Slow Baja - Peter Brock On Datsun, Baja, And Mary McGee

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Peter Brock is an American automotive design and motorsports legend. At age 19, while attending Art Center School, Brock became the youngest designer ever hired by General Motors' design department. In November 1957, legendary GM stylist, Bill Mitchell, selected one of Brock's sketches to become the iconic 1963 Corvette Stingray. After securing his SCCA racing license at 21 years old, he acquired an ex-Le Mans Cooper and returned to California to pursue a career in racing. He landed at the famed Max Balchowsky's Hollywood shop. His next move would be as Carroll Shelby's first employee, running the newly-formed Shelby School of High-Performance Driving. Soon he was working for Shelby American, where he penned logos, merchandise, ads, and car liveries. He designed the Shelby components of the Shelby Mustang GT350s, and his renowned Shelby Daytona Cobra coupe won the FIA GT World Championship. Following his success at Shelby, he founded Brock Racing Enterprises. Brock put the previously-unknown Japanese car maker, Datsun, on the map. The BRE prepared Datsun's dominated SCCA racing, winning on Sunday --and selling on Monday. In 1967, he ventured to Baja with Mary McGee to race in the first Mexican 1000. The experience led to an obsession with off-road racing, and the desolate peninsula. Brock returned to lead the Datsun factory race team for the next three years. Since those early days, he's repeatedly covered the Baja 1000 as a journalist.  In 2010, the Art Center College of Design awarded Brock their Lifetime Achievement Award for "Outstanding accomplishment in the fields of automotive design, technology, innovation, motorsports, and journalism." He was inducted into the Sports Car Club of America Hall of Fame in 2017. Follow Peter Brock on Facebook here. Learn more about Peter Brock and BRE here.

Hello, hello, hello, Ola, Como Estos, Slobaha amigos. My heaping dose of gratitude goes out to Mary McGee. I hope you listen to the podcast with Mary went up last week. She is just a pistol. Funny, witty, self-deprecating, great recall, 85 years old, great recall of stuff that happened 60 years ago. I can't say thank you enough for, to Mary, for making some time. time for slow Baja. Today's conversation is with Peter Brock. As I mentioned in the podcast with

Mary, I called Peter to get some information to get some stories about Mary in the early Baja races. Peter was running the Dotson Racing program and he is an automotive legend. He got hired at GM when he was 19 years old, Penn the 1963 Corvette, Stingray, one of the probably the most beautiful iconic corvettes of all time. Got snapped up by Shelby and designed the Daytona Coupe for all you Ford versus Ferrari fans. Yes, he's the guy who designed the Daytona Coupe. Went on to take a little unknown Japanese car brand, Dotson, Datson, as Mary says, and raced on Sunday, sold on Monday, and really established that brand.

through racing the Dotson Roadster, the Dotson 510, and the Dotson Z car on the track and in the dirt. And Peter Brock was kind enough to talk to me a little bit about Mary. The conversation that I had with Mary was too long to share Peter's conversation, but I really wanted to share it with you. So here it is today. And without further ado, enjoy this conversation. I sincerely hope that I get a chance to get a microphone in Peter's hand soon. and we can all hear more about Dotsons in Baja.

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. I'm on the line with the legend Pete Brock, and I'm going to set it up here for the Slow Baja listeners who aren't familiar with Pete. Peter, you've got a lifelong history in automotive design, automotive fabrication, and automotive racing that spans 63 Corvette, if I'm not mistaken. You jump in here and correct me when I'm wrong. The Shelby Daytona Coupe.

And then, of course, you came to my attention because my first car was a Dotson 510 of campaigning the Dotson roadsters and campaigning the Dotson racing program that was so dominant in the 60s and 70s and leading the Dotson program in Baja. And I called today, and you're so gracious to call me back, to get some stories about Mary McGee. And, well, here we are.

