Desert Insanity: 1,000 Miles Through Baja in a Hummer

As he paced around the pit stop waiting for the crew to bolt in a new rack-and-pinion steering system in our modified Hummer H3, champion off-road racer Rod Hall confessed that he’d just peed in his shoe. After he climbed out of the truck at the pit, Hall had tucked his catheter hose into his shoe — and forgotten he wasn’t simply peeing onto the floorboard of the vehicle, which is how real men heed nature’s call in this grueling 1,000-mile race through the desert called the Baja 1,000.

We girls wear Depends.

That was during the 2006 race, which you can read about here. I was riding shotgun in the H3, navigating for Hall, the winningest Baja 1,000 racer, with 18 class trophies and one overall victory.

This wild and crazy off-road scramble gave birth to endurance off-road racing in North America 40 years ago. Hall was there for the first race in October 1967, and he’s been there ever since, the only driver to run all 39 annual editions of the Baja 1,000.

Irrigating his foot is the least of his adventures in four decades of racing. In May, I had a chance to drive with Hall and his son Josh, who races a Hummer H2, from Tijuana to La Paz, tracing the route he took — or as much of it as he could find — in the 1967 race. Along with off-road driving tips, the elder Hall dispensed amazing stories of courage and skill, resourcefulness and luck: the four cornerstones of victory at Baja.

In the Beginning

The first race was a free-for-all — La Paz or bust. Sixty-eight vehicles started, 31 finished. There was no official route, just five checkpoints, and drivers made it up as they went along.

Before the race, Hall received a critical piece of advice: “Everybody thinks La Paz is south of Ensenada. It’s actually southeast.” He and co-driver Larry Minor kept their compass reading SE in a Jeep with only slightly modified suspension and springs — “It was like riding a wheelbarrow to the finish line,” Hall says — and won their class.

“I have no idea how we got to La Paz, but we only made two wrong turns,” Hall says. These days, the Hummer team spends as many as eight days pre-running, recording the entire course on the race truck’s GPS. Back then, Hall and Minor didn’t even know how they’d get their Jeep home; they paid $100 to have it flown from La Paz to Ensenada in a C-47 cargo plane.

Backtracking Through Baja

On our first day retracing the 1967 route, we head south in a conga line of Hummer H2s and H3s from Horsepower Ranch in Ensenada, where you can rent a dune buggy, learn off-road techniques and even enter the Baja 1,000. Hall points out a spot where the road takes a sharp right. “I didn’t make that turn in ’73,” he says.

His truck vaulted a guardrail and rolled end over end, landing on its wheels but broken beyond repair. “Shortest race I ever ran — 10 miles,” Hall says. “As we were going over, I saw two boys run in front of the truck. I thought, ‘Oh man, I‘m going to hit them.’” When the truck rocked to a stop, he was thankful to see the boys racing away — even more relieved when he found out one was the son of the Ensenada police chief. “I could have spent the rest of the day trying to stay out of jail,” he says.

Some miles down the trail, Hall shares another rollover story from the early ’70s. “I was racing for Ford, making excellent time,” he says. Hall had just let teammate Parnelli Jones pass when, he says, “I ran out of talent,” missing a turn and rolling. But his Ford Bronco landed on its wheels, and Hall went on to win his class.

Racing Lineage

Compact and soft-spoken, Hall looks a decade younger than his 69 years. He is a self-proclaimed good ol’ boy who devours the Wall Street Journal and is a leading light in a chauvinist world — of 430 entrants in last year’s race, only 13 were women. Hall is a feminist who watches Indianapolis 500 races solely in hopes of seeing Danica Patrick win.

Despite being a pro racer, Hall turns down invitations from his Harley-owning buddies because he says they ride too fast. Hall stays in shape mounting tires at his Hummer dealership in Reno, and when his body was feeling tight 10 years ago, he did 10 Rolfing sessions (a form of holistic muscle manipulation) to loosen it up. This year, he’s going back for a refresher course. “It’s excruciating, it’s expensive, it’s worth it,” he says.

Hall raised two sons to love racing as much as he does. Josh, lean and weathered like his dad, is a retired Marine who trains Special Forces, CIA, FBI and the like in off-road driving. “They show up in their crew cuts and mirror sunglasses. We don’t ask who they work for,” he says.

Chad, with finer features and wire-rim glasses, looks like a philosophy professor, but don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s delicate. When a leaf spring he was installing sheared off his left index finger, he had the stump sewn up and raced in the Parker 400 four days later. For Team Hummer, they race two H3s and an H2. Chad has five class wins at the Baja 1,000 and Josh has three.

A New Era

The hairiest stories hail from the early races. As the years passed, the job changed: The cars got better, and the going got worse. As progress came to Baja, paved roads were built, and truckers no longer plied the dirt trails (in the old days it took them a full week of 15-hour days to drive from Ensenada to La Paz), keeping the roads in reasonable shape.

In the mid ‘70s, SCORE, the race’s governing body, began to scout a different route every year. The mileage would waver, sometimes 900, sometimes 1,100. A hurricane might sweep through and knock out miles of road just before the late-fall race. “Then we’d have to crawl through the rocks and boulders,” Hall says.

In 2005, the course barely broke 700 miles — pundits called it the “Baja 1,000-ish.” At 1,200 miles, the 40th anniversary race in November will top the title distance by a grueling 20 percent.

Off-Roader's Algebra

Hall’s rules for off-road driving are simple. “Ask yourself three things: Are you smooth? Are you comfortable? Are you putting the vehicle exactly where you want it?” he says.

Note that speed isn’t even in the mix. That’s because endurance racing favors skill and resourcefulness over velocity, and it requires the constant recalibration of speed against keeping the vehicle running through a thousand miles of punishment.

In an early race, when Hall was driving, improbably, a V8 Maverick — “Ford wanted to showcase the car and I was low man on the team” — he broke a tie rod midway in the race. Hall hitched 30 miles to the nearest town for a spare, hitched back, installed it and still won his class.

From his first Jeep, which he bought at age 16, Hall loved the off-roader’s algebra of horsepower and physics. He spent an afternoon in his Jeep learning how to climb a steep sand hill on a farm near his Hemet, Calif., hometown, leaning out the window to see exactly when the tires began to spin, learning traction and throttle control.

Hall is a planner, meticulously tape-recording notes on all of the hazards in a race course — blind turns and drop-offs, deep silt — then learning the route, section by section, listening to the tape. Nowadays, each hazard is marked with a skull on the Hummer’s GPS display.

“I’m not the fastest driver,” Hall says. “I’m just the guy who makes it to the finish line first."

Perhaps his success is tied to a sober approach on this truly wild ride. “If you have too much fun, pretty soon you’ll be walking,” he says.

Being patient also pays. “The only thing you can do at the beginning of the race is lose it,” Hall says. “People take chances, go crazy in the first 200 miles. But you still have 800 miles to go.”

Hall says that the 40th anniversary race this November will be his last, but the indecision comes through in his voice. Paul Newman was still racing at 80; I’m guessing Rod Hall will be, too.

Next: Hummer H3 Off-Road Report