The truck is in the air, all four wheels off, flying between huge bumps in a series of undulating whooptie-dos. A brief moment of hope: Perhaps we'll skip off the rim of the next hump. And reality: The Bronco's nose craters into the bottom of the next compression.
Our bodies slam into the safety harnesses. The slim 2.5-inch shocks gamely rebound, but there's just not enough wheel travel to negotiate these hellaciously big bumps. The rear of the Bronco kicks up like a pissed-off stallion trying to unman a rodeo rider.
No worries, I'll add in a little gas to smooth things out—now the rear of the truck is coming around. The short wheelbase is difficult to manage. A sharp steering wheel correction and . . . I'm holding my breath. We ride out the last two bumps sideways and the rig stutters to a stop, a fog of kicked-up dirt catches up to us, coating the interior.
I can feel my buddy Boyd's look from the passenger seat. Sorry, man. The truth is, this truck is a whole lot more vintage than I expected. "Dude, I can't believe you race this thing over 1000 miles of Mexican desert," I say. We're in an off-road recreation area in the Anza Borrego desert outside of San Diego. I've only been driving for 30 minutes and already my back hurts, the harness has cut off circulation in my shoulders, and I can taste dirt deep in the back of my throat.
"Thirteen hundred miles, actually," Boyd replies cheerily. "Six times so far."
Boyd Jaynes owns this Bronco, a vintage piece of Ford metal wrought in 1968. He transformed it into a full-on desert racing rig seven years ago. It has racing seats and five-point harnesses, a life-saving roll-cage and a fuel cell. There is a front windshield, but otherwise it's open to all the elements and California dust swirling about us.
What it doesn't have is the suspension travel of a trophy truck. No four-link rear, coil-over, or bypass shocks. The modern Fox smooth-body reservoir shocks are certainly welcome, but all components are original specification, including the leaf springs in the rear. This baby is less Ford Raptor and more 1960s reality.
And yet, the Bronco is not only a runner—it's a winner. The rig is named Caballo Del Diablo (the devil horse), and it's won best of class in the "Pioneer" class of the NORRA Mexican 1000 three times, including last year. It's also netted a third and fourth. When it comes to vintage desert racing, this is the little Bronco that could.
"It all started out as an excuse for me and my buddies to drive down to Cabo, drink lots of beer, and to get away from the wives and girlfriends," Boyd says as we unbuckle and change places. Boyd, 45, is a California native with a constant, contented half smile. I've almost never seem him stressed or lose that look of wry amusem*nt—even when I'm about to wreck his prized Bronco.
We've been friends for years, yet he's kept his off-road racing exploits pretty quiet. Perhaps he was worried I'd ask to borrow his truck, or even insist on going racing with him. But when he won the NORRA 1000 yet again, I had to know more. What would keep me, or any of us, from pulling a Boyd? Go buy an old truck and race through Mexico?
The answer was to take out the truck and get a taste. I figured if Boyd can do it, anybody could. (He can wrench just about as well as I can, which means getting underneath the truck and banging on the starter with a hammer, as we did the night before in his garage when the Ford wouldn't turn over.)
"We never intended to actually do well, but after six years of racing it's snowballed into a real racing program," Boyd says drolly. "We like to say our drinking team has developed a racing problem."
So go many tales of amateur racing, though Boyd and his co-driver, Brian Godfrey, have had more success than most. These days they're sponsored by American Racing Wheels, Fox, and General Tire, and they even get free beer from Modelo Especial.
Brian, a marketing manager, comes from a racing family, and his dad serves as the crew chief. Boyd also comes by his love of desert racing naturally. A professional motorsports and car photographer, he's covered Dakar three times for Mini's racing program and shot the Baja 1000 most years since the early 1990s. When he heard that the NORRA rally was being resurrected, he started shopping for a likely rig.
The National Off Road Association organized the inaugural Mexican 1000 in 1967, an event that would morph into the current, legendary Baja 1000. But in 2010, the original race was reborn as the General Tire NORRA Mexican 1000. It happens in the spring with a route between Ensenada and Cabo. Unlike Baja, most stages take place during the day and include transit sections on paved roads. Classes range from Boyd's 1967 to 1975 "pioneer era" vehicles, which includes Beetles, trucks, and buggies, all the way up to modern rigs in Pro Unlimited.
