Sears and the 1971 Mexican 1000

Here's a Baja story from the wayback machine... Who among us remembers the Sears racing team when they attempted the Mexican 1000 while advertising Diehard Batteries and Sears Steel Belted tires.

Here's what I know about that. A Texan company built 5 or 6 mid-engined Corvair power buggies (five I think) and sold the idea to sears of racing them to La Paz. Sears really got behind the effort. They loaded up A box truck with enough tools to supply pitstops every 100 miles no matter where that 100 miles landed. Remember this was back in the '70 race before the paved road was built. That was back when a box truck like that could barely travel 10 mph on the dirt roads....and there were about 600 miles of dirt roads that year. There was a couple of passenger van with this truck full of the teams that would run these pits. That means it would take a week to set up these pits.

I know that because the whole front beam broke off the front end of my single seat buggy that my codriver was driving at the Sears pit at La Cuarenta on the inland route around the mudflats below San Ignacio. Of course, there was no communication down there so we were only able to find my buggy by air and retrieve it with a rented box truck from San Ignacio. Anyway on to the Sears part of the story.

By this time the grandfather/grandson team had been at a Sears pit out in the middle of nowhere, and I mean NOWHERE, 40 miles from San Ignacio and 60 miles from La Purisima, for 5 days already. The plan was that as soon as the race was over the truck would leave La Paz and come back and get all these pit people.

The Sears race went something like this. Sears had hired some pretty good motorcycle racer to drive these cars, and they came to Ensenada along with the pit truck a week before the race. All the drivers had to do was wring the cars out prerunning a little bit and then wait for the start.

2 of the cars were wrecked that week and didn't make the start. I passed (I drove the first half in my buggy) one car smoking badly off the side of the road not far south of Ensenada. Another car had catastrophic failures before El Rosario. They were only able to complete the race with one car a day after the DNF time. There were TV ads at that time for a year or more with videos and boasts of how their batteries and Tires had 'Beat the Baja'

Anyway, It took me at least 2 days to get my car welded back together In San Ignacio. There were a lot of racers coming back through from La Paz with race info. One of the pieces of information was that the Sears Pit truck had sanded its motor and wasn't going anywhere soon.

It wasn't like they could just rent a Passenger van and go get all the pit personnel, because each pit had a couple thousand lbs of tools and jacks and full gas cans and such.

Sears was making it a point to look good to the public with the Craftsman tool line.

I always wondered whatever became of the pit team from La Cuarenta. If anyone can add to this story, I sure love to hear it.

My buggy that lost the front end..... Sears ad at the time is on youtube.

Since then I learned that Sear had their tire and Diehard Batteries in a few cars in this race and three of them won their classes. Their Steel Belted tire and Diehard batteries were very good products. https://youtu.be/DeQWigs_K74