Off-Road Is the Fun Way to Go

You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I was one of the pioneers in the glorious sport of off-road motor racing.

It was back in the ‘40s and the scene was a road near Buffalo, after dark. I was driving along in a modified 1934 Ford V-8. I say modified because the car was a teen-ager by then and the only original parts on it were the steering wheel and the rear-view mirror.

Among the modifications was the lights fuse. It wasn’t the kind you buy in a store, it was a coil of tightly rolled tinfoil and it pooped out at the precise moment I was passing a stretch of road with trees on one side and a river on the other.

Now, if you’ve ever had your headlights go out on you in pitch darkness, you know it’s like having somebody clamp hands over your eyes.

I got off-road, all right. The race part of it developed when I raced to see if I could get the brakes on before I hit something or went into 10 feet of rushing water.

I hit a tree. All things considered, it was better than drowning.

Another time, I was riding somewhere between Maine and Massachusetts in a snowstorm with my friend Bill Huber and we hit an ice slick and careened almost into oncoming traffic.

There are no monuments at either site but the point is, the exhilaration of off-road racing is that you are taking off at high-speed, driving over unimproved terrain over which you have little or no control.

People generally credit the founder of the Baja 1,000 or Mickey Thompson with inventing the sport but I think it was invented by a lot of guys who survived roll-overs and learned how much fun moments of sheer, stark terror at the wheel can be. It’s a sport for people who are tired of knowing what is going to happen next.

Take Rodney Allen Hall. He got into the sport somewhat the same way.

He had a war-surplus Jeep back in the ‘50s and this battlefield relic seemed to want to take off on its own periodically in search of foxholes or machine gun nests. It hated concrete and paved surfaces. Hall took to giving it its head. After all, Enzo Ferrari himself had said that the Jeep was the only true American sports car.

Pretty soon, Hall was organizing hill climbs and canyon runs and desert rallies for his restless Jeep.

The beauty of this kind of racing, of course, is, it’s the only one where you can hit a cow. In fact, it’s the only kind where you can get lost.

It’s hard to picture a driver at Indy stopping to ask directions but Rod Hall had to once in the Baja 1,000. That’s because he saw the Sea of Cortez on his right as he was on his way to La Paz. When the Sea of Cortez is on your right there, your chances of getting to La Paz are not nearly as good as your chances of hitting Yuma first.

And then, of course, what about the elephants? Ordinarily, if you see an elephant from behind the wheel of the car, you shouldn’t be driving. But Hall’s wasn’t pink and it wasn’t in the streets of Beverly Hills.

He was tooling along the road from Mombasa to Nairobi in an off-roader one night when he suddenly noticed the rays of his headlights seemed to be being swallowed up into a black hole. Immediately, he knew what it was. “For some reason, elephants seem to absorb light, not reflect it,” he says.

This one seemed about to absorb his Dodge Ramcharger, too. “It probably looked to him like something good to eat,” Hall recalls. Or maybe he just wanted to get in show business.

Another of the pluses with off-road racing is, you don’t always have to be going front-end first. Hall won a race once when his forward gears gave out on him 25 miles from the finish line. Reverse worked fine, though. So, he turned the truck around and backed to victory. Lots of people have trouble backing a car out of a garage. Hall backed nearly from Baker to Barstow, rather like Tony Curtis going stern-first out to his yacht in “Some Like It Hot.” He recalls: “My neck was so screwed around that way that I had to back through doorways for a month.”

Off-road racing is hard on power steering. Hall’s went out in mid-race once and produced such arm aches that he took to bouncing the car in the air when he wanted to change direction. “We finished the race like a kangaroo,” he said.

Sometimes, the problems are political rather than mechanical. In Australia, a Russian team showed up for an off-roader outside Sydney. This occasioned considerable surprise by a lot of people but it needn’t have. In Russia, all driving is off-road.

But these Russians were going so slow, Hall began to run up on their tailgate. This upset his riding mechanic, Jim Fricker.

“Listen, if you want to start World War III, why don’t you just go shoot an archduke?” Fricker told him. “That way, racing won’t get blamed.”

Hall was undaunted. “Well, why doesn’t he just take that thing back to the laundry in Moscow?” he snapped.

Turtles can be a problem, too. Not the ones in the path, the ones in the trucks in Mexico.

“Someone said, ‘Watch out for that turtle truck.’ I thought they meant its velocity, not its cargo,” he said. When he hit one in the rain he mixed up the biggest batch of turtle soup, and not the mock, ever seen outside of the court of Louis the XIV.

Rod Hall will not hit any elephants, turtles or Russians this Sunday at the Turbo Wash SCORE Off Road World Championship at Riverside Raceway. Also, he hopes to finish the race facing forward.

Of course, that’s the beauty of off-road racing. You don’t always control your environment. Nine times out of 10, when you leave the road, the next sound you hear is a thud! As I proved when I was one of the pioneers of the sport all those years ago in Buffalo.