and he won his class in a Toyota Land Cruiser at F. J-40 and the 1973 Baja 1000, and he had one month and $300 to build the truck. Didn't do a lot of pre-running, didn't do a lot of anything other than haul that thing around

to a bunch of Southern California manufacturers to get free stuff bolted on. But they got it down there, and they won, and Pete's a terrific storyteller. Can't wait to interview him again. He's turning 80 next month. So anyways, enjoy the show, and I'll be back with a new podcast soon. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja.

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and recreation guides that makes the perfect planning tool for exploring Baja. Pick yours up at Benchmarkmaps.com. So Pete, Springer, winner of the 1973 Baja 1000, all around good guy, builder of Baja Rigs, and you were just about to start

telling me about your dad who you said was twice the man you are? Yeah, I think... As an adventurer? As an adventure, I mean, he was a businessman. He was an oil painter. Went to Ohio State College, never did graduate.

But within about 10 years of when the war started, he got a wartime job in a machine shop. And within five years, he was selling carbide tools. And, I mean, the average guy gets a job, and he's not running a place in five years. So, but as far as going to Baja and things like that, I mean, he didn't know anything about fixing a car. Like I said, he could change a tire. and but if it was engine trouble he had to find somebody which he was perfectly capable of you know

he never got held up anywhere and I'm assuming that Baja when your dad was going and like Baja now there are people and there are people who are going to help you if you break down oh yeah there's somebody's going to help you there were people within you know lots of times it might have been 30 miles but probably if you were having a problem

you realize that there was an issue creeping in there somewhere. And so you would stop before you got out in the middle of nowhere and get the problem looked at. People were smarter then. Yeah. They didn't wait for the check engine light to come on because there wasn't one. And there wasn't some guy coming along. There wasn't some guy coming down the road in 10 minutes.

Right, right. Well, you were just starting, before we turned the recorder on, you were just starting to say something about Cuba. Yeah, he and one of his college friends, when they got out of college, they went to, both of them went to Cuba. And he liked it down there. And he started a travel agency kind of thing where he would recommend hotels and restaurants and so on to the tourists coming down from New York. It was kind of a AAA kind of deal.

And he had started that. was doing pretty well with it when the Machado revolution came along. And that was 1959? Was that right? No, it was earlier than that. That was more like 19. That was Castro came along in 59. That was more like 1940 or 38 or something like before I was born.

Yeah. So since we were discussing before you were born, which we weren't discussing, but you just told me you were 79? Yeah. 79 years old? Yeah. Well, it's just a delight to be here. And I'm here because we became. acquainted via the magic of social media when I was running my stock old

1971 Land Cruiser FJ 40 in the Baja XL. And, you know, I'm blindly ignorant and an adventurer, but I don't really know a lot about off-roading and managed to get some good advice from the man sitting next to me here who won the 1973 Baja 1000 in a land cruiser FJ40 that he built and I'm just wondering Pete how did that whole deal come about you told me before but I'd love to get it on on tape here talking about how did that land cruiser come into your friend's hands and how did you end up building it and tell me about all that in detail well I'd been racing the Baja races for oh since my first race was in 70 and so I got noticed

because I built some kind of strange cars, not the run-of-the-mill Baja bug, do buggy things. I raced a single-seater when nobody was racing single-seaters. So I became friends with Bill Sanders, who was the editor of Four-Wielder magazine at the time. He was just interested in what I was doing. Well, things went along, and we became drinking buddies, and we'd see each other at the races, and he'd come spend time in our camp having a few beers. And that just went on and on.

Well, Bill was, for his magazine, he was doing a project on an FJ40. They ran it on propane and did an article on it, and then they ran it, put a turbo on it. Act Miller put a turbo on it for him. And they did an article on that. And I think they did another article or two, but eventually they ran out of articles to do on this thing, and it had been donated by Toyota of L.A.

So they didn't know what to do with the thing. So they sold it to L.A. bill for a dollar, just to make everything legal. Well, he didn't know what the hell to do with it, but he was talking to him, and he said, well, why don't we race the Baja 1,000 with it? So they agreed to that, and they gave him 300,000, $100 to get the car ready to run the Baja 1,000. My, how things have changed.

Yeah. Well, he was able to get sponsors from the advertising his magazine to give him a roll bar, give him lights, give him anything he needed, really. But the $300 went to me to put triple shocks on the thing and do the running, the suspension work on it. I hauled it around up to some of the $300. in Downey and got big springs put on it at a place that did Toyotas. Anyway, we had a month to get ready.

Wow. A month to get ready. Holy Toledo. No fooling around. Yeah. And the Toyota did pretty good. It was way too heavily sprung. But it kept, it kept, it was like an old Jeep.

