Marty Fiolka

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.

If you work in a magazine like we do nearly every day of our life, it's always great to hear from readers. The good, the bad and the ugly, as long as there's noise, there's interest.

After months of stripping, scraping and welding together an updated chassis and suspension on our Retro Bronco project, the time had come to update things in the engine compartment to match the new Currie C-Mac full-floater rear end, Camburg-modified front 4x4 arms and rugged King coilover shocks. With the body now off for an all-new dash and interior layout, this seemed as good a time as any.

In case you haven't been keeping up with the continuing saga of our Project Retro Bronco, the thumbnail goes something like this: Our friend Ron DeWolf lent us a cool, but old school, Bronco prerunner to chase last year's SCORE Baja 1000.

In our last issue of DIRTsports, you might have followed along as we attempted to chase the Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 in a cool, but barrowed vintage Ford Bronco belonging to Ron DeWolf. To make a long and colorful story short, electrical problems and an incident of killing a cow thanks to no headlights made for a great story and the perfect introduction to a project build-up based on retrofitting an older pre-project with new parts and technology.

Covered with the same thin coating of dust that clings so tightly to nearly everything in Baja, the faded yellow walls surrounding the crusty Ensenada repair "shop" had quickly become like the electric fences of a maximum security prison. We had spent five excruciating hours here, hoping the friendly and hard-working Mexican mechanics could breath life into our potent, but tired, Ford Bronco. A true off-road workhorse, the 1983 Bronco was supposed to carry DIRTsports photographer Boyd Jaynes, Yokohama Motorsports representative Kim Hernandez and myself nearly 1,000 adventure-filled miles chasing Ivan Stewart's Protruck class to La Paz. An electrical gremlin had reared its ugly head before even leaving Ensenada's city limits, and there we sat, the race marching toward the 2004 Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 finish line without us.