LAS VEGAS – To get a sense for just how unorganized the Mint 400 was when it first started in 1967, let’s start with how times were recorded. There wasn’t a sophisticated governing body. There wasn’t any crazy technology. There wasn’t even a guy with a stop watch. Instead there was a time clock employees would use for work, and as each car went off the mark they handed a guy at the line their card.
This was how they got their official time.
“The numbers were screwed up,” Norm Johnson, co-founder of the Mint 400, says at the Commonwealth Bar off Fremont Street the day before the 2017 edition of the race. “The times were all screwed up. Police were on the radio, and highway patrol didn’t know the race was going on.”
Some of the 40 or so cars in the inaugural race were actual cars off the street. Many of the entrants didn’t even come close to finishing. But there was something to it – to the craziness – that not only spoke to the heyday of Vegas, where if you ever got in trouble you could just someone who’d call someone who’d call someone and they’d “take care of it,” but to the history of off-road racing in general.
Even when it’s organized, nothing about off-road racing is really organized. Everything but the race itself moves on Baja time, if it moves at all. Records are more an agreed-upon shrug. Race teams are still filled with relative amateurs who love racing anything on wheels but still drive six-figure trophy trucks like a college kid in a golf cart is trying to win a $20 bet that he can’t jump the bunker without crashing.
“This was a hobby,” this year’s Mint 400 winner Rob MacCachren says. “Somebody just went to the desert. Now it’s a disease, man. You can’t get it out of your system.”
The anarchy of it was enough to draw Hunter S. Thompson out there as the backdrop for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Through the drug-filled gonzo haze, away from the bats, the Circus, Circus casino floor, and from Raoul Duke himself, if the race sounded like a harebrained scheme, well, it kind of was.
This is where Del Webb comes in.
Johnson used the race to drum up publicity for Webb’s Mint casino (hence the name), and among the strangest things Webb was associated, it barely even cracked the top 10. How there isn’t a film about Webb’s life yet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese is astounding, but that’s another story (and a treatment to be written later). The guy caught typhoid fever from a prison inmate, later owned the Yankees, knew Howard Hughes, played golf with Bing Crosby, had dealings with Bugsy Siegel, and owned a construction empire.
His name is still strewn across resorts all over the country, and he just so happened to be the reason The Great American Off-Road Race started. Half a century later, the Mint is long gone, Binion’s takes its place, and Vegas is barely recognizable other than some of the hotel names that have survived.
But the Mint 400 remains. Although it needed a little help. Multiple times the race almost died and had to start back up again. It wasn’t until the Martelli Brothers and the Best In The Desert took over a few years ago that the race was dragged into the future of off-road racing.
“You could basically come to Vegas and get away with murder,” Matt Martelli says. “If you ever got into trouble you just called the mayor. The race is different now, but the spirit is the same.”
Martelli talks a big game, and he has plenty of reason to. A long-time vet of action sports, and founder of Mad Media, a design shop that lives and breathes off-road culture, Martelli knows the importance of bridging historical races like the Mint with the future of the sport.
“We want this race to be a lightning rod the way the X Games were for action sports,” Martelli says.
There’s a hunger for it, as evidenced by the crowds of people lining Fremont Street during Contingency, a ceremony that’s a cross between a parade, a street festival, and a glorified check-in. There are decals everywhere, giant tents with merchandise and samples, “activation” spaces, and kids everywhere. It’s clear this sport has room to grow, and everyone involved is trying to row the boat – the struggle being that it’s not exactly easy to get them all to row at the same time.
Take BFGoodrich, one of the presenting sponsors of the event. BFG has been so intricately involved in the history of off-road racing, it’s careful not to disrupt the delicate ecosystem. But it still wants to push the sport further, whether in its selection of sponsored athletes or evolving technology.
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“It’s like road racing in the 70s,” BFGoodrich tire designer and project engineer Matt Hanlon says. “You can still do something and change the way racing will be for the future.”
One of the biggest advancements in the sport has been in the strides made by the tire manufacturers. As racer Cameron Steele says, “the tires are stupid – it’s like cheating.” The better the traction, the less the tires become an issue and more of a constant, the more drivers can focus on the actual course itself. There will always be a disparity between teams (and the ones with the most money will win most often), but leveling the playing field will only make for better racing.
This year’s Mint 400 field saw a record number of entrants, and there was even a waiting list as some would-be competitors were turned away. This is great news for the Martellis, who wanted to bring some of the spectacle back to the race. It’s a throwback to what KJ Howe did when he took over as race director after returning from Vietnam in the early 1970s.
“Today is just an extension of what started back then,” Howe says.
There’s still the specialty liquor bottle each year, the parties, and the glitz that goes along with anything associated with Las Vegas. They even brought in Robin Leach – yes, that Robin Leach – to be the Grand Marshall in 2017. Leach, who has become the unofficial spokesperson for Vegas, got to tour the Strip in a trophy truck and give his thoughts on what the race means to the area.
“It’s a city all about action, adventure, and excitement that’s 24/7,” Leach says. “It’s the perfect home for the Mint 400.”
Hopefully it’ll be the home for the Mint 400 for plenty of years to come. Tentpole races like the Mint give the off-road community events to mark the calendar by, much like the Majors in golf. Between the Mint 400, King Of The Hammers, the Crandon World Cup in Wisconsin, the Baja 1000, and others, fans know the races are coming, and the teams themselves have marks to shoot for.
“Everybody wants to win the big ones,” MacCachren says. “This is one of the big ones.”
Sure, there are better tires, they’re no longer using a punchcard for times, and they’re not zipping down Fremont Street at full speed, but once drivers get into the desert, the racing still feels the same – even if there are now chase helicopters following the action. The Great American Off-Road Race is alive and well, and like plenty of other things in Las Vegas, it’s downright addicting.
