SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
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passed Coleman as he slept. The bikes that both of the Ekins brothers were on needed attention by this point. Dave ended up "borrowing" a quart of oil from Bud's bike (which had a one-gallon oil tank) and nursed his TR-5 along—rattling and smoking—at a pedestrian 30 miles an hour when they hopped onto a road for the last 130 miles to La Paz. "My Triumph was really hardly running," Dave said, "so I said to the other guys, to go ahead; you're going to break the record." Bud and Mulder wicked it up in anticipation of breaking the Honda trip time. Dave remembers: "I'm running down this long pavement giggling to myself because you're half nuts anyway [after being up for nearly two days] and I see a black line in the middle of the road and I look ahead and there's two guys on motorcycles sitting there. I get up to them and it's Bud and Eddie, and the primary chain on Bud's bike had seized," he said. With only 60 miles to go the guys had another cigarette break while they figured out how to fix it. "I said to Eddie, What the hell are you guys doing? Eddie, get on that bike and run in there and set a new record," said Dave as he recalled the moment. Dave recalled Eddie's reponse as "you know, I'm going to stay here with Bud and smoke a cig." Bud convinced Dave to carry on, having calculated that the record was within reach, so he got underway again. The TR-5 made it to the edge of La Paz before it finally seized. Luckily, that happened less than 10 yards from a Pemex station that stocked motor oil so Dave bought two quarts to pour into his stricken machine, prayed that it would fire and gave it a solid kick. To his relief, the Triumph came to life so Dave rode off in search of the telegraph office. Much to his chagrin, it was no longer where it had been four years before, so he had to do some searching (and he didn't speak Spanish). Once he finally found it, he sent a telegram home at 5:31 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time. His actual time was 41 hours and 31 minutes, so even though it didn't beat the Honda time, he set the record for a non-assisted ride. Bud and Mulder joined him soon afterwards, but it wasn't until dinner that night that Coleman finally reached La Paz. Mulder and the Ekins brothers were dining at a restaurant on the main road into town wondering about Coleman when the solitary rider spotted them and cruised up, shouting, "I had you guys beat by hours!" The Trip Gets National Attention The Triumph trip got more publicity in the mainstream media than the Honda trip, with the Los Angeles Times even running a story. That caught the attention of one Ed Pearlman who was so intrigued with the idea that he convinced friends Dick Cepek (who'd soon found one of the first off-road-vehicle accessory-oriented retail chains) and automotive journalist Don Francisco to make a similar journey but in four-wheel-drive vehicles. After completing that run, Pearlman envisioned a race along that route and created the Mexican 1000 as well as an organization (the National Off-Road Racing Association or NORRA) to run it. Pearlman put on the first Mexican 1000 in 1967 and as a fitting tribute to all the groundwork the Ekins brothers had laid, he made Dave Ekins NORRA member number 1. Pearlman also assigned that number to the brothers' Triumph TR-6 (one of the ISDT bikes used in the previous year's record- setting peninsula run) which they rode to third motorcycle behind the Husqvarna of J.N. Roberts/Malcolm Smith and Triumph-mounted Fred Barnes/Bill Silverthorne. And that -- is how racing in Baja began. SJ BAJA 1 9 6 2 E S T FROM THE BEGINNING 054 SCORE JOURNAL