If you went too fast, it would hurt your body. body. So you would slow down and then that would protect the Toyota. And the other characteristic, I probably got a little lucky, but if you'd ever jumped off the ground with that damn thing, it would fly flat. It wouldn't come down on the front of the rear wheels. It would just jump up like a rabbit and land on all four wheels like a rabbit. Now, you had told me in our previous conversation that you were you had a stock land cruiser fj 40 that you were able to do some pre-running with and i think you said you averaged 22 miles an hour in your pre-run and then when you had the full race build you average somewhere around 33 or 35 miles an hour so not that much

faster oh it wasn't even that much faster it was more like 25 miles an hour in the race in the race Toyota. That was kind of amazing stat when I figured that out. Wow. And you raced a vehicle. Now again, for those kids who are listening to this podcast and don't remember the energy crisis of 1973,

you were racing a natural gas, right? Right. Compressed natural gas. That's right. So do you have any idea what kind of mileage you were getting out of that? No. Did it matter? It didn't matter. It was just that the fuel

was cheaper? You know, it was a project from the four-wheeler magazine. Okay. Who knows what... So you were starting with what you got for a dollar, and it didn't really matter? Yeah. And how did you fuel that up when you were in the race? Did you have to get big propane tanks pre-positioned all the way through? Yes. So logistical stuff. As I recall, we only gassed up once at La Presema. So you must have a hell of a big tank in there. It was a big 60 or 80-gallon tank. Took up the whole point. backseat of the Toyota. And so, but L.A. Bill had arranged for L.A. Los Angeles people to bring a truck all the way down

there to gas or fuel us up. And then the propane did fine. I mean, it was running through a turbocharger. And we never had an issue with the engine running. Wow. And so tell me about, you started running the Baja and not. 1970 and tell me about the logistics that went into, you had a single-seater again way before that was a thing, before the McMillans were making their single-seaters go 100 plus miles an hour. What was it like? How did you get your vehicle down there? Where did you tow it behind?

Where did you stay? Who helped you along the way? What went into a Baja run in 1970? Oh, yeah. We were low-budget people. And, I mean, I was making $2.50 an hour at my dad's machine shop at the time, living in a camper behind the machine shop. So, I mean, I had no overhead. So $2.50 an hour would buy me $20 for food for the week.

And everything else went into the race car. And it was all, everything was junk parts. I mean, my motto was make junk run. And so, but I. I had pretty fast cars. I was located up here in North San Diego County where I didn't have other buggy people around me to where we could learn things together.

I mean, it was completely my idea, and I did all the learning. And so I did a lot of things that weren't the best. So you weren't watching YouTube videos on how to build Baja racers? Yeah. And Baja racing was very new. Right. It had been racing since 67.

Since 67, exactly. And I went down in 69 to watch it, and I just went, wow, I do this. I've been to Baja before I can win this. That's how dumb I was when I started this out. But then most kids are pretty inexperienced when they think they can do something. And I spent 15 years at it. Mike just asked me about how we would go to Baja. Well, it was completely camping out.

We'd tow the race car to Baja on a trailer behind my 66 Chevy pickup truck. We'd sleep in the back of the truck, or that's if we were in downtown Ensenada. If we were down further, like where we might take over the car or something like that, We'd just sleep on the ground camping, probably not even in a tent because it never rains. Right. In Baja. So it was pretty sparse. But we had a great time.

First time I raced down there was within a single-seater VW. and we did pretty good. I ran out personally. I took the first half, and I had a co-driver that would take over and halfway down in El Arco. And I ran out of gas twice on my half of the race because one time the gas cap didn't get put on,

and I splashed at least half of my 10 gallons out. and the second time down below Puerto Cetus I went out to the beach instead of taking the shortcut which is the way everybody would go if you were going south and of course there were no paved roads back then you'd lost your paved roads

about 80 miles south of Encinata Mama Espinoza's right that's where the paved road end there in Elisario or is it before that? It ended before that It ended at San Antonio Del Mar, San Antonio Del Mar, which is, yeah, that's 25 miles after San Vicente. They get a little towns running together. Yeah.

So there's a funny story going on that the United States made a road down. there in that area of San Quintin. And they were headed to San Luis, or to Lake Chappala, because during the Second World War, they thought the Japanese might attack the United States and that we would have to land

or or hide a bunch of our air force on dry Lake Chappala. So the United States started building a road down there. Well, the Mexicans got, thought, well, gee, we don't want the Japanese mad at us.

so they put a stop to that. But because of that, there were about 40 miles of dirt road in the San Quintin area. There was just straight and flat, maybe some gentle curves that you could do 100 miles an hour on. That was a well-built dirt road, built up about four feet above the surrounding land. But when we quit building that road, nothing ever, ever got done to it. So 20 years later, 30 years later, that good road was nothing but potholes. And these potholes were 10 inch deep, 6 feet across. Nobody used that road anymore.

