MONROE — There are probably a bunch of reasons for Roger Habich to skip this year’s La Carrera Panamericana, a week-long road race from one end of Mexico to the other. Among them, the expense, the hours of preparation, and the additional time away from family and career.
Good reasons all, but still not nearly enough to make him miss what promises to be one terrific week of racing.
“There is,” said the 37-year-old Habich, “nothing like this in the U.S.”
It’s one thing to drive a late-model stock car around the oval at Monroe’s Evergreen Speedway, which Habich has done most Saturday nights in the racing season for the past 17 years. It’s quite another to take a vintage car — Habich will be driving a restored 1953 Studebaker — on a trek of nearly 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean coastal town of Oaxaca in southern Mexico to the city of Nuevo Laredo on the northern border with Texas.
The race will take an expected international field of some 100 drivers through city streets, including Mexico City, and across vast stretches of uninhabited wilderness. They will start at sea level and they will climb mountain roads to around 10,000 feet. There are daily stages — much like cycling’s Tour de France — and winners will be decided in about a dozen classes of cars, including one overall champion.
The best day is the last day, when racers will travel from Zacatecas in north central Mexico to Nuevo Laredo, which is just across the Rio Grande River from Laredo, Texas. That final leg is about 500 miles, almost all of it straight, flat freeway, much like I-90 in eastern Washington. The route will be closed to regular traffic, and with a 550-plus-horsepower engine Habich hopes to hit speeds of close to 200 miles per hour.
“You make your car go as fast as it will go,” Habich said. “There’s nowhere else you can do this, driving on streets and racing cars at unlimited speeds. It’s just unreal.”
Habich will be joined by a co-driver and navigator, who just happens to be his father, 63-year-old Daryl Habich, also of Monroe. It was Daryl Habich, in fact, who first experienced La Carrera Panamericana (The Panamerican Race) three years ago. A longtime driver at Evergreen Speedway, though now retired, he went the first year as a co-driver and navigator, and the second year as a driver in the same ‘53 Studebaker.
Last year, the elder Habich coaxed his son into joining him. They had a great time, despite a maddening series of glitches. First, their car was supposed to be taken by trailer to Oaxaca, but instead was left in Laredo; Daryl Habich had to fly from Oaxaca and drive the car back almost non-stop to arrive in time for the race start.
Once under way, they suffered a broken drive shaft and had to search out a shop for a repair — not an easy thing in the Mexican backcountry, where almost nobody speaks English. On another day they missed a turn and ended up going well out of their way.
Still, Roger Habich figures they finished 18th out of some 60 drivers in the overall chase, which was a decent placing, he said.
This year he hopes to do even better. Not only does he have a bigger engine (he’s added about 250 hp), but he’s spent the last several months reworking the car from top to bottom, front to back.
“Basically, every part has been unbolted, checked and reassembled,” he said. “Everything either has a lock nut, a safety wire or a cotter pin on it. You just have to build it like it’s going to go into outer space because you can’t afford to have anything rattle off. And as we learned last year, you can’t afford to have anything break.”
Doing well, he went on, “is not just about speed. It’s about finishing all the legs, not getting lost, not crashing, not getting flat tires, and all those things. Having a really fast, good-handling car is great, but it better be reliable.”
The race begins in Oaxaca on Oct. 26 and culminates in Nuevo Laredo on Nov. 1, which is the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) holiday in Mexico. Along the way, drivers are treated like celebrities, and there are banquets and receptions at each of their overnight stops.
Habich is taking along 2,100 autograph cards, which include a picture of the car, to give away as souvenirs. “And we’ll probably run out of those by Day 5 or Day 6,” he said.
The Mexican people love the race, which began in 1950 to celebrate the opening of the highway system that allowed drivers to go from one end of Mexico to the other.
“In central Mexico,” Habich said, “a lot of those towns don’t usually see anything like this (at other times of the year). There will be some pretty spectacular cars. I mean, I’m a car guy and I’m still looking at some of them and going, ‘Oh, man, that’s cool.’ So I can’t even imagine what it’s like for somebody who drives a burro most of the time. Down there it’s a big, big deal.”
It’s a big deal, too, in the Habich family, with father and son partnering on what has become an annual event.
Racing with his father “is really cool,” said Roger Habich, who has two sons of his own. “And then I’m looking into the future and I’m thinking, ‘I could do this with my boys and just have a ball.’ And then I think, well, that’s what he’s doing with me. So it’s great. We really have a good time together.”
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