It's one of those improbable rags-to-riches stories, and if you tried to write it as a script and pitch it to a movie studio, nobody would believe it was based on a true story. A couple of guys start a website aimed at bringing four wheelers together on a web-roots level, and in a few short years their site is one of the Internet's hottest automotive properties. They meet up with a couple of veteran pro rockcrawlers who nurture a vision of a hybrid off-road racing competition that combines the high-octane thrills of Baja racing with the demanding technical skills (and engineering acumen) needed to be a champion rockcrawler. Take a unique grand vision, pair it up with some media-savvy marketing and web promotion, and voila! King of the Hammers was born.
In only three years, an untested idea has become the Southwest's biggest off-road racing attraction-not counting Baja-and is now on the verge of busting out into a multi-event points series for 2010 and beyond. What gives?
King of the Hammers, simply put, is like no other kind of racing event we can think of in North America. A barren and desolate dry lake in a remote stretch of the Upper Mojave becomes a literal home overnight for tens of thousands of racers and fans, a veritable Rockstock Festival for wheelers. Competitors and spectators mingle freely in base camp in the hours before race day, and if you didn't know the racers by sight, it would be hard to distinguish them from the fans. There's no visible hierarchy here, no racing royalty, and no egos. (Not yet, anyway.) There are no groupies or bodyguards huddled 'round the racers, no onslaught of media vultures (not counting us), and no gratuitous bikini contests. (Hey, nothing's perfect.) Sponsored race teams with pro drivers can compete, as can enthusiastic amateurs with homebuilt rigs. And coolest of all, the event is free of charge for spectators-and if you want to get within a few feet of the racers and snap a few photos while they're muscling their way up Jack and Sledge, that's okay too. Say what?!?
In all, the event's catch-as-catch-can atmosphere made us think of what Baja racing must have been like back in the days when sponsors were few, race rules were minimal, course maps were crude, and fellas like Parnelli and Minor and Hall were running self-tuned rigs, getting off course (sometimes) and engineering field fixes on the fly. Today's racers at KOH might enjoy more sponsor support, and the exposure afforded by webcasts and video (and trust us, they have to wade through a ton of safety rules), but in the end, like the racers of old, they're blazing a new path for the next generation.
They're building vehicles to tackle obstacles previously unseen in desert racing, and their ability to patch up their rigs and improvise on the fly is just as vital as ever. (And, as some competitors discovered to their dismay, it's easy to get lost at KOH, even with accurate maps.) We came away from the event unable to shake the feeling that we had experienced something genuinely new, fresh, and exciting at play, something that could revolutionize the way we think about off-road racing in the future. And when you've been in this business as long as we have, you don't get that kind of feeling very often.
Right now, the only thing standing in the way of making KOH even bigger and better in years to come is the ongoing jurisdictional dispute between the BLM (which currently administers the land) and the Pentagon (which wants a big chunk of it to expand the Marine Corps training base at Twentynine Palms). We'd guess that's one reason why the KOH organizers have decided to expand the series beyond Johnson Valley; for 2010, they'll be teaming up with Best In The Desert to stage three additional races with the hopes of building a KOH points series. But for the time being, King of the Hammers is pointing the way toward the future of off-road racing-and that future is here, right now.
-Douglas McColloch