Sometimes you can only sit back in utter amazement. It's not like we sit around our offices and intentionally try to concoct
the next great
thing for Dirt Sports to cover. For sure, there are no focus-group drones telling us what their in-depth marketing survey says, either. While most
of the time we try our best to
inform and entertain by dreaming up the next story angle, sometimes a truly great ideal actually comes to us.
Such was the case when Rodney Wills, our bald-headed, dirt-motorsports-loving bro' over at HPI Racing called with an interesting
proposition. It was not just another lame-assed publicity event dreamed up by some overpaid and undertalented PR firm, but
an honest to God brainstorm.
Wills' premise was simple: would Dirt Sports consider joining HPI in setting a new world record from Barstow, Calif., to Las
Vegas? Immediately, the words "world record" snapped us to attention. Then it sunk in. Was friggin' Rodney actually talking
us into using one of HPI's
radio-controlled toy cars for this deal? Or, even worse, one of his toy monster trucks? Are you drunk, dude? You want us to
stop every 120 yards on a 120-mile desert run to change a
battery pack on some 12-inch long version of Grave Digger? Ah...no.
The record breaking RC buggy was a stock HPI Baja 5B with a trick carbon-fiber body.
But Wills, the marketing director (as opposed to, Wills the potential AA member), had a special bullet in his PR arsenal–the
brand new
and revolutionary 1/5-scale Baja 5B powered buggy. Phrases like "three feet long," "factory supported effort" and "45 miles
per hour, top speed" snapped
the idea back into sharp reality.
Was it really possible that the latest generation of radio-controlled (RC) off-roaders could really make it 120 miles across
the desert from Barstow
to Vegas in just one day? The answer surprised even us.
THIS AIN'T NO TOY STORY
The first commercially available gas-powered buggy was a Meyer Manx model, introduced by Cox in the early 1970s.
Wednesday morning, January 17 was cold. We are talking freezing here, as if our group had accidentally been transported to
Poland. Enveloped by the predawn darkness outside of Barstow's famous Slash X Saloon, our group of would-be record breakers
shook like atheists at a Billy Graham convention.
Someone mentioned that the temperature stood at a mere 15 degrees.
A lifelong enthusiast of off-road motorsports, Marty Fiolka raced his first SCORE Baja 1000 in 1992. A graduate of the California University at Long Beach, he formed the Rennsport Marketing Group in 1995 and executed public relations programs for Nissan, Infiniti, Exxon, Mitsubishi, and SCORE International. Now an eight-time Baja 1000 competitor and desert racing veteran, Fiolka is the associate producer of Dana Brown's Baja documentary, Dust to Glory, the author of the recently released coffee-table Baja 1000 history book 1000 Miles to Glory and the editorial director for Advanstar Communications.
Articles by Marty Fiolka
Untitled Document
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