Everybody drove along the sides of the road. But in a full-on race car, if you could get going fast enough, you could just bounce off those little high spots on that road because the high spots were level. and you felt like you were driving an airboat because you'd make a little steering in a boat and you weren't on the ground enough to really steer. It would just kind of steer. But you know, and there weren't any curves.

You know, steering wasn't a big problem. But I did that road twice in my race cars. And I found out that I could only go about 15 or 20 minutes before the visual of all those killer potholes that I was hardly feeling. But I just, the visual said, you're going to kill yourself here in a minute. And anyway, I'd slow down and instead of being 80 miles an hour, I'd slow down to maybe 30. And at 30, you couldn't go through those bumps. So I'd get off on the side of the road and run the,

side roads. But some of the guys had enough balls to stay on those roads like Johnny Johnson from San Diego, Bobby Farrell. I mean, those guys had guts. Can you tell me a little bit about Bill Sanders? He was quite a character, wasn't he? He was quite a character. He could sell. He was a promoter. He was a promoter. But not something. But not as you'd ever recognize it, but he would always come up with deals and he had such power with a four-wheeler magazine that everybody gave him extra extra time. And, you know, and then if you, if you did do something together, he'd write about you in the, in his magazine. So, so I think he was less of a promoter and more of a power.

in a position of power. Yeah, so fewer outlets in those days. So if somebody was writing, somebody was interested in the subject, there's only a couple magazines they're going to be writing about it. And if he's the guy writing about it, he's the guy who tells the story for everybody else. Back then, he was the only paper, only magazine. He was the creator of history. Yeah.

And you were part of that history, which is pretty neat. I saw the truck on my last trip down. I stopped at Spector and bought a water pump because I'd had a crazy issue with my, my, my FJ40. You know, I know that that truck, you're winning. You were in, I think, a champion spark plugs ad. Yeah. That would have made all the big magazines.

Where else did that go for you? You know, it didn't go anywhere. When we run that thing, we thought, boy, this is the start. You know, I mean, people are going to know us. We're going to get sponsored. Yeah, this, that. but Toyota just wasn't interested at all outside of a verbal congratulations. And I really don't know why, because a few years later, when the Toyota pickup truck by...

Ivan Miller, Ivan Stewart, excuse me. Yeah, Ivan Stewart. You know, it got... It became huge. It gave, yeah, they had megabucks poured into that thing. So you were the pioneers. Well, yeah. We were the first...

Thanks for your service. Now get out of here. We were the first Toyota to win something in Baja. So from the 15 years that you raced there, you started out in home-built single-seaters. And where was the progression? Well, the progression, really, it just went to... I built a couple of cars. The first two cars were complete my design, complete suspensions my design.

And honestly, I didn't know enough about it. cars to be doing that. Tell me a little bit about your ignorance. What chassis, what engine, where did you start? Well, I completely, you know, I built the frames, I built the transmissions, I built the engines, and I don't know nothing about Volkswagen's, really.

Oh, I've got a couple of friends in the, around that have Volkswagen garages, so I could get information, but they didn't know anything about racing Volkswagen, they just knew about. So I, you know, and then my dad had a machine shop, and we had an arc welder, and that's where I'd learned how to put them. And I'd been into fun buggies, starting out with Renault dolphins with a top cutoff.

No one ever said that ever, a Renault dolphin with the top cut off. Right. So were those just around Southern California in those days? Could you buy them for $100 bucks used because nobody could fix them? Yeah, $50. bucks. You couldn't afford a Volkswagen, that'd cost you $250. How much did a Caravelle cost or Renault Caravelle?

Was that 75? Probably, but there weren't many of those. French cars, really, if you needed a part, and you had to buy a French car. I love it. Go ahead, Pete. Tell me more about starting with Dolphine. Yeah, I learned how to widen the rear wheels because you couldn't buy any of that stuff, especially for Renault-Dauphine.

And so then I got to widening rear wheels or wheels for jeeps and building roll bars for a Jeep dealer up in Oceanside, California, which is where I live now. And that went on for a couple of years where I'd maybe I'd build 10 of each of those things every month for a while. And that's all while I'm learning how to weld. You know, it's not like I know what I'm doing. And how old are you at this time? 26, 27, 28. So back from the service and you're working for dad and living in a trailer behind Dad's shop. Working for Dad, $2.50 an hour.

But I wasn't worth any more than $250 an hour. I was just beginning to learn to be a machinist. And we all decided to buy a welding machine because maybe we could draw a little bit of business off the road, welding some things up. And, you know, I just put out a sign that I can weld. And all my chassis were welled together with stick welders and not migmish guns, like, became very popular very quickly in that early 70s. And I built Baja bugs. I had a couple of doctors around the town here that wanted to go racing in a Baja bug. So I built those for them.

and it's funny one of them didn't even know how to drive a stick shift and the first day we took it out to test that's when I learned he couldn't drive a stick shift we took it out to Ocatee O'Wells makes perfect sense and he was able to get it running

once you got a stick shift going it's just getting it going's a problem but he leaped it off of some hill about six feet in the air and it came down our front wheels and bent the tie rods. So we went home. Hady, 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 Nora Mexican 1000. We're going to drive by day. We're going to party by night.

