Dust Devils

Flying top cover for off-road racers

It's pitch black outside. There is no moon, and Baja's mountain ous desert terrain offers few lights to show us where the land ends and the sky begins. Yet there is one all-important light below — a 5-million-candlepower light bar on one particular off-road race truck that we are tasked with following through the night.

Circling overhead in a Cessna 172RG, we are only one small piece of race driver Robby Gordon's support crew for the grueling Baja 1000 off-road race. But we are a critical piece. Since the hilly terrain interferes with radio reception, the ground crews and race drivers often cannot hear or find each other without the help of an airborne crew member.

Gordon's tense voice crackles over the radio, barely audible over the high-revving, 750-horsepower engine in his Trophy Truck racer. "Mike, do you read me? I'm running on a right front flat! Find the closest truck; have it meet me at the chase road intersection 7 miles back from from the turn at Trinidad." Pilot Michael Strauss quickly checks his race map, radios down to the chase trucks, and finds the one closest to the point that Gordon has chosen. He then directs its crew to "haul ass" to the intersection and be ready for a right front tire change.

The tension builds as Gordon radios again. "I'm coming in, I'm getting close! Is he going to be there?" Strauss radios the ground crew again. At first there is no response. Then a voice shoots back, "Roger, Mike. We're here; we're ready. We've got the jacks set and a guy with a big red 'X' on his shirt. Tell Rob to stop right in front of him." Strauss relays this information to Gordon. The rendezvous is made, and in something less than 30 seconds Gordon and his co-driver, Gregg Till, are back on the course with a new tire.

And so it goes for the 14 to 30 hours that it takes drivers to complete what is known as the toughest off-road race in the world. To "beat the Baja" has been the ultimate challenge for off-road racers since the first Honda 250-cc motorcycles raced the length of the famed peninsula south of California's border in 1962. The race was formalized in 1967 as the Mexican 1000, running from Tijuana or Ensenada all the way down to La Paz. Renamed the SCORE Baja 1000 in 1975, it now alternates between 1000 miles and 1000 kilometers in length. But either way, it is a test of endurance for both the drivers and the pilots who chase them.

"This race is first and foremost a contest between us and the desert," says co-driver Till. "Then it's us against the limits of our physical endurance. Only third is it a race against the other trucks."

For pilots, the Baja represents a different kind of marathon challenge that they call "the longest night in racing." "On the long Baja races we take off at 7 a.m. and fly until 9 o'clock the next morning, stopping only for fuel," explains Mike Venable, who flies a Twin Commander for the Venable Racing team. Those hours are not spent on autopilot, either. Chase flying is a demanding activity.

First, there is the basic task of trying to maintain visual contact with a race truck on the ground while avoiding competitors' chase aircraft that are circling in the same vicinity. Meanwhile, Strauss had no fewer than three frequencies coming through the headsets — an FM radio link for Gordon and his ground crew, an air-to-air "race traffic" frequency for all the chase pilots, and a local ATC frequency. Often, he had up to three or four voices vying for his attention at the same time. In addition, a couple of 5-hour stints in the air will make pilots more current in slow flight, S-turns, and turns about a point than they have been since they were student pilots. That is, of course, after they manage to find the race truck they are supposed to be chasing.

Strauss had both the requisite sectional of the area and a map of the race course. Unfortunately, we were hard-pressed to find any correlating points between the two, in part because the Baja race takes place in remote terrain with few roads or villages — let alone railroad tracks, power lines, or other telltale sectional guides. As a result, GPS becomes a very important weapon. Strauss bootlegged a list of coordinates for various mile markers along the course, which at least got us in the ballpark. Finding the truck then became a matter of keeping our eyes peeled for competitors' aircraft and the telltale cloud of dust that marked each racer's trail.

Pilots also have to cope with the challenges of flying in a foreign country. Weather becomes a much higher stress factor, since aviation weather reports and forecasts in Baja are far from reliable. In general, the Mexican controllers work very well with the race pilots. But pilots still have to work with the more restrictive and sometimes unpredictable rules imposed by the Mexican aviation authorities, which create some interesting situations.

"The only thing you know for sure in Mexico is that nothing is for sure," says Curt Potter, who flew a Grumman Tiger for the Ford Rough Riders team during the most recent race, held last November 7. The race teams pool together to pay certain airports to stay open for fueling later than normal, and pilots come equipped with extra T-shirts, hats, and team paraphernalia to help pave the way. But that is not always a guarantee of results.

During November's race, for example, the airport at San Felipe was supposed to stay open until 10 p.m. for fueling race aircraft. When the pilots began to arrive, however, they discovered a good news/bad news situation. The good news was that the airport did, indeed, have fuel. The bad news was that the airport officials had decreed that fueling would cease at 8 p.m., as would the filing of any international flight plans. As there were no other airports open in northern Baja after dark, the change meant that several pilots had to abandon their drivers before the end of the race.

Another year, Potter recalls, the airport officials in Loreto decided "only big airplanes" could take off after dark, even though the race crews had paid to keep the airport open all night. "You just have to come here with the right attitude and not get all worked up about it," Potter says. The pilots also try to help each other out when they run into administrative or other difficulties.

