How the Meyers Manx Led to the Baja 1000

Yahoo

09-03-2025

A rainbow's worth of Meyers Manx buggies have graced the pages of Car and Driver over the years. We've celebrated its creation in the '60s, and its creator, Bruce Meyers, a man as bright and colorful as his namesake. More recently, we've followed the sale of Meyers Manx to Phillip Sarofim, and the resulting modern offerings like the electric Manx 2.0. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the buggy, Manx has put out a coffee-table book from Bruce's beginnings to the present day. Written by journalist Basem Wasef and featuring archival and contemporary photography, Meyers Manx 1964–2024 is available from the Meyers Manx website. In this excerpt, we follow Bruce Meyers down to Mexico, where the Manx not only sets a record, it inspires a whole racing movement. —Elana Scherr
The Meyers Manx buggy launched in 1964 to remarkable effect. With its jaunty stance and adventure-ready moxie, the affordable off-roader eventually landed on no fewer than 45 magazine covers, capturing the imagination of enthusiasts and mainstream audiences alike.$64.00 at meyersmanx.com
Although early sales grew by word of mouth, the vehicle's long-term impact proved to be unlike that of any recreational product before it. Initial appeal could be attributed to the novelty and accessibility of its cheery design—elements that had been absent in virtually all rivals before it. But the Meyers Manx's off-road capabilities were vastly underappreciated by the general public.
As the fiberglass buggy slowly gained sales traction, Bruce Meyers wondered what it would take to leap to the next level of retail success. It didn't hurt when Ted Trevor finished in the winner's circle at the Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb (later Pikes Peak International Hill Climb) in 1966. Or that a Corvair-powered Manx ran circles around Shelby Cobras and achieved a perfect score in Sports Car Club of America slalom events at the hands of Ted Trevor and Don Wilcox. But how could the Meyers Manx transcend the mainstream perception as a friendly runabout and legitimize its reputation for off-road aptitude? It turned out the answer lay south of the border.
Mexico's Baja California peninsula is the untamed counterpoint to the sanitized American Dream. Rugged and raw, Baja's dusty trails and rock-strewn stretches attract the hardiest of adventure seekers craving to push themselves and their vehicles to the limit and beyond. The natural kings of Baja were motorcyclists—off-road athletes whose derring-do drove them to ride hard, over and through challenging terrain for hours on end for the glory of claiming the quickest elapsed time between La Paz and Tijuana.
In 1962, Dave Ekins, brother of Bud—famed Hollywood stuntman and Steve McQueen pal—achieved the run aboard a Honda CL72 in a blistering 39 hours, 56 minutes. The Ekins brothers were world-class riders, and they would go on to serve as the first-ever U.S. team to compete in the International Six Days Trial with Steve McQueen and Cliff Coleman in 1964. When Dave returned to Baja in 1966, he was able to shave only around eight minutes from his previous record time. If one of the world's top riders had all but maxed out the route, it seemed there wasn't much room for improvement.
Although Meyers had explored Baja in a buggy more than once, he had yet to tackle the peninsula at full tilt. However, entrepreneur John Crean had achieved the distance in a Meyers Manx in 51 hours—a record for a four-wheeler, but nowhere close to the Ekins's two-wheeled time. Baja was already on Bruce's mind when the age-old topic of car vs. bike came up during a weekend party at Big Bear Lake. As Meyers recalls in his book Call to Baja, Cycle World publisher Joe Parkhurst and a group of "bike guys" were in one cabin, and "buggy guys" were in another, when Joe invited the four-wheeler clique over for drinks. The inevitable trash talking between the two tribes ensued, leaving Meyers no more convinced he could touch the bike record than before.
However, his friend Ted Mangels was galvanized by the exchange. Showing up at Meyers's door the next day with a copy of the Peter Gerhard and Howard E. Gulick Baja guidebook and a smirk, he pitched an idea: map out the route by breaking it down into segments using the guidebook, classify sections into categories and speeds based on their prior experience in buggies, and add up the averages in order to estimate a total travel time. They each calculated times based on their own estimates, then averaged those figures—which were surprisingly close—for a final duration.