'The finish line is always within a few steps of the bar, and at the end of the day they give you shots of tequila before you get out of car.'
The inclusion of older vehicles ensures that things generally move slower, but the attitude is also different. "It's not as serious as Baja 1000, and it shouldn't be." Boyd says. "We drive during daylight, and a lot of big name guys do the rally just because of the old school nature. The finish line is always within a few steps of the bar, and at the end of the day they give you shots of tequila before you get out of car."
The Bronco marque is 50 years old and suddenly prices are stratospheric. Rusted-out hulks are going for good money. Boyd scored a deal through the San Diego Craigslist, paying $10,000 for the 1968, which had a cage and numbers on the side, but was otherwise pristine. "It looked racy," he says."But the roll cage was fake and it had never been raced." Since that time he's put in a proper cage, replaced the front drums with disc brakes, and runs 33-inch General tires on 15-inch, vintage-style American Racing Wheels.
The engine is a 351 Cleveland V8, which came with the truck. Boyd has barely touched it since. "There's just enough power in the engine to get in trouble, but not enough to break the truck," he tells me as we blast up a dry gully known as an arroyo. He's driving twice as fast as I was, with constant corrections of the wheel. "The short wheelbase means the front is always trying to catch up to the front. And you've got to be really careful not to hook an edge or it will roll."
Amazingly, he and Godfrey have never rolled the rig. "We've had some close calls, tacoed some wheels and banged it up, but we've been lucky." After more than 6000 miles racing the truck, Boyd has a keen touch. He rolls through a variety of whoopties at a pitch-perfect speed, a stone skipping over placid waters. He also reads changes in terrain with a practiced eye. Still, he toils to reign in the Bronco when we approach big crests or major obstacles. "Maybe I should work on the brakes," he concedes when I point out that the stoppers suck. Every time we need to slow, Boyd primes the system by giving a long hard pump, as if prodding them awake, and then matting the pedal to the floor.
"I like to keep it as vintage as possible, but if it's not safe, or we're not going to make it, what's the point?" The front lights look right, for instance, but really they're LEDs from Rigid. And the team relies on a mounted navigation unit in addition to the route book.
We switch up again. It's a Saturday and the desert washes are increasingly crowded with UTVs, motorcycles, and buggies. There's no question that a turbocharged Polaris Rzr would thoroughly outpace the Bronco, but with vintage goggles and open-face helmets and a kick-ass livery, we outclass everyone else. (The Bronco attracts major crowds wherever we stop.) "We grow mustaches for the race," Boyd says. "Looking cool is an important part of it." The team just` ordered race suits with a mariachi charro theme, complete with neck kerchiefs.
The Bronco is a temperamental beast. It takes a while to get to know it. It likes to move around, and it will slide willingly despite the big knobby tires. A sudden lift of throttle produces quick results. It is bucketloads of edgy fun.
I'm chasing after a trio of buggies up a wide dry arroyo. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but you can go a lot faster through here," Boyd says. I'm trying to pick a path through the tributaries cut into the banks. Choosing a route is disconcerting: There is no single path or right decision, a far cry from the lap-after-lap exactitude of road racing. The arroyo splits. I skirt between two boulders, the Bronco rocking side to side, and enter a haze of dust. We pull abreast to the buggies. For a long moment we're side by side and then I bury the gas. The Bronco suddenly feels more stable, and we charge by. "There you go!" Boyd yells. "And this whole time in your fancy sports cars, you thought you were racing."
The next NORRA race takes place in late April. The Bronco needs a lot of prep before then. But Boyd and Brian will be out there again, for the seventh consecutive race, making the best of their old, beaten-up, and totally glorious Bronco. And now, of course, I've got the bug, just as Boyd knew I would. Surely there's one decent Bronco on sale on Craigslist at a decent price somewhere . . . right?
(Jason Harper, a contributing editor to Road & Track, has tested and written on cars for two decades. His scariest drive was a rally race in an original Lancia 037, his first drive of a supercar was the Porsche Carrera GT, and the only time he's gotten a speeding ticket was in a base Mini Cooper. His column, Harper's Bizarre, runs every Wednesday.)