I'm pouring shots of Fortaleza tequila. April 30th through May 6th, 2022. 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, it's the happiest race on earth. Check it out at nora.com, n-r-r-r-a-com or on Slow Baja. Here at Slow Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser south 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 Bajabound.com, serving Mexico to Mexico. traveler since 1994. You started off single-seat VW-based racers that you constructed everything yourself. What was the progression? So you started there, you eventually got to the land cruiser and then you got on to a Jeep. That's what I've heard.

But fill us in on the spots that I haven't heard about it. Well, between the Toyota and the Jeep, my dad had died. and left me $10,000. And so I put $10,000 into a two-seat Chenoweth frame. And so that was probably happening about 74. And that was a suspension that I didn't build. That was Chenoweth's rear-end Volkswagen-styled and Volkswagen front-end. And that was a disaster.

We never won anything. with that car. And after that, the Jeep happened in 78. And we got a fourth place in the Bahawin. I think that's the only race that I raced with them. Bill may have taken it and raced one in L.A. But it didn't do very good, but it was, you know, it was good for his magazine to write an article about what we'd done. And then I built a Carmen Gia, which was a Baja bug for short course racing. And I hit everything about right with that thing. I mean, you know, you get a little experience, you start learning some stuff. And that thing, it ran Saddleback Park and it ran the L.A. Coliseum.

There were two of those races, and we won the Baja Bug class in the L.A. Coliseum against Rick or Roger. Rick Mears at L.A. Coliseum. And then I raced Roger out in Colorado with the Carmen Gia. It was known as the Carmen Gorilla. The Carmen Gorilla. I'm going to have to look that up on the internet.

So you've dropped some big names here, Lynn Genoith and the Mears brothers. And tell me about did you have any relationship with Lynn? No. In fact, I have met him once or twice, but he wasn't active in his business down there anymore. In fact, it may have been sold to the guy who took over, I think of Johnson took it over at that time. Lynn was a great off-road mind.

I just saw him at the inaugural Nora Mexican 500, and I thought, wow, that's Lynn Chenow. I haven't seen him since 1986 when I photographed the Baja, 5. And he's looking good. He's got some white hair, but, you know, I'm delighted that Nora has come about and all these old vehicles are, you know, making their way. They're still seeing the light of day. You get to see some neat stuff out now. Nora is doing some great stuff. Well, Triple Shocks.

What other things did you engineer on that 73 FJ40 that won the Baja? What did you bring to the party? The Shocks was what I brought. the parties and then just nothing and bolting stuff on right putting the lights on it. The roll bar had been built by Schmitty built up in Los Angeles. It was a donation from. So a good half of that month that I had to prepare that thing was towing that Toyota around to the various places to get a roll bar put in it to get the seats put in it.

The Mastercraft supplied the seats. and so it was I mean I was like a crew chief a working crew chief because you know it definitely and it definitely needed

shock absorbers and those are really the toughest thing to put on that requires strong welding yeah you had to fab up mounts for you know for two more two more so you had

did you have one in the stock location then two more addition or how did you work that out? One in the stock and one in front and one behind the axle on each side in the front. And then the rear, I think, we just had two shocks on each side. Well, we're going to pivot here because we probably just lost all of our audience talking about the arcane details on FJ40s, which I love. And we're going to get back to your dad, got out of Ohio somehow,

and got to California and started going to Baja when you were quite young in an old Dodge pickup, if I recall, our previous conversation. Can you tell me about how that came about when you first started going to Baja and what you saw and what it was like? Well, I grew up in Ohio, rural Ohio, and we had a blizzard one year that froze my dad out. He said, the hell with this. And he'd come from Cleveland where there was plenty of bad weather. But when he had to take care of it himself, he said, no more of this. He started taking a California newspaper.

And he couldn't believe it was 70 degrees. in the winter in San Diego, so that's where we came. By 1953, and I was 12 when I got to California. So he got a job at one of the aircraft plants, and it took him a couple of years to get his financial situation to where he could buy a, he bought an old 1948 Jeep. and that's what we started going to Baja with. And I remember rolling that Jeep down a mountain when I had it out the day before my senior prom. Anyway, it was fixed, and then we started going to Baja. When you say rolling it, you did not mean rolling it on its tires.

You meant rolling it on its head. No, actually, I had gotten out to see where the road goes and they have a real sketchy emergency break in those things. And it popped off while I wasn't in there. So it rolled down the hill, rolled 50 yards, or maybe 100 yards down the hill, leaped off the road that it crossed and ended up down in the bottom of the... Anyway, but Dad got it fixed. Not barrel rolling.

