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Baja 1000

Discussion in 'Trip Reports' started by snivilous, Nov 23, 2020.

  1. Nov 23, 2020 at 12:06 PM
    #1
    snivilous

    snivilous [OP] snivspeedshop.com

    Joined:
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    I got back last night from the Baja 1000, here is a quick overview to maybe help people in the future on a similar trip. This is my second Baja 1000, and 3rd time to Baja. Last year I chased and pit for a trophy truck team which was cool, but this year decided to just spectate and explore a bit. I had some friends come down from Salt Lake City and we decided the Tundra was the best platform for the trip, so we swapped my buddy's RTT and bed rack onto the Tundra late Wednesday and then rolled out from Southern Utah.

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    Wednesday night we spent near San Diego at a friends place. Thursday morning we rolled out and first picked up some ADS bypasses from a forum member while getting groceries :D then headed south and crossed the border and went down to Ensenada. This is the course map, with Ensenada in the top left. This year contingency and tech weren't a public thing so there wasn't much to do or see, so we grabbed some tacos and went to the hardware store for some stuff and then headed to a camp site.

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    Race mile 140 is along the beach, so we planned to camp there along the course. We were to take the course from where it exits the highway down to the beach, and the map we were following showed that we could follow it down near San Vicente. What I didn't know was the guy navigating somehow had downloaded the course from 2016, so we ended up driving the totally wrong way for a few hours. This was near an overlook on the 2016 part of the course. Most of the course looks like this and isn't much worse than a fire road.

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    One of my friends brought his Road Shower, which is a pile of shit and has these dumb little tube clamps that hold it on. Well that ended up falling off right when we got to this overlook and banged up the bed side a bit (course it was my fault for driving on a quick pace, and not my friend's fault for not knowing how to mount his gear properly, oh well).

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    Around that time is when I more thoroughly investigated the navigators route, since we had stopped seeing course markers miles back. That's when I found that his map was wrong. We were closer to the other end of this loop we were on, so we kept going forward. We came upon our original planned camping area.

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    Fast forward a bunch of miles and we got back on the highway, got service, downloaded the REAL course map, and found the correct beach near RM140. We found this spot late at night.

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    We bought the largest pizza ever the night before and the supercharger provided plenty of reheating ability. 55 slices lasts awhile!

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    Where we camped was about 100ft near the course. Friday morning the first motorcycles passed us around 7am and they had left the start line at Ensenada around 4am. We ended up moving the truck closer to the course and setting up the awning (my friends brought the full overlanding try hard gear as you can tell).

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    Around 1pm the first Trophy Trucks passed us, they had left around 10am. To reiterate we were 140 miles into the course, so they were averaging shy of 50mph up to this point.

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    After a few hours watching trucks and buggies and utvs pass us, we packed up to cross the peninsula. We wanted to catch the trucks at other points and ultimately loop up the east coast to head home. The most direct way across is through the "cross over road" which connects Valle de la Trinidad (Valley T) to the west coast highway. On the map that's around RM100 to Check 2. It's a dirt road and crosses the mountains. Last year this road took us about 3 hours in a 1 ton chase truck, this time it took us right at an hour to get to Valley T. On the map it's around 40 miles. The road is just a graded dirt road mostly, with some hardcore cliffs and super narrow in spots. We got lucky and only ran into a handful of trucks and were able to pass them. Once we got to Valley T we got some tacos before getting on the highway there. The race course goes through Valley T and then onto the highway for 30 miles, so our plan was to setup where the course exits the highway and wait for the trucks.

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    I forget what time we setup a makeshift hang out, but it was multiple hours before the first trophy trucks reached us. We were now at RM440, so everything we had seen had to cross ~300 miles to get to where we were now. Around 7pm I want to say, the second place bike passed us.

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    We stayed at RM440 for awhile and saw probably 15-20 vehicles pass us, they were all pretty spread out though the trophy trucks were still pretty tightly grouped. Eventually we left to find somewhere else to camp since it was getting so dusty (if you've been to KOH you know). We got back on the highway and headed to San Felipe where we got some food and then camped on the beach.

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    The east coast water is a lot warmer than the Pacific so we washed off there.

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    Got gas in San Felipe and then headed to some beach tacos I went to the first time I was in Baja.

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    It was Saturday now and we had some time to kill before our last camping spot. The race course was near us, but not a lot of vehicles coming through at that point so we just hung out and explored and drove around on the beach.

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    This was when the truck started to have issues. I was too lazy to air down and had enough power to just push through everything, and the truck seemed fine so we drove around the beach. I didn't have my phone out to monitor my temperatures but the dash looked fine, eventually the trans temp started to climb on the gauge so I pulled over right away to let it cool. I checked on my phone and the pan was at 240F and the converter at 285! At that point we aired down a little, ie from 50psi to 30psi. Obviously we could air down more, I've run single digit pressures on the tundra plenty of times, but 30psi is still almost double the foot print of 50psi so that was good enough to not need airing up again and get us back to the highway without stressing anything. Here's a sick cool cactus too.

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    So up to this point, the truck had been golden. I was consistently making 9psi of boost, I was getting some pinging in certain load scenarios but was listening closely and making sure it stayed happy. I was stoked with how well the truck had been doing since I haven't had it at sea level for long periods of time, and I don't take it in the dirt much (by my standards). The trans getting so hot didn't worry me much, I've had it hot (not that hot) and no issues before and prior/post getting it hot there hadn't been anything noticeably wrong and no warnings or lights or anything to indicate any issues.

