Shotgun on the Baja 1,000

Rod Hall's modified Hummer H3 kicks up dust during its trek through Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

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Rod Hall, one of the reigning celebrities of the wild Baja 1,000 off-road race that Mario Andretti famously called it “a 24-hour plane crash," is rumored to have X-ray vision: He can sense what lies ahead through the cloud of desert dust that often obscures anything more than an inch beyond the hood of his seriously modified racing truck. This time, his sixth sense has failed him; passing a pickup on a deeply silted hill, we have plunged over a bluff and overturned. “This isn’t good,” Hall says, with typical understatement. He is looking up at me — literally — because our electric blue Hummer H3 is currently resting on the driver-side doors.

Hall has participated in every one of the 38 annual stampedes down Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, races that feature a lunatic assortment of entries, from 800-hp trophy trucks, the largest class of off-road racing vehicles, to slab-sided Erector-set dune buggies to jacked-up Volkswagen Beetles. Hall races for Team Hummer, his sponsor. The Baja attracts drivers as diverse as NASCAR star Robby Gordon, TV hunk Patrick Dempsey and working-class Mexicans who’ve spent the grocery money on a Baja Bug.

Despite more class wins than anybody else (18), here at mile-marker 12, things are looking grim. We clamber out through the windshield hole (this Hummer goes glassless) and a crowd of locals who’d been standing on the bluff hoping for some action pitch in, rocking the 5,400-pound truck back onto its tires. Elated that we’ve only lost five minutes, Hall hits the starter switch, and … no joy.

The starter is toast. Now, two of our team’s three chase trucks must make their way upstream along the race course, as I radio descriptions of the entries that are screaming toward them: “… yellow and blue dune buggy; green quad; red Baja bug.” Racers share the course with support teams, which often move against the current. There’s no such thing as a yellow flag. Did I mention the route is also open to local drivers, or that the citizens of Baja like to boost their odds of seeing a crash by booby-trapping the course — pushing boulders onto it, building dams to flood it or digging axle-snapping ditches? “Anytime you see a bunch of people deep in the desert, watch out,” Hall says.

It’s a testosterone festival. So few women drive, or even navigate, as I am, that anytime one does, it’s a press-worthy event.

The weekend seems to be fueled by Corona and highlighted with incidents like the 2 a.m. fracas when someone kicked in the hotel room door across from mine. I guess he forgot his key.

That same night, a pickup and a dune buggy were stolen from the parking lot of our gated resort — hard to believe, as I would swear the lot was filled with drunken revelers from sundown to sunup. The day before the race, there’s an enormous street fair in downtown Ensenada, where the race begins. Drivers thread their vehicles through the crowds toward a tech inspection station amid hawkers selling T-shirts, posters and churros. The driver registration center has a cash bar. It’s that kind of event.

Hall's Hummer midway through its 1,047-mile trek

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On race morning, 431 motorcycles and trucks (a record number of entries) assemble on the streets surrounding the start. Mexican kids circulate, felt-tip markers in hand, getting drivers and navigators — yes, even me — to sign their shirts. Magically, the chaotic assortment of motorcycles and trucks organizes itself into the right order for the start. As the trophy trucks swing down a ramp into a dry riverbed, they send rooster tails of dirt into the throngs of spectators, who are welcome to edge as close as they dare. Most vehicles are powered by teams of drivers, but the toughest of the tough, like Hall’s son Josh, do it Ironman-style, driving the entire 1,048-mile course (he wins his class, “stock full,” in a Hummer H2).

Back at mile-marker 12, our chase team has swapped out the starter from their own truck. We’re on our way — but not out of the woods. “The power steering’s shot,” Hall says. Wrestling the big truck along the twisting, gullied route is a wrist-bending chore. When we spy a little clutch of tents at mile 62, we pull in, even though this is not our pit (each team contracts with a specific supplier). The Magnificent 7 crew lives up to their name, welcoming us, crawling under the H3 to replace the entire rack-and-pinion steering mechanism (luckily, we carry a spare). They offer us beef tacos, grilled over a campfire. The Baja 1,000 brings out the worst in some, the best in others.

By now, night has closed over the desert and the field is hours ahead of us. Hall takes comfort in the fact that this is a race of attrition. Only half the entries finish, and some classes have been won by their sole vehicle that makes it to La Paz.

A third-place finish for the Hummer H3, in 36 hours, 37 seconds

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We’re running through a tones-of-beige world, details crisply illuminated by the panel of roof-mounted halogen lights. The occasional jack rabbit hops across the trail in front of us, and tiny rodents scurry away from the Hummer’s huge tires. Hall is one of the smoothest drivers in the field. A newbie, I’ve been warned about everything from paralyzing fear to debilitating bruises to upchucking into my helmet, but as we rocket through the empty desert, all alone, the effect is spiritual, not scary.

It’s a long race, and Hall is a patient man. He’ll avoid mistakes, bide his time and hope for the best. Thirty-six hours and 37 seconds after we swung onto that dry riverbed in Ensenada, Hall and co-driver Emily Miller cross the finish line in third place. It’s not the win he’d hoped for, but enough to secure him the “stock mini” class championship for 2006.

I’m not there to cheer them. I ceded my seat to another navigator at mile-marker 122, vowing “same time, next year.”