Hola! We are back, and apparently in high demand as my younger brother has informed me that he has been jumped by a blogger gang at his highschool demanding more timely posts from Mexico. ( He's a bit of story teller!)
To say the very least, A Lot has happened since we made our last post. In addition to being on a local radio station in Tuxtla we also made a handful of TV appearances on the local news stations, we managed to finish our qualification stage the day before the start of the race using only waste vegetable oil, and the night before the race some Tuxtla locals showed up at our hotel with 30 gallons of grease from a local fast food resturant. The gentelman who set up our radio interview also showed up with 10 gallons of grease from Burger King, and the hotel that we stayed at donated 5 gallons of really clean, still warm from the friolator WVO.
Willet and Kip's uncle Jim arrived the night before the race at around 9p.m., we woke up the following morning at 5:30, and that's when the fun really began! During our qualification stage we had noticed a bit of hesitation in 4th gear while we were running on grease. For those of you who that do not know, we start the engine with regular diesel when it is cold in the morning, and switch to the waste vegetable oil in our second heated tank once it has reached the appropriate temperature to flow through the engine properly (about 100 degrees farenheight for our purposes).
The first stage of the race was a transit leading to our first speed stage. The streets were lined with people, and we spent a good half hour signing t-shirts and taking pictures with the local fans. The first speed stage was the same as the qualification stage from the previous day, so it went fairly smoothly. Our car tops out at about 85mph so we tend to stay near the back of the pack out of everybody's way. Our main goal this year has been just to finish the race, as we have been told that this is an exteremly difficult task for any car, let alone one fueld by WVO. After the first speed stage we had another transit stage that transitioned into the second speed stage, which was a bit more interesting. This speed stage was in the mountains, most of it down hill with cliff biting corners that came fast even for our slower car. Within the first 10 minutes of this stage we saw that four of our fellow american race teams crash into rocky faces just off the road, and later on heard of two teams that had sailed clear off the road tumbling down small hills/cliffs(either way pretty scary, but luckily nobody was seriously injured). In the same area that we witnessed all of these crashes we came quickly around a sharp corner only to find a conctere bridge that was actually unfinished, dropped about 4 inches onto a rebar frame and scrapped the bottom of the car fairly well. We had a skid plate installed the day before, which saved the oil pan. 
However, we soon discovered that we had damaged our shift linkage. This made it so that when we pushed down to disengage the clutch and change gears the pedal had no effect. Therefore in order to drive the car we had to match the RPM´s to shift into gear. After the speed stage when we had made it to the flats, we also discovered that we were running dangerously low on vege oil, and to make things even more interesting our diesel fuel filter was clogged preventing us from being able to utilize the petrol diesel tank. As a result we decided that the smartest thing to do was stop and wait for the help of our service crew. The good news is that up until that point we were not in last place and were actually on time to reach the service stop half way through the first day of the race.
In steps Odvar! Odvar is a mechanic for one of the other teams from the Seattle area that is racing a vintage Volvo. We are told that he first moved to the U.S. from Norway when he was 17, spent much of his life as a fisherman in Alaska, and is a mechanical and car racing celebrity in his own right. He's a tall, wirey man with long silver hair, a body worn from years of hard labor, and a certain air of knowledge about him.
Odvar reached us before Willet and Jim. He pulled his trailer in front of our car, stepped out without really saying a word and went to work. He discovered that the linkage was cracked as we had suspected and that it would need to be welded. As for the hesitation he started right in on removing the diesel filter and finding the clog in our lines that had been starving our little motor. This meant that our vegetable oil filter was most likely clogged as well since we run diesel fuel back through the veggie lines at night so that the vegetable oil doesn't clog the lines when it gets cold out. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this at that time. By this time Willet and Jim had arrived and once Odvar had cleared the diesel fuel filter we set off to finish the remaining 150 miles of the race for that day, mind you now 2 hours late and without a clutch.
As we made our way down the road revving the engine to the appropriate RPM's so that we could throw it into gear it became painfully obvious that both our diesel and vege oil fuel filters were getting progressively worse. The noise from the engine began to loose its crispness and started breaking up as we slowed to a crawl climbing through the mountains. As night began to fall it became almost impossible for me to read the route book so Kip was on his own navigating the tight corners, nearly missing large trucks and buses through the remote transit stages of that afternoons race(without a clutch!). 
A motivational sight amidst hard times in Mexico...
Meanwhile Willet and Jim were also experiencing some problems of their own with the truck. We were a ways in front of them trying to stay close to Odvar, lead blocking the roads through the mountains, so that we could reach Oaxaca before our car stopped working all together. As Jim and Willet reached higher elevations the truck began to stall as it was starving for air, but they slowly pressed on. Eventually we had to stop to change our vege oil filter, and about 10 minutes later Willet and Jim rolled into the same gas station crammed into a small Datsun pickup truck with some of their bags in the bed. The truck had quit! Willet and Jim hitched a ride in the Datsun. Kip and I chugged on with the race car and we all arrived in Oaxaca at about mid night. After a quick bite to eat Willet and Kip somehow managed to find a tow truck to bring them to get the truck (2 hours away). Jim and I managed to get some restless sleep, and Kip and Willet arrived back at the hotel with the truck and the trailer at about 8a.m.
Despite all of this, we press on! We have decided to miss the second day of the race and stay here in Oaxaca to get the truck and race car fixed. We will leave as soon as we can and catch up with the rest of the Pan Am crew in Queretaro and forgo the Mexico city stage. There we can hopefully continue racing the last 4 stages of the race using only waste vegetable oil as we had originally intended. Can't wait for that finish line in Nuevo Laredo! We will cross it, even if it means pushing the car there.
Stay tuned...
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