It didn't barrel roll. No. No. Dad got it fixed. And he beached home down here. because it was legal to drive on the beach in 53 and 4 and 5. But then we started going to Baja. And we went down to Punta Banda,

where the bowhole is below Ensenada. Got stuck in the sand down there with the family car. And then I went in the Army. And I got out of the Army. the Army, or I came home on leave, and we took this 1940 Dodge one-ton flatbed truck down to Los Angeles Bay. And again, this is like 1960. And this is you and dad and who else? And two other of his friends.

All of you across the front bench seat or somebody sitting in back in the flatbed? Two people would stand in the back. Stand, of course. Yeah, you got to stand up. And hold on to the flatbed. and you know we had a good amount of camp gear too we'd ride and then we'd switch and the old Dodge it like I said he didn't know anything about fixing something if it ever got in a pull a hard load spark would start jumping away from the coil and it would just go fall flat on his face it

it didn't have a power to pull it on up the hill so you'd have to back up and get another run at it and so but we got all the way to L.A. Bay and then the idea was he was going to leave the truck there and he'd fly back in there and then he'd take the truck further maybe down to Muleh. But none of that ever happened. And did you, you left the truck? We left the truck.

And did you fly back from, how did you get back from L.A. Bay? We flew back from L.A. Bay. And what sort of aircraft? There was a guy named Francisco Munoz, who, who ran a charter up and down Baja, and he had a six-place plane, so that would take care of the four of us and him.

So I can just imagine driving in Baja in those days. What was flying like? Did you ever have any adventures? I think you might have. Yeah, later on in my career, I became one of my racing partners was a frontier fence owner out of Escondido. and he had an airplane.

So that was ideal for this single seat stuff that I was racing because he could fly halfway down and be there when I'd get there and take the car over and do the second half. Which worked out pretty well. But one time we thought, you know, we're spending a lot of time going down here pre-running. So it might be easier to pre-run in the airplane, you know, run around at a couple hundred feet.

You know, we probably wouldn't be able to see any holes, bumps that we'd have to miss, but we'd be able to see turns that we had to make, like where there was a fork in the road. Anyway, so we decided to do that. And we flew down, and we wanted to go down, and we wanted to go down, fly the beach south of San Ignacio. We didn't want to go all the way because you get much further south than that and you hit the pavement and it's pavement all the way into La Pazas. But we wanted to know whether we wanted to go on the beach or we wanted to go inland because we're all afraid of the soft, mucky that the tidal flats became at time, sometimes. Sometimes it

was hard, sometimes it was soft. So we did that. We flew down south of San Ignacio on. We had enough gas to, you know, you calculate your gas by when your one fuel tank goes empty, you know you got that much time to fly on and other fuel tanks. So we came back to San Ignacio and landed in the dirt strip there, thinking that we could get gas there. Well, they, didn't have any gas. And we had maybe 30 minutes worth of gas left. And we thought, well, what the hell are we going to do? So we'd heard, you know, and I was the only one that really knew much about Baja, and I didn't know a hell of a lot. But we'd heard that you could get, there was an airport in Santa Rosa Leah that was a company airport from the mines over there.

Yeah, that makes sense. and that we could go in there an emergency and get gas. What do you think? Is that 100 miles across? 50. 50, all right. Maybe not quite 50. It's 25 miles across a nice flat.

So you've got ample fuel for that little run. Well, maybe. And here comes the rest of the story. Maybe. We figured that, you know, we've got 25 miles. If we run out of gas in that 25 miles, we can land on the straight road. After that, it stouched down about a 3,000 foot mountain down to the coast, probably as a crow flies in maybe 10 miles. We thought if we run out of gas after we get over the mountain's edge, we can coast down, and if we have to, we can ditch in the ocean.

Now, this is, me and there were three of us. The guy owned a plane, he was 40, three or four years old. We were 30 of the other two, and we talked Tom, owner, plane owner, into going this flyover. Well, we got out there about 20 miles, and it was a low-wing plane, so they had a fuel pump. So the fuel pressure began to drop off, and that meant it was time to put it down on the ground. So we did. We had enough fuel in the carburetors to get it on the ground. And this is on the road.

On the road. Yeah. On the paved road. Yeah. That 25 miles from San Ignacio to the mountain's edge was the only paved road in Baja besides Ensenada and the La Pazza. But we put it down and we're going into a little. little cut in the road where there's a little bank on the right and the left and we realized that we didn't know if we could get the wings through that cut and so Tom slammed on the blind binders and did did drive into that cut and and the other two of us had to get out and raise the wings a little bit

for us to get on through that cut to where we can push the plane off the road, which we did and so that That was another dodging of a bullet. And the first parked car that came along was a 72 Ford station wagon with three kids and a man and his wife. And they put the three of us grownups in the back behind the second seat. And we rode on into Santa Rosa Lea, spent the night, got up the next morning, got an audience, which was, this was a Sunday now. So we got an audience with the company, the company commander.

