Racing’s wild side: At Mexico’s deadly Baja 1000, (almost) anything goes

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We’re doing 110 kilometres an hour on dirt in a little dune buggy and the maniac in the driver’s seat is still accelerating toward a sharp crest over which there is nothing but blue sky.

We might as well be speeding toward the edge of the world. As we hit the crest and take off, my heart sinks. Time slows just like in the movies. We’re flying up and up as the ground drops farther away. There’s enough time in the air for me to brace for carnage and twisted metal, but it never comes. Instead, the landing is like falling face first onto a pile of mattresses – WHOMP – jarring but not unpleasant, almost graceful.

As soon as the tires touch dirt, said maniac is hard on the throttle again, flat-out, heading for a tree line. The buggy’s little engine sounds like a killer bee in hot pursuit. Just as it looks like we’re plowing straight into the trees, a gap opens and the forest swallows us whole leaving only a plume of dust to show we were there.

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The maniac in question is Brock Heger, to whom I have entrusted my life for two laps of the qualifying course for the 2025 Baja 1000. The point is to get a little taste of the high-flying, high-speed sport of desert racing before the 58^th running of the of this legendary race kicks off.

The route changes every year, but it’s always roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) through the desert and dry scrub of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The winners will complete the distance in around 16 hours, while the last-place finishers struggle across the line in 36 hours.

If all this isn’t ringing any bells, I don’t blame you. Outside of the Baja Peninsula and Southern California, this race is not as well-known as, say, the Indy 500 or the Monaco Grand Prix. The Baja 1000 is, however, a bucket-list event for top-tier talent, attracting former F1 Champions (namely Jenson Button) as well as NASCAR superstars, drag racers, Supercross riders, World Rally champions, Dakar Rally winners and rich guys who spend millions on purpose-built Baja racing trucks.

Celebrity entrants have included Paul Newman, James Garner, Steve McQueen and Brad Pitt’s character in last summer’s blockbuster F1.

In the final scene, Pitt’s character – a faded F1 driver – turns up to race Baja. When asked why, he chuckles. If you have to ask, there’s no explaining it to you, but I’ll try anyway.

Stumbling out of the little dune buggy – a factory-built Polaris RZR side-by-side on 35-inch tires with roughly 30-inches of suspension travel – I learn Brock Heger is 25 years old and, in fact, not a maniac at all but a decorated desert racer who has been at it since he was seven. He has class victories at both the Baja 1000 and the Dakar Rally. And, outside of his racecar, he’s supremely calm and soft-spoken, even by the laid back standards of Southern California.

“They’ll fly,” Heger says of his Polaris RZR racer. “We hit these jumps doing 70 mph and flew 50 or 100 feet,” he tells me, implying that he was taking it easy on this fragile writer. Tomorrow the race starts and his real world begins.

“I live in a small town called El Centro, near [the Glamis sand dunes],” he says, almost in a whisper. “My backyard is definitely desert. I’ve been born and raised there. My dad’s a farmer so I got to drive dirt roads a lot.”

“It’s the best job you could have,” he says, adding that it beats mopping floors. “I was never good at stick and ball sports, so I figured better make myself good behind the wheel.”

The start

It’s 9 a.m. on race day. This year’s Baja 1000 route is an 835-mile (1,343-kilometre) loop, starting and ending on the public roads of Ensenada, a port city about 100 kilometres south of the U.S. border.

Various officials are gathered on the starting podium, including race organizers, local military and police officials. The governor of Baja California gets up to the mic. “Ensenada is the world capital of off-road!” she says in Spanish to big cheers from the massive crowd, who are dressed in trucker hats and t-shirts displaying their brand affiliations – Fox or King Shocks, BFGoodrich or Toyo tires – as well as pictures of their favourite racing trucks. (Several of the top trucks have names: for example, Fastball or The Beast and their drivers are celebrities around here.)

Heger will start first in the Pro UTV Open class for high-performance side-by-sides. Ahead of him in the long line of exotic vehicles waiting at the start is another former Dakar Rally winner, Toby Price. He’s starting third in the four-wheel vehicles category. (The motorcycles started earlier, just after midnight.)

Price tells me he fell in love with Baja on his first visit here in 2012, but he’s still hunting for his first overall victory in the 1000.

“Anybody that’s never seen an off-road trophy truck rip through the desert, it’s an actual mind-blowing experience whether you’re into motorsport or not,” Price says.

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He and the rest of the top drivers (or at least the rich ones) are in Unlimited-class trophy trucks, which cost as much as US$2-million. There are hardly any rules governing these beasts; they’re probably the last bastion of gas-guzzling Americana. Their mid-mounted big-block V8s make no concession to eco-anything.

With 40-inch BFGoodrich KR3 tires, Fox Racing shocks and springs as thick as a 2-litre soda bottle – and reportedly more than 1,200 horsepower to play with – Price’s Mason Motorsports-built machine is the manifestation of every pickup truck’s pure id, its raw unfiltered desire.

Unlike in NASCAR or Formula 1, no team really turns a profit racing these things. “Nope, this is all loss,” Price says with a smile. The race is open to amateurs and pros alike, on almost any kind of vehicle. But the trophy trucks are typically owned by wealthy businessmen.

“They like to spend their money to come down here and have fun and burn up some tires and burn some race fuel,” Price says. His truck is owned by fellow Australian Paul Weel, who shares driving duties.

When that three-tonne machine takes off, its nose rises high into the air and speeds forth with a tortured, hellish roar.

