Brock Heger won his first Baja 1000 class victory in an RZR Pro R Factory UTV on November 17, 2024, but that is only part of the story. It was the unique way he accomplished the feat that underlined that accomplishment. And with the win, Heger secured his second consecutive SCORE UTV Pro Open Class Championship.
Every year, dozens of motorcycle riders attempt to “ironman” the Baja 1000, that is to complete the full distance of the race without benefit of another rider to grab the handlebars for a segment or two. One rarely hears about drivers performing the feat in a four-wheel vehicle. Heger wanted to be different in 2024.
He and co-driver Justin Wilson, a long time friend who served as navigator, crossed under the checkered flag after completing the 864-mile loop in for 18 hours and six minutes, from Ensenada, down the Baja California peninsula, and winding up exactly where he started. He scored his victory in the UTV field, but most impressively, he finished seventh overall among four-wheel vehicles and was only a little more than three hours behind the overall winner Luke McMillen and Rob MacCachren.
This was the highest finish by a UTV vehicle since the class was first introduced in 2007.
“It’s pretty crazy, looking at the finishing order,” Heger told NBC Sports. “I finished seventh overall and six of them were $1. 3 million trophy trucks. ... So it’s really cool to declare in a RZR try to show the world what it’s really capable of.”
Going It Alone
The decision to complete the Baja 1000 by himself was a long time in the making. Heger knew he wanted to do it, but only if he could be competitive.
“Ironman nowadays, a lot of people do it just to say they’ve done it,” Heger said. “And that was my whole thing. I said to everyone prior: I don’t want to go [and just do it].
“And I don’t consider it an ironman because an ironman on a motorcycle is literally the one guy on the motorcycle by himself. So for me, I classified it as soloing because obviously I had a co-driver with me and he stayed in the car the whole time. It was obviously a crazy experience, waking up early in the morning, taking off the start line and racing all day, watching the sun go down, racing all night and literally finishing with the sun coming up. Not only that, we encountered some rain the last 100 miles.”
If one had asked him two days earlier if he would attempt — let alone complete — to solo the Baja 1000, the answer would have been “we’ll have to wait and see.”
Heger and the Polaris Factory Team bandied the idea about for a couple of months, but the decision was never firm. Heger wanted to get down Ensenada first, make a few passes through the desert and then decide if soloing the race would give Polaris the greatest opportunity to win. Heger was more than willing to put his ego aside if that was what was needed.
“To be honest, we kind of went away from it,” Heger said. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and when we were kind of talking about it with the players, everyone [who is] a part of the program I was like, ‘yeah, it’s something I want to do. It’s something I think I can do competitively, [but] I’m not positive because I’ve never done it.’
"[...] At the end of the day, you know, if I did it and it didn’t go good, then it’s fully on me. Obviously it worked out in a good way.”
Stamina wasn’t the question. He knew he had enough to complete the race.
Even after swapping out drivers and navigators, racers never rest during the Baja 1000. They most often end up joining the coterie of chase trucks and mechanics that are as much of the show as the drivers. In 2023, Heger wound up in a spare UTV, a runner, hauled by his father Joe Heger in an attempt to render aid to one of his relief drivers who rolled his RZR less than a hundred miles from the end of the long show. The driver and navigator of that final segment managed to get the Polaris RZR back on all four wheels, but the point stands: desert drivers never rest.
“At the end of the day, I wanted to be able to control the race from start to finish, and do things my way — mile by mile, where I was going to push or where I was going to kind of slow down a little bit.”
Additionally, three years earlier Heger drove a trophy truck more than 700 miles in one stint, got out of the truck for about an hour, and then completed another 150 miles.
“I wanted to give them what I thought could be the best chance to go out there and compete for a win and so for me, it was just something I kind of took in my own hands and with the Dakar [Rally] coming up, I wanted to see how I felt after that and getting that long distance in a car.”
Heger could also rely on his experience with farming. Brock’s family owns a massive commercial farm in California and in even today the work of harvesting is done manually with a man behind the wheel of the tractor, reaping through the day and overnight. Heger has put in many 18 hour plus stints there
Road Blocks
“Once I was down there I felt confident about it, except the night before the race, I ended up getting sick and I wasn’t really able to eat any dinner,” Heger said. “I ended up with like, I don’t know, a cold or something. I had like cold chills and stuff. So it was a rough night prior to it. I was hoping to get a good night’s rest before the big day and a good meal, which I didn’t.
“So when I woke up [in the] morning, I felt way better. About a 100 - 200 miles in, I kind of started to get like a little bit of chills and I was hoping it wasn’t going to lead into how my night was before. It didn’t end up going that direction. So, once we kind of overcame that, it was just take it mile by mile and we had a picture perfect day.”
Almost picture perfect as it turned out.
Racing through the Baja Californian mountains has its own set of challenges. Near a pit stop where many of the other teams prepared to swap drivers, a trophy truck stalled and blocked the only passage. The time spent in these types of bottlenecks do not count against the driver, but it extends the time spent sitting in the car and elevates stress.
“It was it was kind of annoying sitting there not really knowing how long it was going to take ... where the bottleneck was, shortly after that was where a lot of people were doing all their driver swaps,” Heger said. “So their day was essentially done. As for me, it was at mile like 400. So I’m sitting there like ‘holy cow It takes a really long time I still have a really long way to go, so I hope this hurry up and clears up’ ”
In his class, the result was never in question. Heger surged to the front early and established a fast pace. It turned out Heger had a secret weapon. He was able to control his fate.
