Ok, it’s only one quote in a tremendously cool article written by Judy Smith, a veteran Baja racer and longtime writer for Hot VWs. A good number of the photos were shot by Trackside Photo, which got the great shot of us catching air at last year’s Baja 1000. They even mentioned our fundraising for World Diabetes Day. Click here or on the image to download a PDF of the article.
The folks at the Press Banner did a piece on us and a local motorcycle team prepping for the Baja 1000, “1000 reasons“. A great headline. Thank you Chuck and Peter.
Our 1102 numbers arrive from STS Graphics tomorrow via Fedex.
Shawn and I (mostly Shawn) complete painting the car tomorrow. I pick up the Desert Dingo logo for the hood, sponsor graphics and some surprise stuff on Monday.
The team is pulling together spare parts that we’ll either load in the car or carry in the chase vehicles.
We were contacted by the local American Diabetes Association with an offer to display the car at the San Jose City Hall rotunda. Unfortunately, we’ll be down in Mexico doing pre-running. I’ll be meeting with them on Monday, will give them hero cards and loads of crayons and we’ll figure out how we can work together on future events and have the car available. This should be fun.
We’re going with a new paint scheme for this year’s Baja 1000. We took the car to Holly Oak Elementary School in San Jose where Ms. Battistella’s students painted their palms in red, blue or gold paint and pressed them on the fenders. I’ll put a gallery of photos up later tonight.
We depart for Mexico on Wednesday. More painting and final prep work to do this weekend. Graphics start arriving tomorrow. More to come.
We did our logistics meeting today, mapping out everything that has to happen before we leave, what we need to do between the time we leave and the time the race starts, and what happens during the race.
Seth is a logistical genius. I Twittered the meeting here, which is the best way to get the recap.
While all that was going on, Shaw was prepping the car for paint. We made a rocket run to OSH for Rustoleum gloss and matte white paint for the rattle can work and to some hot dog stand that looked like a giant orange and which has been in business since 1936.
We are so much smarter than we were a year ago and still, with a week to go, there is so much to do. Check out shots from today’s effort here.
We all meet at noon today to work through logistics for the Baja 1000. We were told early on that logistics is 75% of winning the race and I’m coming to believe it. I’ll live Twitter the meeting, so watch http://twitter.com/desertdingo for live updates.
But first, check out the unbelievably cool book that Blair created for the team. She’ll be putting more of her creations online, but until then you can check out what she has for sale here.
One of the greatest miscalculations I made last year was expecting that everyone in Mexico spoke English. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but my mistake became quite apparent pretty quickly after we got south of Ensenada. It’s a mistake I won’t repeat and I’m now relearning Spanish by listening to a great Spanish language learning series by Michael Thomas.
Julia has also been tremendously helpful, coaching me on some desert-race-specific phrases, including:
“Help me flip the car back over” translates as “Por favor aduyame endedicar el coche.”
And then there’s “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” You say: “Parecia una buena idea en el momento.”
and, most importantly:
“Es sólo una herida superficial. No le diga a mi esposa.”