The estimate, 30 to 31 hours, was low. But was it accurate? There were big differences between the buggies and bikes that had run Baja. A typical desert-racer bike could exceed 100 mph, while the 40-hp, Volkswagen-powered Manx barely pushed 65 mph. Mangels pointed out that, despite the middling top speed, the buggy held several critical advantages. For starters, it could carry more fuel, along with extra tanks that helped avoid the inevitable time sink of running out of gas that the bikes faced. Also beneficial was the presence of a navigator alongside the driver, saving further time that might be squandered by stopping and checking maps or, worse, getting lost. Finally, the fatigue factor was significantly reduced, since driving and navigating duties were divided by two.
Meyers was skeptical. After all, Mangels was an eternal optimist infamous for his so-called "Mangelonian Theories." But the two also reached common ground on the estimated drive time based on individual calculations. Was a record-busting run attainable? There was one way to find out: a feasibility run. The only logical way was to drive the route with a chase vehicle in tow, in case things broke or the adventure went south. Meyers and Mangels would pilot Old Red, chased by Neal Allen and James T. Crow, and Sanford and Jane Havens in another buggy. While Allen was along as a helping hand, Crow was a Baja virgin who offered a different kind of assistance: he was the editor of Road & Track magazine and could potentially write an editorial account of the experience. Showing up for the desert drive in office clothes didn't help his image in the rough-and-tumble world of off-road racing. But in this case, he would later prove that the pen was mightier than the garb.
The intent for the feasibility run was, in Meyers's words, to drive "... briskly but conservatively, to preserve the car." The distance was grueling—"like driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a dirt road," as Bruce later described it, emphasizing that these routes were far more rough, treacherous, and strewn with peril than any off-road stretch known by Americans. Strategizing on routes, Meyers calculated that a shorter but more navigationally challenging option would be worth the risk. He also noted that the timing of high tides prevented them from taking a beach route that could potentially save time. Figuring that minimizing refueling time was key, they clamped three oxygen bottles onto Old Red that served as auxiliary tanks, expanding fuel capacity to 65 gallons. The good news was that the tanks enabled the buggy to run longer before stopping for gas; the bad news was that they added weight and were each independently fitted with filler pipes, meaning they had to be individually detached and their fuel dumped into the main tank, rather than seamlessly feeding it. Meyers later called the tanks "dumb," because they were heavy and didn't hold much fuel. However, in retrospect he acknowledged the good intentions, as misguided as they might have been.
On April 16, 1967, the foursome set out in two buggies from Ensenada to La Paz, bouncing, scraping, and ripping their way through the unforgiving landscape with the enthusiasm of ambitious men with something to prove. After the dust settled, it turned out the Meyers Manx performed surprisingly well, suffering only a torn tire when Bruce drove through a rocky section too spiritedly. When they landed in La Paz and totaled their travel time, they rang in at 30 hours, 40 minutes—remarkably close to their highly promising estimates. The experience helped them shape the logistics of how to tackle a timed run. However, what they didn't expect were the intangible ways that Baja would change them, eventually shifting the course of their lives.
Allen, an engineer who worked for the Douglas Aircraft Company, became enamored with Mexico, and would later retire to Bahía de los Ángeles on the eastern shore of Baja. Road & Track editor Crow, who had reported for dirt duty dressed like a city slicker, came to enjoy off-roading so much that he bought a Ford Bronco upon returning home, and later revisited Baja numerous times. And, of course, Meyers and his eponymous buggies would eventually become inextricably linked to the peninsula.
Following the initial southbound run, Meyers and Mangels returned with routes, tactics, and a game plan in mind in order to tackle the northbound route to Tijuana in earnest. Although that 30-hour, 40-minute time stood as a baseline, the territory could be infamously cruel—anything could happen along these untamed stretches.
On their chosen date, April 19, they decided to set out at 10:00 pm sharp for several reasons. For starters, the time enabled all Mexican officials to be present, ensuring no question of the accuracy of their timing. The late-night departure also allowed them to go flat-out on the longest stretches of paved road and easier dirt sections, giving Meyers a chance to catch some sleep before hitting the rocky portion. Once they were underway, however, the scheduled slumber came to an abrupt end when the stragglers in a cattle herd forced Mangels to veer around the bovine roadblocks, sliding the buggy between the giant slabs of flesh. The jarring jolt shook Meyers awake, and he couldn't fall back asleep before his turn. Mangels had successfully avoided contact despite his high speeds and limited visibility—evidence of his quick reflexes and off-road skills.