Yeah, the controller, the COO, whoever's going to let you get some gas from their, from their very, very, very protected reserve. Yeah, so we went up to his place. We had an appointment to go there at 10 in the morning. And this guy, he said, when he finally received us, he was receiving us in Spanish. and I could speak a little Spanish, and the other two couldn't speak any. My Spanish was mostly, how do you get here?

How do you get there? I'm hungry. Do you have a beer? Things like that. So I've suffered through trying to tell him about airplanes and out of gas in Spanish for about 15 minutes before he starts speaking English and let me off the hook. But he did. he provided us to a guy to drive us back out to the airplane, gave us 10 gallons of gas.

I think we had to pay him. And 10 gallons of gas was plenty to get us up to L.A. Bay where we could fill up. So what a, you know, luck beats good is where I get the same. Even telling this story, I feel so stupid. But it was, you know, it was like. got a great grin on your face for those who can't be here with me. It was the Baja, the stuff that happens in Baja, you know, it's just crazy. But you can do it.

You know, anybody can do it. You know, most people are too afraid to try. Not everybody, but a lot of, you know, and they don't have these stories. So you started with Baja trips with your dad and some other friends in the 50s, and you got on to building race cars of your own design without any real, I guess you'd call it folk art, folk art race car building in the 60s, late 60s. You saw the race in 69, and then I guess you were building a car by 70. And tell me about misadventures, adventures, what has Baja done to you and your soul?

And, you know, obviously it brought us together, but what, what, What does Baja mean to you? You know, Baja is just a free place to be. You know, you get to Baja and you, you know, if a cop stops you, you just pay them off. You don't have to go to court in two or three weeks. Or if you're wits, you know, if you have plenty of wits and you're lucky, you can talk the cop out of it, whatever. You just don't have unlimited power like the authorities have in the United States to just make you jump through all kinds of ruts. You're telling me basically you have freedom.

Basically you got freedom. You can camp anywhere. You can, you know, you can't be stupid. You know, you can't get drunk and disorderly. Tell me you've been drunk and disordered. in Baja a few times, but I would imagine. But not disorderly. Well, that's good. One time we'd go down to the cantomar,

which is about halfway, about 30 miles below Tijuana with our buggies. This is before we were racing. And we'd camp at the sand dunes there. Then we'd run our buggies on the sand duc every all weekend. Well, at night, we'd be camp somewhere. We'd get a few beers in us. And then we'd probably run, get our buggies out and run up to the halfway house, which was three or four miles away. And then get really blitzed.

One night, one night, my friend of mine and his buddy, where we're high school friends together, got, he's drunk, and the one buddy who didn't own the car they were driving, said, I'm just going to act like I'm passed out. So he passed out trying to get in the car. Well, Jim, the guy who owned the car, went around, he's just as drunk. And he tried to haul his buddy, but he couldn't pick him up, really. So he just decided to pull him out of the car and leave him there on the ground. and he was just pretending to be Right

The other guy would just be passed out Well that's a good friend Just pull you out, leave you on the ground Sorry, absolutely Good luck to you pal Well then the guy with the Pickup He drove back to where camp was

There at the sand dunes And it was a foggy night And he kind of lost his way And where to turn And so he got his pistol out From under the front seat And he started shooting it in the air like somebody'll come and get me or something.

I mean, none of us knew he had a pistol. Well, there's a local cop there that came over and got him. And they put him in the house arrest at his house, which is right next to where we're camping. I mean, none of us really knew this until the next morning. And one of the guys that was down there with us had a Colombian girlfriend who could speak Spanish. And she was pretty nice looking gal, 25, 30 years old. And she was able to talk the cop into letting our buddy go.

You know, he had a gun. Guns are illegal down there. Everything we were doing was illegal down there. But the cop explained to our girlfriend that he was much baracho and muy ruido. And that's not the only incident. we had one of the guy racing partner of mine who owned the airplane. He got his buggy down in San Felipe one night and was trying to drive it up the steps at the Miramar bar there on the... I know that bar well.

Yeah, there on the... On the Malacone. And the cops got him and they were going to haul him off to Mexicali. But one of our cooler friends slipped the guy 25. five bucks and said, I'll take care of him. And so the cop let him go. But I was never a crazy drunk, so drunk maybe, but not mean.

You're a tranquil, very tranquil. Hey, did you ever spend any time fishing or surfing or doing any of the other water sports there? Were you just in the dirt, racing cars and having a good time and drinking a beer and laughing at all your friends? Best I could do is do a little swimming in San Felipe, if the water temperature was up. No, I didn't, I wasn't a water sports person.