    Well the instant I got on the highway the transmission decided it was time to go south. From that point on it was a 50/50 chance if the trans would buck into a gear or be smooth, 50/50 chance if the truck was in limp mode with power cut back, 50/50 chance if it would get into 4th gear, and generally just acting like it was a few minutes from completely blowing apart. To not overly clog this post, the truck limped us through the rest of the trip and periodically was throwing multiple shift solenoid/line pressure solenoid codes and the truck at most would shift into 4th gear and any time accelerating from a stop it wanted to die, but would cruise fine once it actually got into a gear. I've already ordered stuff to begin diagnosing and inspecting and fixing the trans, but it would seem that the ATF getting to 285 made it not want to play well with the rest of the trans. Fingers crossed that fresh ATF is all it takes to fix it.

    Either way, we started to make our way north. We had reservations at Guadalupe Hot Springs for Saturday night, and instead of taking the direct dirt route to get there, we went up to Mexicali and then drove west a bit and then dropped south down a dirt road for probably 40-60 miles to get to it. This seemed the better option of being on pavement as long as possible and give the trans a chance to self heal. The hot springs is directly north of the highest up part of the course near RM 760.

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    The hot springs were absolutely awesome. You have to reserve a spot, but they have a pretty good website. The spot we got is meant for 10 people, and has parking for 3 trucks. Each camp site has its own dedicated hot springs pool. It was really cool, and probably the cleanest part of Mexico. The water I'd guess was ~107 at our pool.

    Sunday morning we headed out early, transmission didn't make any recovery regardless of resetting, temperature, driving, throttle, shifter, etc (trust me, we had 10 hours of driving to test every combination to make it happy) so she sat in 4th gear almost the entire way home, luckily the truck can do about 75mph at 3400rpm so we still made decent time. We went through the border at Mexicali, then up through Needles, Las Vegas, and back into Utah.

    For this trip I brought $150 in pesos, and only used $60 of that. I'm not sure how much gas I used, but we did around 1400 miles round trip in 4 days. If I hadn't been ignorant monitoring the trans/lazy airing down then we would've had no issues whatsoever, and did probably a few hundred miles of dirt total. Overall had a lot of fun, and will probably be there again in a years time!
     
  2. Nov 23, 2020 at 12:40 PM
    #2
    GravityGear

    GravityGear Parking Lot Prerunner

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    Transfer Flow tank, Pinstripe Suit
    Viva la Baja Mil.
     
  3. Dec 14, 2020 at 2:45 PM
    #3
    Baja Fundra

    Baja Fundra New Member

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    I just stumbled on your trip report, I think I saw your truck at some point on the San Felipe side of the race. I was camped out at Pete's camp just outside of San Felipe with the chase tundra
     
    snivilous[OP] likes this.
  4. Dec 14, 2020 at 3:37 PM
    #4
    Cruzer

    Cruzer Wheeling Full Size

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    What an epic road trip!
     
    snivilous[OP] likes this.
  5. Dec 14, 2020 at 6:26 PM
    #5
    snivilous

    snivilous [OP] snivspeedshop.com

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    Who were you chasing for? Good chance we passed each other, there were a lot of tundras hauling race gear we passed.
     
  6. Dec 14, 2020 at 7:06 PM
    #6
    Darkness

    Darkness Allergic to white

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    All over SoCal
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    It's really dark
    Such a good adventure.
     
    snivilous[OP] likes this.
  7. Dec 14, 2020 at 8:45 PM
    #7
    Baja Fundra

    Baja Fundra New Member

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    I was chasing for Bryce Menzies in one of the light chase tundras, would have been a 2nd gen white crewmax with no team decals or wrap. We pitted at 440 and 691
     
    snivilous[QUOTED][OP] likes this.
  8. Dec 15, 2020 at 3:25 AM
    #8
    TXRailRoadBandit73

    TXRailRoadBandit73 YOTAS,RAILROADER,RÖKnRÖLLN',BEER,MAX/GEMMA

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    The 956, TEXAS
    None yet
    Nice pics and read! Awesome Sauce
     
    snivilous[OP] likes this.
  9. Dec 15, 2020 at 3:57 AM
    #9
    TundraMcGov.

    TundraMcGov. Your friend. Your foe. Not yo Ho.

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    1000% this ^^^.

    An epic adventure is always made even better with an epic write up. Thanks for taking us along.
     
  10. Dec 15, 2020 at 8:39 AM
    #10
    Half Assed

    Half Assed me ne frego

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    Very cool. Looks like fun.
     
  11. Sep 22, 2022 at 9:53 AM
    #11
    VWTim

    VWTim Mid-Travel Crew

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    Bumping this report up to see if anyone is planning to spectate again this year? Just got confirmation a buddy from OR is coming down and we'll be taking my Tundra down.
     
    snivilous[OP] likes this.
  12. Sep 22, 2022 at 10:44 AM
    #12
    snivilous

    snivilous [OP] snivspeedshop.com

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    Yes sir, planning to go down again. Don't know if we'll take the Tundra or one of my buddies vehicles this time.
     

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