Baja Racing Hall Of Fame Plans Celebration Of Life For Member Bruce Meyers
Bruce Meyers (94) Passes Into Baja Racing History 2021
Ensenada, Baja California-
By: Mark Vaughn, Stewart Bailey
Baja Racing Hall Of Fame Plans Celebration Of Life For Member Bruce Meyers STAY TUNED>>>
Bruce Meyers has passed into Baja racing history at the age of 94. Meyers was best known for the Meyers Manx, known worldwide as the 'Dune Buggy'. The original Manx was copied for many years, in many forms.
Bruce and Winnie at his 90th birthday party (Pictured Above) almost five years ago, with fans and friends. Below, friends and family celebrated Bruce at his 92nd birthday at his home in Valley Center.
Courtesy Baja Sun Films
Bruce is a member of the Baja Racing Hall Of Fame, an avid off-road racer and one of a very small handful of desert rats or gringo adventure seekers who created what came to be known as the Baja series of races.
If
you took everything that is pure Southern California—surfing, sailing,
the beach, some guitar playing, blond hair, the Laguna Beach Arts
Festival, even large portions of neighboring Baja, California,
Mexico—and poured it all into a huge cultural cuisinart, out would come
Bruce Meyers, driving a Manx. He was equal parts Raymond Loewy, Carroll
Shelby, and Degas all rolled into one and riding a surfboard. And we,
the motoring public, are the better for it. “There are no retired artists”, Meyers once said, during a day at the beach we spent with him almost 20 years ago.
Courtesy Baja Sun Films
To say Bruce Meyers was a renaissance man would be to limit him. Yes, he was trained in fine arts at Chouinard Art Institute, with a specialty in life drawing, but unlike the traditional renaissance man, Bruce surfed, raced in Baja desert off-road races and sailed to Tahiti on a trading schooner.
Race Record Establishing Baja Peninsula Run 1967
The Manx was built in his old garage in 1964 and his race record establishing Baja peninsula run in 1967, broke records motorcycles had established on the point-to-point run to La Paz, Baja South, from the late 50's to 1965.
Bruce, the founding father of Southern California USA off-road lifestyle and industry, drove his handcrafted manx, nicknamed “Old Red”, in mid-1967. Meyers and buddy Ted Mangels drove the manx from Tijuana to La Paz in a record time, five full hours faster than previous trans-Baja runs done on motorcycles. The racing feature not only garnered attention around the world, but also resulted in the formation of an organization of Americans, a gringo racing association, that eventually led to today's Baja 1000.
Though he refused to participate in "organizing" the group, he did participate in every racing event produced in Baja California, during the early modern racing era. He raced, promoted and sponsored modern Baja racing events.
Considered the first 'modern west-coast desert race', the inaugural Mexican Mil, "1000" was won by Mangels and Vic Wilson in a factory-supported Meyers Manx. The Meyers Manx sparked a huge automotive and lifestyle movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Organized 'American' "runs" in Baja Mexico ran from 1906 to 1965, are not considered part of the modern desert racing series of events, by the hall of fame.
In Southern Baja Mexico, the CABO 1000 has run events from the 50's to today.
"Desert Rats", gringo explorers of desolation.
Big Baja Story With Some Bruce Meyers in It
Maybe the easiest way to quantify Bruce Meyers is by his most famous creation, the Meyers Manx, incorrectly recorded in history as, simply, the “dune buggy”. By conservative estimates there are something like 300,000 dune buggies in the world today. The majority of them are knockoffs (or, more accurately, ripoffs) of the first fiberglass-tubbed, Volkswagen-parts-bin Manx that Meyers himself designed and built in a garage in Newport Beach 40 years ago. When he built that first one, he didn’t intend to build an icon of surf culture. He assumed he’d build at most 20 of them, just so he and his buddies would have something to get them and their boards to remote breaks in pavement-free Baja. “I wasn’t thinking about buggies”, Meyers said. “I just thought, ‘What is something that would work well down there [in Baja] that’s cheap to drive?”.