So tell me what I got correct and incorrect on your career. You've got all the correct design stuff and whatever. And it was the important thing that we're looking at is we're looking about, you know, early or mid-60s and 70s that, The Japanese car industry had not yet really landed on these shores with any great success. So my team, BRE, was one of the first to begin running Japanese cars when nobody else was. I was the very first to run a Japanese car in the United States. I ran with a little company called Hino, H-I-N-O, which is one of the largest trucks and bus manufacturers in the world, but they specialize in Asia.

and they had a small group within their company that wanted to build a high-end, high-quality car. And so they were interested in doing something. And I had some friends that were running inos in Japan, and they suggested that I bring one of those cars over here and develop it for racing in Southern California, which we did. And that program turned out very well. And as we moved along, of course, we were, were looking for other areas to run and one of those areas was Baja and I'd always had a great

fascination for running in Baja but did not have much experience and that was when I got together with Mary McGee because Mary being one of the top motorcycle racers in that period had gone down below the border there weren't too many people that had gone down below the border and she had a lot of experience down there. And so I decided to tap into that experience and ask Mary to be the lead driver on a prototype program that we ran in 67 with a little pickup truck. And so it was both a chance to do a test for the factory and showing what the pickup trucks could do in their ruggedness in Baja.

and also get some more experience in running in VA. So it was a developmental program that started in 67. And from that, we developed a 5-10 that we ran with a 2-liter sports car motor in the next year. And that gave us even more experience when we ran down there. And then in 69, we put together a full team of which Mary was part. and we ran three dots in five-tens that had been lightweight rally cars that had been built identical to the cars that the Nissan factory had run very successfully in the safari rallies in Africa and India. So when they brought those cars over, of course, we had some good experience in Baja

and looked them overall and explained to the chief. engineer who came with the cars that I thought everything on the car looked pretty good, but I felt at the front end was going to be pretty fragile because of our experience the previous year. And there was a lot of resistance to doing that at that point. And, you know, after a few days and we ran down there a little bit, I finally said, you know, why is it we can't make this modification that I want to do to the front suspension? And there was kind of a long silence and he says, well, he says, my boss designed that.

front suspension and he said if I change it he said that will put my job in jeopardy so I can't change that but he says the solution is we will we will hire an airplane with two more Japanese factory team mechanics that ran in the safari and we'll load it up with front suspension parts and we'll follow you and if the car breaks you know we can land at these little dirt strips and each little town had a dirt strip for medical emergencies so they were dotted along the whole baha peninsula so when the suspension would break they'd fly come down right out of the sky these two guys had run over and changed that whole front suspension on the car in about five or six minutes and off we'd go again so the cars were really really fast and and of course mary was

you know one of the lead drivers and doing very well with us but we couldn't keep keep them all running without breaking. And, of course, we couldn't fix them at night because that's the time that the drug runners fly at night. So it's against federal regulations in Mexico to fly your private plane at night. So in fact, that we were the fastest production two-wheel drive team down there. We had this problem with the front suspension that which kept breaking.

And had we not had that, we would have easily won it. As it was, we could get way out in front. front and then it would break and we'd have to wait for the airplane to come and fix it and then you know catch up again so at that time we were running against the uh the factory sob team and uh they had sent over their top drivers from uh from sweden to run against us and uh they were very very reliable and they would just you know it was a tortoise and hair thing you know we'd go screaming by them and we'd be out miles out in front and then we'd be broken down and they'd come trunding along and go by and, you know, merrily wave at us as they went by.

So I think we ended up third instead of first, but it was a good experience. And if we hadn't had Mary McGee-Dade down there at the beginning to give us some indication of what Baja was like and where to go and how to get along down there, we wouldn't have been able to do it. So I think Mary's whole experience of running in Baja and running a bike down there long before anybody had ever decided, you know, take any cars down there was of a great, great help and planning it. And, of course, it led into that three-year program as we kept developing, and she was definitely part of it. So she made it happen. 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.

If your website's fast and easy to use, check them out at BajaBound.com. That's Bajaubound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Pete, well, I've got you on the line, and I am tickled to have you here. John Morton told me at Monterey a couple years ago you were absolutely obsessed with Baja. And you're a fellow who's raced all over the world. Honestly, La Maugh, sports car racing, you've raced all over the world. You absolutely were dominant in the sports car scene here in the 60s and 70s with your program, putting a totally unknown car brand on the map and generating sales on Monday and all that.

