Racing 800 Miles in the Desert—in a VW Bug | National Geographic

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

The Baja 1000 is just one of the toughest off-road races that exists. Uh, it's in Baja California in Mexico down the peninsula. It's pretty much the race that you aspire to do in off-road racing. This year's event is 828 miles and has, I believe, a 33-hour time limit.

When most people think of the Baja 1000, they think about trophy trucks, which are these thousand horsepower million-dollar forces of nature when you see them on the course. We're kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum with, uh, basically stock Volkswagens from the 1970s, got about, uh, 50-60 horsepower in them and very little modification. Sometimes we're going down the road sideways, almost about to tip over, which is interesting and kind of scary at times.

Well, we really did feel good coming into the event. The car was strong; we had the biggest team we ever had. We had great communications and, unfortunately, we had a problem come out of left field, uh, with our fuel system that caused multiple failures of different parts of it, and it knocked us out of the race 30 minutes in with everything that we had this year. It really stinks, it just stinks, just stinks.

This is the sixth time we’ve failed, so that's kind of a tough thing to face. Um, it is hard. I mean, this is one of the hardest things you can do out there, but failing is part of learning and getting better at this stuff. Um, people are exhausted. I want them to sleep, I want them to get hydrated, I want them to get fed. Um, by this afternoon, we're going to be sitting down talking.

"All right, let's look at lessons learned. What can we do better next year? Where we were at with the team that we had this year, where we needed?"

Graphing hundredths from 0 to 0.1 | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

Bitbutter, guest on Decline to State podcast

View All

After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin

Following on from Paul’s talk about some of the ways to think about becoming, or what it takes to become, or whether you might believe you might become a hundred billion dollar business, I am going to have a conversation with Mathilde, who is in the proce…

NOAA and the 1871 Lost Whaling Fleet | Drain the Oceans

I had known about this story for decades. The disaster of 1871 was one of the things that basically ended Yankee whaling in the early 20th century because it was such a devastating loss. What was still there, if anything, was still there, was a question t…

Worked example: Calculating concentration using the Beer–Lambert law | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

So I have a question here from the Cots, Trickle, and Townsend Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity book, and I got their permission to do this. It says a solution of potassium permanganate has an absorbance of 0.53 when measured at 540 nanometers in a 1 cen…

Emirate of Diriyah as the first Saudi State

The history of the Saudi state and the Saudi dynasty really becomes interesting in 1744 in the town of Diriyah, which is very close to the modern city of Riyadh in the region of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Najd. This is an important term to know if…

Calculating gravitational potential energy | Modeling energy | High school physics | Khan Academy

In previous videos, we have introduced the idea of energy as the capacity to do work, and we have talked about multiple types of energies. We’ve talked about kinetic energy, energy due to motion. We’ve talked about potential energy, which is energy by vir…

Big Trophy Hunting | Explorer

BRYAN CHRISTY: The hunting held out one place as the gold standard for trophy hunting, a place they say big game hunting is honest and killing saves lives. I set my coordinates for Southern Zimbabwe, the same country where Cecil was shot and killed not lo…

Racing 800 Miles in the Desert—in a VW Bug | National Geographic

More Articles