I said I was going to post a blog every Wednesday. Well I fucked that all up didn’t I. One blog down and then I miss a week. Well two, because today is Thursday. (and it finally went up Saturday night, this isn’t easy) You see it’s hard to find the time and energy to create these masterpieces while exploring 5 new countries in 3 weeks, and running a company. Add to that 3rd world internet. How I managed to write a blog every single day for over a year beats me. That’s completely insane!
Anyway, Bolivia. First a trivia question. What’s the capital of Bolivia? (This question is for the non-Americans reading this obviously, as the American readers are still coming to terms with the fact that Bolivia is a country that actually exists.)
La Paz right? WRONG! It’s Sucre. How this is possible I do not know. How do you make the whole world (well except America) believe that La Paz is your capital when it’s actually some other place no one has ever heard of? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that half the population is constantly high? Really high! I mean 12 000ft high, 3600m. That’s so high that our JQRacing driver Jorge Zamora who is a commercial airline pilot told us sometimes he likes to mess around and land in La Paz by reducing altitude too much before La Paz, and then having to actually fly up to be able to land. What worries me is these commercial airline pilots that like to “play around”.
Anyway, the super high altitude has a couple of major flaws:
- Now I could have swore that our hotel room didn’t have any gym equipment in it when I went to bed, but in the morning I woke up to Keenan K White working out on a treadmill. That’s what it sounded like. Heavy breathing, swearing, shuffling around. Turns out all he was doing was walking to the bathroom and back, packing his suitcase, and trying not to die. Apparently it’s almost impossible to breath at this ridiculous altitude.
- It is also impossible for our engines to breath. There is almost no power at this altitude. It’s ridiculous. The power is severely limited, the motor’s don’t rev high at all. You have to experience it to believe it. The things I did to at least make my car driveable:
- Removed the venturi completely.
- Removed 0.1mm head shims.
- Ran a 50 main gear, I would have run a 12t clutchbell, but didn’t have one.
- Ran an aggressive setting on a REDS clutch.
- Ran a very short low end needle to increase low end power.
- I would have needed fuel with higher nitro content also.
The reason for me and Keenan being in Bolivia, was our Latin America Tour, spanning Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Colombia. We would end the tour with the roughest and most dangerous country of them all, South Carolina, for the Fall Brawl. So Bolivia was step 1.
Basically our visit lasted 5 days, landed in La Paz, tried not to die, drove for 6 hours or so to Cochabamba, traveled back in time and checked into our hotel from the late 1800s, raced for 2 days, then drove back, checked into a hotel close to the bus terminal in order to take a 11h bus ride to Chile the following morning. Below you can see and read about the highlights of our journey.
And as for Chickens making you gay, I asked for an interesting fact about Bolivia for my blog, and the best story we heard was about Bolivia’s nutty president Evo Morales who said that eating chicken makes you gay. As a result chicken sales plummeted.