The two continued into the night, until it was time to swap seats. It was these high-speed runs through the wilds of Mexico that inspired Meyers to marvel at his natural surroundings as he moved swiftly through space in a buggy, its trailing-arm suspension soaking up the ruts as it negotiated the jagged surfaces below.
He recalled the sensation in Call to Baja: "Like a slow-motion sprint car in a botanical dream world, through the Boojums and boulders, through the rocks, rills and ridges of the world's greatest cactus garden, Old Red carried us. The rhythm of this endless game of dodging what the trail presented to us became a recurring measure of time like the cadence of poetry or music. In this spirited state we drove."
At its best, Baja delivered the out-of-body experience of the buggy floating over the earth below it in a sort of transcendental, meditative way. But the equal and opposite side could just as quickly intercede: the brutal, merciless aspect of the peninsula. It was north of Rancho Santa Inés, beyond the smooth stretches that morphed into rugged stretches, where Baja bit back: a rock gashed the metal brake line at the left wheel, spilling vital fluid out of the buggy. Meyers and Mangels scurried to control the bleeding, clamping the brake line and smashing at it with a hammer and rock. A top-off of fluid sent them on their way, with three out of four brakes working, which required a countersteer to compensate every jab of the middle pedal. As if that wasn't enough of a challenge, the car started lurching and dying sporadically, which turned out to be a front transmission mount that had sheared off and was now interfering with the accelerator and clutch cables.
No amount of field work or baling wire could put Old Red right: the original Meyers Manx was limping ahead, down on its usually healthy pace. When all was said and done, even in its compromised state the buggy was able to complete the approximately 950-mile run in 34 hours and 45 minutes—four hours off its trial time, but a significant five hours, 11 minutes under the record motorcycle time.
The record-breaking Meyers Manx run in the spring of 1967 was a significant accomplishment. But it was difficult to overstate the subsequent swell of publicity that the achievement leveraged. Meyers' wife Shirley collaborated with her employers, John and Elaine Bond at Road & Track, to blast the media with news of the record. With a playful Buggy Beats Bikes in Baja press release penned, the world's automotive and media personalities became acutely aware of Meyers Manx in a matter of days.
The buggy was pictured on the April 1967 cover of Car and Driver magazine, whereupon phones began ringing off the hook, and 350 orders piled up virtually overnight. The Bonds, who had generously offered Meyers production space at their publishing facilities, were now fueling and laying witness to Manx madness. Meyers, who became the center of attention thanks to his buggy's record-breaking time, took a call from one Ed Pearlman, who expressed interest in starting an off-road racing organization with him. Meyers was too busy building buggies, but he did help Pearlman with contacts.
Pearlman eventually formed NORRA, the National Off-Road Racing Association, and on November 1, 1967, the group's first race kicked off: the NORRA Mexican 1000 Rally. Starting with a rally from Tijuana to La Paz, an eclectic crew of 68 vehicles including Ford Broncos, Jeeps, a Citroën, a Triumph, a Fiat, privately entered Manxes, and three factory-sponsored buggies assembled for the sprint from Ensenada to La Paz. Ted Mangels teamed up with Vic Wilson (no. 10), Bruce Meyers partnered with "Wheelo" Anderson in a gold metalflake buggy dubbed Goldi (no. 1), and George Haddock and Jimmy Smith paired up in the third Meyers Manx. Mangels and Wilson ended up crossing the finish line in a scant 27 hours and 38 minutes, earning a victory in the first annual event. Meyers and Mangels split the $13,775 purse.
As much as the first record-breaking run caused a stir, the overall NORRA Mexican 1000 Rally win made even bigger waves by effectively launching the modern movement of off-road racing. "The record is certainly what precipitated the race," says Meyers Manx historian Nelson Sparks, "and it exploded. It was huge. And everybody who missed it wanted to be at the next one." That sudden popularity cemented the buggy's legendary status, and would help transform Meyers Manx into a global phenomenon inextricably linked to Baja—a connection that persists to this day.
You Might Also Like
Car and Driver's 10 Best Cars through the Decades
How to Buy or Lease a New Car
Lightning Lap Legends: Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang!