El Taxi Perdido's Blog

Today we started out renewed with hope and a special appreciate for how difficult is it to add times together in a race car traveling at speed over a twisty, bumpy road. For instance, adding your official start time of 14:08.30 to your transit time of 1:53.30, to your Servicio time of :40, to your Transito time from Servicio to Z section, gives you? Quick. It’s easy, but it’s not easy, if you know what I mean. (we had lots of help from Peter L, who’s a math wiz) Throw in that you have to also hand the car to the time checker at no less than 60 seconds after that time and it gets tougher. Tougher because when you line up to hand the card over, six cars that are running late try to jump line on you. So what do you do? You jump out of the car and with helmet, suit and hans device still on, you run a 100 yards and hand the card over. Did that three time yesterday. Boy, I’m out of shape. Speaking of yesterday, it was a very good day. The car ran perfectly, the roads were amazing and we figured out the timing calculations. Conrad drove like a demon and we passed several cars including a Porsche 911 on the inside of a number 2 left hand corner that gave me, an excellent view of the quite surprised Porsche driver. The day was supposed to end for us in Mexico City with a triumphant police escort into a square that had been set up with victory celebrations. But guess what? Police cruisers are faster than us and we ended up losing the convoy of about forty cars. This put us in some neighborhood of Mexico City (the fifth most populated city in the world) with no clue where to go. We pulled over the first taxi (yes, a Taxi hailing a taxi) and asked for him to take us to the Hotel and we’d follow him. He refused when he found out where we were going. Apparently, it was too far for him to go. Great! So we did what any self-respecting American male would do – we asked someone else. Using this method of pulling over every few miles, we pieced together a route that got us close enough for another taxi to accept our offer of “mucho dinero” and he showed us the rest of the way. Oh, and did I mention that it was raining the whole time. And it was dark! Well we made it, but a little late for the big party, which wasn’t such a big party after all due to the rain. The only bummer is that our time card was turned in late and we weren’t part of the official scoring for the day. So after all of that great driving and all of my jogging to hand in our card along the way, we can only hope that this morning (yes, it’s 5am) we’ll be gridded properly. Today is my turn to drive and we’re schedule to be the opening exhibition race for a Mexican NASCAR event that starts at 11 this morning. Wish us luck and thank you for reading this bla, bla, bla. Adios for now.t