Racing 800 Miles in the Desert—in a VW Bug | National Geographic

The Baja 1000 is just one of the toughest off-road races that exists. Uh, it's in Baja California in Mexico down the peninsula. It's pretty much the race that you aspire to do in off-road racing. This year's event is 828 miles and has, I believe, a 33-hour time limit.

When most people think of the Baja 1000, they think about trophy trucks, which are these thousand horsepower million-dollar forces of nature when you see them on the course. We're kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum with, uh, basically stock Volkswagens from the 1970s, got about, uh, 50-60 horsepower in them and very little modification. Sometimes we're going down the road sideways, almost about to tip over, which is interesting and kind of scary at times.

Well, we really did feel good coming into the event. The car was strong; we had the biggest team we ever had. We had great communications and, unfortunately, we had a problem come out of left field, uh, with our fuel system that caused multiple failures of different parts of it, and it knocked us out of the race 30 minutes in with everything that we had this year. It really stinks, it just stinks, just stinks.

This is the sixth time we’ve failed, so that's kind of a tough thing to face. Um, it is hard. I mean, this is one of the hardest things you can do out there, but failing is part of learning and getting better at this stuff. Um, people are exhausted. I want them to sleep, I want them to get hydrated, I want them to get fed. Um, by this afternoon, we're going to be sitting down talking.

"All right, let's look at lessons learned. What can we do better next year? Where we were at with the team that we had this year, where we needed?"