You know, I did water sports in Encinitas when I grew up in high school, but I was really a greaser. I wasn't a, I wasn't a surfer. And no fishing. And so you say no fishing? So when your dad and you're driving the truck down to Bahia de Los Angeles, mostly people in those days were going to Beheed on Los Angeles to Fis Angeles to fish. Yeah, my dad would go fishing, and I probably went out with him one time or so, but it certainly wasn't a highlight of my life. And tell me a little bit about your mom. What did she think about

all this? Well, in the beginning, when I was 14, and she'd go camping with us. But by the time I was in high school, she was done with camping. She'd just stay home. And of course, Fred and I were my dad, Fred, we weren't out getting drunk. So it wasn't that kind of an issue for her. It was just going to be gone for a few days, and then they'll be back. Good father-son time. Yeah, yeah. We had good time.

And my dad was a heavy drinker, but he never missed a day's work that I know. Came with the territory in those days, though, didn't it? Well, yeah, but he was a professor. I mean, he had stories he used to say he had a bar room personality and that's probably true because he was a life of a party

when the beer came out. So let's get back to, again, what brought us together, Baja, your passion for Baja and my passion for Baja. What happens to you when you drive across the border? What do you

think that the Baja effect is. Do you feel it in your bones? Like, hey, I've gotten out of Tijuana. The coast is on my right. I'm heading south and there's a feeling that comes over you. Or am I just romanticizing it? Well, the first thing it happens is you crack open a beer. You know, and you have two or three of those the time you get to Ensonata.

And, you know, you're still plenty. sober. So then you go through Ensenada, maybe stop for dinner. So, I mean, you're beginning to be loose. You don't do that in the states anywhere. And

I don't know if there's some mystic feeling. It's just you know, you're just going to go down there and you're going to have a good time. And when you crossed back to the relative

sanity and safety of the United States. Did you ever feel like, who, I dodged a bullet. I got back in one piece or I only got back with scratches, no stitches. For the first 15 years of my going to Baja, every time when I left there, I said, I ain't never going back. Never going back. I've never going back to Baja. It would take about six months. this was before racing

and it would take about six months and we'd be having a beer somewhere daring each other or suggesting that you know let's go down we'll do it right this time let's go

I mean when we took that 40 Dodge down to LA Bay and remind me what year was that 50 what? That was like 61 1960

yeah 6060 60-161 Well, about two or three years later, we realized we weren't going to get the truck on down further south and that why didn't somebody go down and get it? Well, a friend of mine who was good 10 years older than me, and I was probably 23. One summer from college, we decided to go down and get that truck and would take our motorcycles. Well, I had a 500-cc-vella set. It didn't have any lights.

It was strictly a dirt bike. And he had a Greek, no, it wasn't a grieves, Jawa, 250 Jawa that he'd race out in the desert, heron-hound things. And so we loaded up, went down to get that thing. And we drove for 13 hours out of, out of, Tijuana that day before I went over the handlebars in the dark because there's no lights. Trying to get about 10 miles out of L.A. Bay.

Just trying to get there. We're just trying to get there. We're in the dark. We're just trying to get there. Right. It's only 10 more miles. And the darker it got, the faster we went. And it's pretty damn dark there, isn't it?

It's dark. And that's the exact thing you're not supposed to be doing. The darker it gets this slower. you should be going. But, you know, it was, it was like, oh, we only had a little ways to go, and we'd get a bed instead of sleeping out here in the sand. But we slept right where I went over the handlebars. And then, you know, we were going down there to pick up the truck, so we were going to put the bikes in the back of the truck and bring the truck home, which we did the next day.

I found a welder that would weld my rear hub on the motorcycle to the hub so the four out of the five lug nuts that I'd lost, the wheel wouldn't drop off. And we loaded it up and we left. And we decided to go to San Felipe, even though we'd gone down the west side. But we didn't know about the three sisters there south of Portocetis. which was just a horrendous in those days.

It had one foot tall ledges that you had to climb up over three mountain passes, just rocks. And remember, this is the truck that would fall on its face of it. And we hit those goddamn mountains in a pitch black, a wind was blowing. and we didn't know how far the ocean was down below us, but we could hear the waves crashing. And with one hill, the worst one, we had to make a run at three different times. In fact, we had to unload the bikes to finally make it up. Had to drop back, back down this goddamn hill with a flashlight,

a dim flashlight that he was shining. I was going to say, you didn't have those big rigid off-road lights that everybody has to turn his night. into day here now. You've got a dim flashlight. And we made San Felipe after about 24 hours of leaving LA Bay.