“This is wild-west racing,” Price said.

The chase

There are more than 200 vehicles entered in this year’s race and there’s no point watching them all take off at the start a few minutes apart. Instead, I hop aboard Larry McRae’s Chevrolet Silverado and head south along Highway 1 to the first makeshift pit stop, a spot in the desert where racers can refuel and repair damage before heading out. Pit crews and chase trucks – support vehicles that shadow the racers – clog the two-lane highway. A military checkpoint slows traffic to a crawl.

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McRae has raced and won at Baja as a member of the BFGoodrich Performance Team, but this year, at 62 years old, he’s chaperoning a couple of writers the tire company has invited to watch the race. BFGoodrich is a title sponsor, because, if you’re an off-road tire company this is the best place to show off your products.

“What I love about the sport is it’s really one big family,” says McRae. “If I’m in a race and I break down, everybody’s going to stop and everybody’s going to offer: ‘What do you need?’”

But, there are risks.

“Every year there is [a fatality], just about,” McRae says, adding that deaths aren’t always race-related though. “There’s way more traffic on these roads that can’t handle it,” he says as we’re stuck in chaotic bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“There’s motorcycle guys that have wrecked and died. Quad guys have wrecked and died,” he continues. “One of my buddies said they came across the finish line and there was actually a finger in the fiberglass. People like to touch the cars as they go by, and that one cost [someone] a finger,” he says.

What scared McRae most when he was racing though was getting stuck in one of the deep silt beds that dot the course, and then getting hit by another competitor. The silt is like talcum powder, visibility drops to zero, he explains. Drivers sometimes can’t even see their own car’s dashboard. If you’re digging out a car in those conditions, other cars might never see you.

The pits

After two hours in traffic we pull into the first pit stop. It’s nothing organized or clean like you see in Formula 1, just a bunch of mechanics and trucks and barrels of fuel scattered around in the dirt.

As for what the drivers have been through just go get here, two hours into their 16-36 hour race, McRae describes racing the Baja as: “like being in a car wreck for 12 hours. It’s literally violent, even the [trucks] that ride nice, you’re still pushing the car to the edge of its limit so it’s beatin’ you up,” says McRae.

Most of the vehicles have open windows, no glass or windshield. It’s not exactly glamourous. McRae says he wore an external catheter during his races, but it could sometimes leak, in which case it would be a soggy race. Some female racers, he adds, chose to wear diapers. Even if driving is shared among several people, you could be in the car for eight or more hours at a time.

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The first trophy trucks thunder past the pits leaving a plume of red-ish dirt that envelopes onlookers.

There’s nothing to separate the racing course from spectators and photographers; anybody can get as close to the speeding cars as they dare, jumping out of the way at the last second.

“This is last bastion stuff,” says Greg Lust, an Australian motorsport broadcaster I met amid some prickly bushes beside a sandy section of the course. “It’s awesome. It’s preserved some old-school things about motorsport,” he says. Racing is getting safer, as it should, he adds, but races like the Baja 1000 and the Isle of Man TT that preserve the raw history of motorsports are incredibly rare now.

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Brock Heger barrels into the pits in his Polaris RZR with a broken steering rack. A team of mechanics swarm the vehicle and swap in a new rack and tires in just 25 minutes, but Heger’s chances of continuing his winning streak are low.

After Heger peels out, we head back to our hotel – a three hour drive in traffic – to sleep while the race continues into the night. Back in Ensenada, a roadside Taqueria is packed with race fans. (If you’re ever in the area, El Trailero’s chorizo is a must.)

The end

My alarm goes off just before midnight. We stand around the finish line waiting with a massive crowd. According to organizers, up to 800,000 people turn up each year to watch the Baja races: the 250, 400, 500 and the 1000.

We can hear the winning trophy truck approaching long before it’s visible. A plume of dust and helicopters announces its arrival.

It rounds the last corner, but it’s not Price.

He was in the lead when his truck ran out of fuel with just 82 kilometres to go. A simple mistake in the pits cost Price his maiden Baja 1000 win.

Instead, Bryce Menzies crossed the ceremonial finish line first at around 1:30 a.m., after overtaking Price who was helplessly stopped by the side of the course.

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“That’s what Baja does, man, you can never give up. You just put your head down and grind. The rain came in. The dirt was unreal,” Menzies says after taking off his helmet. “It seems like we’re running qualifying pace for 850 miles.”

Price did eventually manage to get some fuel and finish 14th overall and seventh in the Trophy Truck class after a gruelling 18 hours.

Of the 229 teams that started, only 131 would cross the finish line before the 36-hour cutoff.

The BFGoodrich people milling about the company’s motorhome next to finish line looked visibly saddened seeing Menzies win in a truck wearing Toyo tires. The fact the second car across the line was wearing BFG rubber didn’t seem to matter much, neither did the fact that the majority of the field had gone out and purchased BFG tires to race on. The company people wanted to win. I just wanted to sleep.

I read later that Heger ended up 27th overall and 5th in his class. The steering rack issue and subsequent pit stop probably cost him the win.

As we left for the airport early the next morning it was pouring rain and many of the drivers will still out there, struggling toward the finish. Some teams would be going for another 10 or 12 hours, driving though the rain in a car with no windows soaked to the bone, caked in mud and quite possibly sitting in a puddle of their own urine. And when it’s all done, they may just decide to do it again next year.

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The writer was a guest of BFGoodrich. Content was not subject to approval.