If necessity was the mother of the Manx, Meyers was the father. He laid up the first 12 Manxes in fiberglass, slathering the stuff over a wooden buck he made. Since a car with a fiberglass tub (as opposed to the likes of Corvettes with steel chassis and fiberglass bodies) was such a new, untried idea, he kept a gallon of resin and a few yards of woven glass mat with him for the first few months he drove it in case the body break open and he, as he said, “wound up riding on my ass”. He needn’t have bothered as that original car has turned over the odometer a few times and has never even cracked. “I imagine I’ve got a couple hundred thousand miles on this thing, mostly in Baja. We were there like three weeks out of a month. And we did that for several years. So the car’s got a lot of use”.
Bruce would tell you, "Sure, try this at home!"
On that day many years ago, Meyers let me drive the original Manx, called Big Red. It was my second time behind the wheel, the first being during the Baja 2000 two years prior. Old Red, as it’s called, was still sprightly and fun, as fun to drive as it looked like it might be. Even though I ground the gears, all the old Volkswagen pieces kept jumping to life and springing the car forward. The most durable things are usually the simplest, and the original Manx is simple. After the first 12 he stopped using the big fiberglass tubs for the bodies and built the rest on the shortened chassis of Volkswagen Beetles, because he was so impressed with the Beetle’s engineering. “It’s a marvelous basic thing. I’ve been weighing aftermarket frames for buggies and they’re never as light as a Volkswagen floorpan. Old Ferdinand [Porsche] was really a sharp guy”.
He
made 7,000 of them from 1966 until he lost the copyright protection
battle he’d been fighting in court for years and he stopped making
Manxes in 1970. During the 1970's, he did some boat and car tooling,
made some convertible conversions, and built a house in Baja. But in the
back of his mind there was always the Manx. So he came back and built
the Manxter 2+2, a four-seater. The Manxter 2+2 is the natural evolution
of the first Manx. Like the original, it’s based on a VW Beetle
floorpan, but this one is not shortened. Instead of taking out the 14
inches of floorpan required by the first Manxes, he simply left it all
in for this one.
To make the shape of that original Manx body Meyers drew on his life-drawing experience, trying to imbue it with what he calls “gesture”, and “a sense of motion” that remains even when the car is standing still. The Manx could go anywhere. There was more to Meyers than technical expertise. “Here I was an ex-hot rodder, racing my ’32 Ford roadsters up at the dry lakes, and building fiberglass sailboats and the beach-boy attitude… So you have this kind of a posture of loose craziness. I spent a year building this thing not knowing whether it was going to be profitable or not. That tells you right there that I’m wacko”.
The Manx was profitable and the years ticked off
Meyers
Manx is in new hands, but good hands. Trying to quantify Meyers is an
enormous undertaking.He was a war hero. After his ship, the aircraft
carrier USS Bunker Hill, was hit by two kamikazes off Okinawa, and
everybody had to jump into the Pacific to avoid the flames, Meyers the
surfer gave his life jacket to a sailor who didn’t have one, then he
towed an injured pilot through flaming oil slicks for two hours. He was a
pioneer surfer from the age of hollow wooden boards; as such he served
as mentor to budding surf legends Greg Noll and Bing Copeland, among
others. He was a sailor who was one of the first to mass-produce boats
out of fiberglass. He followed by producing surfboards and his wonderful cars.
“You know, it was just his time”, said his wife Winnie Meyers, who for many years helped operate the business Bruce founded. The company, 'Meyers Manx', had just changed hands to a company called Trousdale Ventures. “We sold our business recently”, said Winnie. “And that was wonderful. So that it really was able to close some doors”. The announcement of the sale was made at the time by the new company chairman, Phillip Sarofim. Sarofim is a venture capitalist, car collector, and racer with a passion for cool cars. Sarofim named former VW, Audi, and Porsche designer Freeman Thomas as CEO and chief creative officer. "He was an original", Thomas said. "He paved the way. He was different, so different than every other innovator that came before him. He was someone who understood humanity, as much as innovation".
Thomas and Sarofim got to spend a couple hours with Bruce Meyers only days ago."We ended up staying with him for over two hours", said Thomas. "He wouldn't stop. He wanted to keep talking. We kept asking questions. You know, he was so alive at that moment. He told us about how happy he was that we had Meyers Manx, and we could tell that made him feel good, that his dream, his vision, his innovation, his ideas would go on. So we were pretty lucky".
Via Con Dios Bruce!
Special Thanks go to Baja Sun Films
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