#timerider

A while ago, I read P. J. O'Rourke's hilarious book Driving Like Crazy because it has a few chapters about his time in Baja with Mike Nesmith. Mike had been racing in the Baja 1000 since around 1967-68. He raced his Triumph Bonneville during those early years. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he raced modified Jeeps and trucks, including his Timerider truck. Anyway, the above Reddit comment reminds me of this passage from O'Rourke's book:

Mexico has only one brand of gasoline, Pemex, owned by the government. Quality and supply are the same as they would be if the U.S. Post Office was also the gas station. We installed thirty-gallon gas tanks, added backup fuel filters, and packed a case of octane booster.

We also packed oil, coolant, extra radiator hoses and fan belts, a tow strap, jumper cables, fire extinguishers, several sets of wrenches, a shovel, and an air compressor; plus tents, sleeping bags, coolers, twenty gallons of American water, a camp stove, dried food, a compass, two-way radios, piles of maps and guidebooks, and four snake-bite kits.

In retrospect this strikes me as three snake-bite kits too many. I mean, once I’ve had to use one snake-bite kit I’m out of there. Hello medevac, good-bye me. On the other hand there was no medevac in the Baja. While you’re treating yourself with the first snake-bite kit, I guess the same snake could sneak up and bite you three more times. Even so, for the sake of our love lives, Michael and I would have been better off replacing a couple of the snake-bite kits with a pair of small blue boxes from Tiffany & Co.

Larger gifts from Tiffany wouldn’t have fit. The Jeeps were so full that we had to leave a lot of things behind, but only the things we’d be needing. It took us from morning until late afternoon to pack the Jeeps with the other things. On the first day of our journey we made it to Huntington Beach.

O'Rourke, P. J.. Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending: Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed to Be—With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac … Reserve Mowing Our Lawn (English Edition) (pp. 110-111). Grove Atlantic. Édition du Kindle.

Lyle Swann is a champion off-road racer. But to the people of 1877, he’s something very, very different…

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