The types of chase aircraft used by teams vary widely. For daylight portions of the shorter Baja races, some of the better-funded teams employ helicopters, which have the advantage of being able to get to a race truck immediately in case of an emergency. But drivers still rely heavily on fixed-wing airplanes, since Baja's aviation authorities do not allow helicopters to fly at night. In the most recent Baja race, Gordon decided to use both a helicopter and an airplane, allowing Strauss a respite during some of the daylight hours.

Yet even the fixed-wing aircraft vary quite a bit. Chase planes range from Grumman Tigers and Cessna 182s to a Cessna Citation V business jet. Slow, high-wing airplanes are better for keeping sight of a race truck and directing ground crews to a broken-down racer, but some teams settle for just the all-important radio relay capability an airborne crew provides.

There are some restrictions about what pilots can tell the racers, and officials monitor frequencies closely to enforce those rules. For example, chase pilots are not allowed to tell race drivers any details about the course itself or alert them to wrong turns. In theory, the drivers shouldn't need this information, because the top teams spend a great deal of time "pre-running" off-road courses, charting their turns and obstacles. But the Baja race is complicated by a wild card known as the local residents. Not content with the excitement generated by the normal race course, locals often go out the night before the race and construct obstacles or dig ditches to snag racers as they go by.

Usually, the pilots have to let the race drivers deal with these unexpected booby traps on their own. If the trap is serious enough to pose a real safety threat, however, pilots are allowed to warn their drivers of the danger ahead. Pilots of both airplanes and helicopters are also prohibited from ferrying or dropping any parts or tools to drivers stranded in the desert, although there are sheepish grins and rumored tales that hint of that rule's having been broken every now and then.

What the pilots are allowed to do is act as a radio relay between ground crew and drivers, tell the racers how far ahead or behind the competition is, and help steer ground crew vehicles to stranded race trucks. Since the top finishers can be separated by as little as 20 seconds, those services can spell the difference between a win and a middle-of-the-pack finish.

Nobody is quite sure when off-road race drivers started using aircraft as chase vehicles, although one of the earliest pioneers was undoubtedly Jim Venable, who started using an 85-hp Piper J-3 Cub to chase his Volkswagen beetle racer in 1978. Using an airplane was a natural connection for Venable, a pilot whose family owns the Hemet Valley Flying Service in Hemet, California. Other racers soon saw the advantage of having an airborne crew. But airplanes cost money, and off-road racing — like air racing — traditionally has been a sport for independents, funded out of their own pockets.

That began to change with the advent of cable sports channels in the late 1980s. The expanded television coverage of motor sports suddenly made off-road racing more attractive to sponsors, creating budgets that could incorporate aircraft chase crews, at least for the fastest racers.

Gordon, who races both NASCAR and Indy cars in addition to his off-road efforts, has significant sponsorships from several companies that help to fund the estimated $1 million that it costs him to compete for an off-road season. Just Gordon's race truck, which is loosely based on a Ford F150 pickup, is a $400,000 vehicle. For the Baja race he also employs at least half a dozen ground support vehicles spread out along the course, in addition to a full tractor-trailer mobile repair station. Then, of course, there are the aircraft.

Gordon started using chase airplanes in 1993 and began incorporating a helicopter for some races in 1995. "Basically, we'd ask anyone we knew who had an airplane if he'd be willing to fly for us," says Till. The team reimburses expenses, but the pilots volunteer their time. So when Gordon met Strauss at an Indy car race in 1994 and found out that Strauss owned an airplane, Gordon immediately began recruiting him for the team. It didn't take much persuasion. "It's fun," Strauss says. "Yeah, it's tiring, but it really is fun."

Only the top off-road race class — the Trophy Trucks — regularly uses chase airplanes. But Robby Gordon's father Bob, himself a renowned off-road race driver, attributes that to more than just the availability of sponsor money. "An airplane gives you such an advantage that the other classes themselves discourage the use of them, to keep one guy with money from dominating the class," he says. "For instance, at the Laughlin (Nevada) race this year, I lost by 1 minute 10 seconds. If I'd had an aircraft chasing me, I would have known to put the power up and I could have won."

Gordon and Till know well the value of their chase pilots. "There's lots of places, especially in the long Baja race, where if we broke, we'd be hard pressed to get a crew to us and get out without air support," Till says. They also have a lot of respect for the job the pilots do. Indeed, Till thinks that the pilots may have the harder end of the bargain.

To take on the Baja, Till and Gordon spend 14 to 30 hours bouncing through ruts, holes, ditches, and rollers in choking dust and mud at 40 to 100 mph. Many times, they also have to perform their own field repairs. But Till still wouldn't want to trade places with the pilots.

"Reading notes and navigating while we're tearing over a course for 15 hours wears you down," he admits. "But I'll tell you what. I'd rather be a co-driver in a race truck than try to be a pilot chasing this race all those hours. Now that would be really brutal."

Lane E. Wallace, AOPA 896621, is an aviation writer and private pilot based in California who has been flying for more than 7 years. She is the co-owner of a 1946 Cessna 120.