Murphy’s Law
You know how it is said that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong? I imagine that anybody that has participated in Great Race for more than two years has a story like that. This is ours.
It was Thursday, June 26th, 1986. The Great American Race, as it was called then, was going from Palm Springs, CA to the Grand Canyon that day, across the California desert.
Think about 1986 for just a minute. Pay phones, not cell phones. No satellite communications. Photography was to film, not digital. Scoring was done in the back of a U-haul motor home rental so that we could have a generator to run the computer. It was a full sized PC with a CRT monitor that was strapped to the table in the back. The way we did scoring back then was the checkpoints kept a time log and we would drive by after the last car and pick it up. John Schmidt wrote the scoring program, and John and my husband Steve were in the back inputting the data from the checkpoints while I drove. Even then, our first duty of the day was to hand out the daily course instructions to the contestants.
One of the things that Great Race did back in the day was to have a Fan Bus. It was a full sized motor coach that you could buy seats on that would take you from break to break so that you could cheer on your team as they arrived. That early in the event the bus was full. There was a three man team from Belgium that had to make a last minute vehicle substitution due to a cracked block. They went from a 4-seater vehicle to a 2-seater vehicle. Since the bus was full, one of the guys needed a ride. Our travel agent asked if we could carry Willy with us that day and we said “sure!”.
After handing out that day’s course instructions, we needed to go get fuel. I pulled into the fuel station, grabbed the fuel nozzle and starting dispensing – diesel!! Oh, CRAP! I sat down on the steps of the motor homes and cried. Now what? After talking, we decided it was a relatively small amount of diesel (approximately 10 gallons in a 90 gallon tank) and that we would finish filling it up with gasoline and go with it, keeping our fingers crossed.
We then finally got on course, leaving Palm Springs on the interstate. There is/was a pretty good sized uphill leaving Palm Springs, with a sign saying “Turn off your air conditioning to avoid over heating!”. It was still early in the day and only maybe 80 degrees, so I just kept going. We had not gone very far when, BLAM! It sounded like an explosion under the hood. I pulled over and watched the coolant rolling down the hill behind me. Oops. I guess I’ll turn off the front AC now. Let's turn on the overhead unit to try to keep it cool
One of the last support vehicles that were around saw us and pulled over to help. They had a gallon of coolant, so we recapped the reservoir, filled it back up, and with many thanks, waved off the support truck.
I started driving again, but there was a bad vibration, so I pulled back over. And another, Oh, crap! The inside left tire on the rear axle had a huge blow out. NOW what do we do? There is nobody left to help and we are starting to get seriously behind. We decided to just keep going, but to limit our speed to about 45 mph to 50 mph to avoid wrapping the tire around the axle.
We finally got to the first check point, about 2 hours late. There was no shade anywhere, and one of the workers was under the table with a washcloth on her head! We picked up their log, and they said they would try to go ahead to get us some help.
So now we are truly in the middle of nowhere in eastern California. Along about then, a mountain lion decided to lope across the road like he owns the whole landscape! (He probably did.) Seeing the big cat cross the road made Willy’s eyes get really wide, and he said, “You know, in my country you cannot go more than about 10 kilometers without seeing a town and people.”
Then, just to add insult to injury, the overhead AC unit froze up. With no other options, we opened the windows to get some circulation at least. The curtains are flapping around, and the interior thermometer said it was 120 degrees inside. But it’s a dry heat, right?
By the time we got to lunch, there was no venue. It was completely packed away and the checkpoint crew was nowhere to be seen. We grabbed a quick fast food lunch and a pit stop and kept going.
The route in the afternoon was largely on the interstate. We were going along in the right lane, curtains flapping, when suddenly Tom McRae and Harold Melnick pulled along side of us, waving a walkie talkie out the window. We turned ours on, and said, “Hello Harold!” He said, “Did y’all know you have a flat tire?” If I could have reached him I would have throttled him.
Since Tom and Harold had come back to find us, they knew there was a truck stop up ahead. They said to go there, and they would get them ready for us. We pulled right in and they got the tire changed as quickly as they could. I turned the key to start the motor, and got the dreaded click-click-click-click. The mechanic told me to push a button to use the household batteries to start the motor, which worked – whew! And we are off, at actual speed limits!
By the time we were pulling off the interstate to start heading up to the Grand Canyon the sun was going down, and it’s starting to get pretty dim. These are the longest days of the year, so you know it’s getting late! I turned on the headlamps, and the motor started to stall. “Turn off the headlights!”, Steve says. The motor comes back. Oh, boy.
We found one of the checkpoint crews just off the exit ramp, thank goodness. They had all of the timing logs we needed, and we asked them to please be our lights headed into the Canyon.
Have any of you ever driven that road at night? It is a twisty, two lane road, and it is dark! People kept flashing their lights at me, but there was nothing I could do. About halfway to the Canyon, another road comes in from the right. There was a support truck there, and they came in behind me to keep anybody from running into the back of us.
Just as we made it to the parking lot where all the cars were parked (it had to be at least 10pm, maybe later), the motor home died. Fortunately, it was a down hill to a garage with a mechanic waiting to work on anything that needed help at the bottom, with nobody else there. We rolled in and he got right to work. It turns out that the alternator belt had broken at some point and we had been running off of batteries for most of the day.
There has never, in all of our years, been another day like that. And Willy from Belgium certainly had an adventure! The motor home got us the rest of the way across the country to New York City with no other hiccups.