And I mean, that was a perfect case of I ain't never going back to Baja again. When we got home, it was over. Not for all the beer in the world. I'm not doing it. Yeah. Amen. Well,

I think it's been a delightful chat with you, Pete, and I really am thrilled that you got a chance to talk to me about your Baja days. What's your takeaway? Again, when was the last time you were down there and what's your takeaway? Do you think that things have changed, or do you think that you've changed, or do you think that just there's so much more reporting about everything that you hear about stuff you didn't hear about before? What's your take on Baja these days? Well, there's all that, but I wouldn't be a bit afraid to go anywhere in Baja. Although I don't do it much anymore.

Hardly, I haven't been down in, I think it's been going on three years now. And really don't anticipate going again. I don't have the vehicles for it. You know, I wouldn't go down just to be on the pavement in my Prius. so but gee if you have an off-road car

and it's still the place to go go down watch the races or go down and fishing or you know just get a map and go you know do your research

whatever you got time for but all you need is a map uh don't be try to keep track of where you're going to get your next gas if you're south of Ensenada. But there's, you know, there's a big

there's about a 300 mile stretch from El Rosario to Guerrera Negro where there isn't any gas stations. Maybe it's 250, but it's quite, it's too far for a motorcycle. Or a land cruiser that only gets 10 miles of the gallon and doesn't

have an auxiliary tank. But, you know, the Mexicans have the same trouble, so they've got pickup trucks along the away with 50 gallon drums of gas that they'll sell you gas for it's only a little bit more expensive than the regular stuff yeah they take their cut but not they don't hurt you it's not near as much as i'd charge for gas for hauled at that far given the work that goes into it exactly you're exactly right uh yeah you know and i had extra gas the last time i rolled through there and i bought some anyways just to say you know what this guy's out here doing it so i bought five gallons for

them just to make sure i was going to get where i was going because you know it was good insurance Yeah, absolutely. You were down there when the roads were really bad. Oh, God, yes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the bad roads keep the good people out, or keep the bad people out. Yeah. Yeah, bad roads, good people.

Good roads, bad people. Yeah. That was her saying. Most, whenever you ask a Mexican, how's the road over there on the way to there? And, you know, they'll say, well, it's less worse. Less worse. Yeah. I love it.

I love it. Hey, you spent an entire era when you had to ask for directions all the time. You didn't have a GPS. That's right. You didn't have the Baja Almanac. You might have had a AAA map or a World War II map or something, right? But you asked for directions everywhere you went. Yeah.

And then there would usually be a homemade sign. said with an arrow with an arrow that said L.A. Bay or Pune-A.da. The major towns. The other road, wherever it went, it didn't tell you that. Right, right, right. How many miles do you think you've driven in the peninsula? It's a long pause. Probably 15,000, 15,000. 15,000 miles. Yeah. Wow. And do you have a, is there one spot that? Did you say if I could go back tomorrow I'd be there? I don't think so. No?

And I had a school bus that I put on a piece of property down 25 miles south of San Felipe on a lot. Porticito someplace down that way? That way, but halfway. Yeah, halfway. San Felipe, Portocitos. And I had it there for a few years, and I didn't, it was the biggest mistake I ever made. because I didn't want to go to the same place again. And then because I had a bus there, I felt like I should.

Right. So, no, I don't think I have a place. You know, I like Melling's Ranch. I like the observatory up there. You know, I like going through my Sky Ranch, but I don't want to stay there. And I like Coyote Cows, that beach, there south of Santa Tomas.

Okay. And Arendara is where that is. Yep. I like that whole coastline. Yeah, I drove that road from in the first day of the Nora Mexican 1,000.

We drove that dirt road from Santo Tomas out to Irondura. And that's the first time I've been on that road. It was pretty neat. It was rough enough for me. I should have aired down before I did. It's plenty rough, but almost anything can do it. But it's neat when you get down, you start to see the water, and it's like, holy, Toledo, look at this.

I just wish we'd stopped at Castro and had a big seafood lunch there. You know, we had to keep on going and ended up having tacos and Valley Tea, I guess. I go into downtown Arendara to Gloria's place. It's one block up the hill, the Kocina kitchen, and that's where I always go to eat there. That's a good recommendation. Next time I'm going to go in there and drop your name. If you bring a fish that you got from Castro, she'll cook it for you. Nice.

Or she's got stuff too, but probably chicken and that sort of thing if you don't bring her a piece of fish. And I've never eaten it, Castro. Well, that makes two of us, but I'm going to take your recommendation for Glorias, and I'll bring her a piece of fish, and she'll cook it three ways like they always do. Yeah, she's one block up the hill. Yeah, we saw it when we were driving out. Well, Pete Springer, I'm delighted that you made this time for me. It gave you absolutely zero notice, and we've had a nice hour-long chat here.

So I'm going to say signing off now for Michael Emery, Slow Baja, with Baja Legend, winner of the 1973 Baja 1000 Pete Springer. Thank you, Mike. 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.

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