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WRC Rally Mexico was an extraordinary, mind-bending experience for me and my brother. This event changes your perspective about rally, in that no other event you have run in the past (or could imagine of running in the future) could ever compare to the enormous spectacle of Mexico. Rally just doesn’t get any better that this.

My Rally Mexico adventure actually began two years ago, shortly after Bill Caswell and Ben Slocum completed their epic trip. Every time I would see Ben Slocum at a rally he would tell me that I just had to take my Beetle down to Rally Mexico. He kept stressing that my car would be an instant fan favorite. So after almost two years of nagging, John and I finally decided to make the commitment and put down the huge chunk of cash to run the event.

Knowing that Rally Mexico would be one of the toughest events we’ve ever done, we decided early on that our car preparation would need to be top notch. My methodology to car prep is highly removed from Bill Caswell’s proven chaos-train of all-nighters, still building the car days before the event. Work started on our 1970 Volkswagen Beetle back in November of 2011. Everything in or on the car was removed, inspected and fixed. Several rally-ending problems were discovered during our teardown, such as a broken chromoly head stud, missing two out of four nuts that hold the engine to the transmission, and several melted relays.

February 24-26:
We finished work on our car in early February, just in time to shake it down and run it as the course opening Zero car at the Rally in the 100 Acre Wood.



My co-driver in the Zero car was Simon Wright (he also would be running Rally Mexico with his Ford Focus). Everything ran smoothly that weekend, and while Ken Block was spraying champagne on Saturday night, we were loading the car on the trailer to head for Laredo, Texas the next day. Our tow down was not without problems. Somewhere in the middle of Texas we noticed massive amounts of white smoke coming from the trailer. When we stopped to investigate it was discovered that one of the leaf spring clips was missing and a leaf spring was tearing into the inside sidewall of the trailer tire. A sudden blowout at speed could have been disastrous. After acquiring new tires from a Super Wal-Mart we were back underway.