Howzit

[BoothPacific Films]

I don't even know where to start. My father raced in ISMA back in the late 70's and had always been a car guy. All his friends were car guys so i grew up around racing machines and going to the track. My godfather is Steve Earle who created the Monterey Historic Automobile races up at Laguna Seca and is a member of the FIA Board of Directors. So I grew a love for fast machines at a very young age. I remember being in a 917 Porsche can-am car on the hollywood freeway. no seat. and an original Ferrari GTO at Sears Point with my godfather pushing it. My dad had a bunch of friends and i'd hear stories about Steve McQueen and various other characters and some of their antics. I guess Steve McQueen had an old VW bug with a trick porsch 911 motor and he used to smoke people on sunset blvd. I grew up at the beach around surfing as well and that became more of my passion than did a pursuit of car racing. It was sometime back in the late 1970's, I was around ten years old or so, and my friends and I wouldn't miss a surf movie playing in santa monica. It was either Big Wednesday or Endless Summer that we went to see and it turned out to be a double feature. On Any Sunday. I'll never forget it. The song rings in my head to this day.

It was about the same time that surfers really started venturing south past the known surf spots in Baja California. I think the road got paved in 1976. Even before i got my license I had the opportunity to take a trip with some older kids down to K-38 and another with my Dad to ride motorcycles at his friends trailer in Ensenada. So as the years went on my crew of surf friends and I started our own explorations into Northern and then Southern Baja. and some of us found a favorite place to go about 800 miles south on the pacific coast. San Juanico. My first trip to SJ was in 1987 and there wasn't anything there. a small fishing village and some surfers camping thats it. and throughout the years we spent less time exploring and more time concentrating on getting there. Our goal became very specific. Get to scorps as fast as you can. I made a lot of trips mostly between the months of april and october. that's the time of year when the southern hemisphere sends waves to Baja and most of the pacific coast. there is one gas station in SJ. not a PEMEX but a gasolineria where a kind old man would siphon some magna sin out of an old jug into your truck for you. he could also fix things. in Baja you always have things that need to be fixed. This little shack was typical of all the spots in Baja where surfers ventured, it was plastered with stickers. But this place was and is different. Half of the stickered wall was from off-road racing sponsors and teams. mixed in with the rip curl and quiksilver sitckers were VP, BF Goodrich and SCORE. None of my surf friends ever paid much if any attention. but I having grown up at the track was intrigued.

So 15 years or so after my first journey my brother and I bought property in a bustling SJ and decided to build a garage for surfboards and the rest of our toys. So 2006 was the first year I had to be in SJ past october. After all the years my Mexican friends had told me about the Baja 1000 going through town i finally was able to be in SJ for the race and the couple weeks leading up to it. I had no idea. I never had so much fun staying up all night in my life. plus all the pre-running. i spent years sleeping in the dirt, drinking warm beer and eating fish off a burnt stick and now there were A-STARs landing on the beach giving kids rides. How frickin' cool is that.

Professionally I am a video editor for action sports films among other things. I've worked on many snowboarding, surfing and freestyle motocross films. I was part of the original film crew for Crusty Demons of Dirt and partnered briefly with Jason Moriarty to work on the Curt LeDuc film, NEVERLIFT. I am finally going to do my own film. I know there are many films about the Baja 1000. My film is about off-roading in Baja for two very distinct reasons that intersect at a remote little spot on the pacific coast. A film about how far men/women will push themselves and their vehicles to achieve their goal. A film about roads that are both legendary and create legends. A film about a place that lures us back over and over. A film about going places fast.

Chip Booth
BoothPacific Films

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