Desert racing is the act of racing through the desert in a 2 or 4 wheeled off-road vehicle. Races, which generally consist of two or more loops around a course covering up to 40 miles, can take the form of Hare and Hound or Hare scramble style events, and are often laid out over a long and harsh track through relatively barren terrain.
Point-to-point–style races, including the famous Baja 1000, attract nationally ranked and celebrity drivers. This type of racing tests the endurance and capabilities of racer and machine, and while organized clubs or teams sometimes field multiple sponsored riders for particular events, desert racing in its purest form is largely an individual endeavor. Winning racers accrue points to advance their rank and placement in future contests.
Desert racing vehicles, which include rugged enduro-style motorcycle, four wheeled all-terrain vehicles, pickup trucks (like Trophy Trucks), and dune buggies, have specialized suspensions with increased wheel travel. The now-defunct Barstow to Vegas, which ran from 1964 to 1989, was a well-known example of desert racing in North America. Desert racing, in its most organized form, began in Southern California in the 1920s.
Famous quotes containing the words desert and/or racing:
“Some people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keep on digging. Most people don’t. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can’t stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.”
—Hal Borland (1900–1978)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)