![]() ![]() ![]() Side note, no matter how empty you think your bladder is, you will have to find a spot every 30 minutes of driving or so - more in the morning than in the afternoon. I was lucky I was riding solo, so there were no seat adjustments at the frequent stops. The clutch is easy to get used to, as long as you find a good driving position. Or any gloves with a little padding in the palm. If you want to save yourself some trouble, bring racing gloves. I thought my back or neck would be sore it was more my hand and elbow. The throw is long, though, and there’s no give in any direction. If you know how to drive a manual, adding this little wrinkle should be no problem. All it takes is a little throttle blip as you pass neutral. Attached to the rear-mounted engine is a four-speed manual with straight-cut gears, meaning you have to match the engine speed when shifting. The power is channeled, surprisingly, only to the rear wheels through an open differential, but with 33-inch, aggressive off-road tires, I never get stuck, and neither does anyone else. They use a rear-mounted Subaru EJ25 boxer four engines for power, which develop somewhere between 185 and 205 hp. Because of new rules and engine regulations the cars would now be in Class 1 if the BC class doesn’t fill out. But Class 10, Cummings tells me, complained when they ran there, as they usually won. Previously, if there weren’t enough entrants, they’d be in Class 10. They can run in the Challenge Class of the Baja 1000. The car you’ll be driving is a full-out, tube-chassis, six-figure Baja Challenge car. They’re more comfortable than they look.< p One bounced off the beadlock wheel and the other grabbed a nail. We had seven cars in the group, four tires per car, and only lost two over the three-day trip. There were 11 other guys on my trip, and one wife, and it seemed like all came away impressed after rolling over 300 miles of tire-killing rocks that would flatten a normal tire in seconds. ![]() Our guide was Jeff Cummings, a BFGoodrich employee whose job it is to take tire distributors, wholesalers and dealers out to the sand to show off what these, giant, knobby, seemingly indestructible KM3 tires can do off-road. “After looking at 100-foot drop-offs all day, 30 feet starts looking pretty tame. Professional guides bookend the three- to four-car groups, but they are far enough away for the drivers to get in plenty of trouble. Wide Open is an adventure-based vacation/test of your mettle, where customers, or corporate groups like the one I was with, go out to the desert (either in Baja or Cabo San Lucas) to drive these purpose-built buggies as fast as they want. It really rang true when barreling across the washboard sand surface in a Baja Challenge race buggy near Ensenada as the wind shifted, sending a thick beige cloud into my car, taking visibility to near zero. There were plenty more nuggets of info, but that was the one that stuck. That was the first thing our Wide Open Baja guide told us when we met him at the airport in San Diego, minutes before we crossed the border into the Mexican Baja peninsula for our three-day desert racing tour. “In the center of every dust cloud is a crunchy metallic center.” ![]()
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