What was it about Baja? What was it that got under your skin? John said he hated it, and you loved it. Tell me about that. Well, I mean, John's a, you know, a precision road racer. And it just drove them absolutely nuts when you went down there that you didn't run the line. You had to pick what you thought was going to be the best line. And Baja was so unusual because in the years that everybody had run all kinds of stuff up and down those roads down there,

there were a variation of roads they were all you know maybe 100 yards apart or whatever they split off and they joined back up again and you had to figure out to be the fastest way down there you'd go down and pre-run and figure out which of these little alternate courses that you might run would be fastest and you couldn't tell because you'd come over the top of a hill and as you'd look down there would be like three different variations that you could take right left or whatever. So the purpose in going down there to pre-run was to take each one of these and make notes on them and figure out which would be the best one. And then when you got on those, you didn't run the line. You know, the Baja line is trying to figure out which is going to be the least destructive line for the car. So for John, who's a very precise driver, it absolutely drove him crazy because having been

down there and run there, I was running this hard line, which was not the ideal road racing line. And so when he'd look at it, he used to go, God, that's crazy. We should be running the ideal line. But of course, that was all chewed up on the apex. So it took a while for us to get dialed in on it. And sometimes I made decisions down there that didn't work. I remember once we came up to a river that we had to cross and there was a guy there that was trying to be helpful in pointing out what the least amount of depth was to cross over there and I got out and I walked around in different spots on it

and I decided I was going to go someplace else and I did and it was the wrong if I'd take any of the local advice I would have gone right you know and it's just uh John just thought are you out of your mind and of course I was you know But that's the way you learn in Baja, and it was so much fun to run down there because it's the terrain that determines

and how you read the terrain that determines how fast you're going to be. And if you can build a car that will hold up, it's wonderful, wonderful racing because it's a total adventure every time you go down there. And it can be an incredible amount of work. You can get stuck in the deep dirt down there, and it'll take you, you know,

or three hours to go six feet and keep digging it out in the saw sand or whatever. But that's the whole, you know, thing that makes it difficult. And it can be a tremendous amount of work, but it can also be a lot of fun. But if you don't go down there and you don't learn that, you have no idea what you're going to get into. And that was what, where Mary McGee was a great help to us because she had been down there. And, of course, running a bike down there, it's a little bit different than a car. things are a little bit easier to run around on a hard line.

So that experience that running down there with Mary was the whole beginning of our adventures in Baja. Well, Peter, I truly appreciate you making some time for Slow Baja today and telling me a little bit about Mary McGee and how she helped you guys get going down there. It must have been really something in that era. I can't imagine there were a lot of women sports car racers or doing any type of racers. She's a formidable woman, 5 foot 11. You said you met her used to be at the bar there. Can you just tell me a little bit about? Yeah, well, she and her husband ran that bar.

You know, Bob was also a racer. He was a guy that prepped everything for her. And she loved to run down there and was a remarkable person. And I've always, you know, I go on people's ability not whether, you know, what they look like or who they are or whatever on their abilities and knowledge and that was what really made her stand out well I appreciate you sharing some stories

thanks for making some time and I'll let you get on to your productive year day but again can't say it sincerely enough thanks Peter all right real good you take care now give my regards to Gail I'll do that cheers hey thanks bye bye

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AdobeGuadalupe.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, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Peter Brock, as brief as it was. I could listen to problems of Peter telling me about trying to solve the problems of the Dotson front-end design all day long, and I hope sincerely that I get a chance to sit down with him soon to get the more on that story.

Big news out of Nora today, Mary McGee was named the Grand Marshal of the upcoming Nora 500, which is at the end of September, September 29th through October 2nd in Ensenada. You know you can join me in that event in your street legal four by four. sign up for the Slow Baja Safari class. We'll have a lot of fun. You'll get to meet Mary McGee. I'll probably get to pour you a little Fort Laiza after all the driving's done. It'll be a great long weekend in Ensenada.

Okay, I will be back with something fun next week. Thank you for listening. I guess I've got to say it. I've got to tell you about Mary McGee's pal, Steve McQueen, Baja lover, Baja's life. Everything that comes before or after is just waiting.