How A Guy With No Racing Experience Took A Junkyard Bronco To The Baja 1000 And Beat Everyone In His Class

Racing in the SCORE Baja 1000 is not for the weak. Hailed as one of the most challenging off-road races in the Western hemisphere, rookies and seasoned drivers alike often struggle to finish the Mexico-based event, facing multi-hour stints behind the wheel while barrelling over unforgiving desert terrain.

The odds, then, were stacked against RJ Zanon. The Southern California-based Army Reserve Blackhawk pilot had never raced anything in his life, much less the Baja 1000. Yet, he did set out to do just that earlier this year. And he did it in what I’d consider the coolest way possible.

Zanon isn’t made of money, so he couldn’t just chuck a huge stack of cash at a race-ready truck or a shiny new build. Instead, he got clever, reviving a wrecked Bronco from a junkyard and rebuilding it to race spec. Against all odds (and thanks to the volunteer help of dozens of fellow Bronco enthusiasts), Zanon finished the race quicker than anyone else in his class.

It’s Now Or Never

Growing up in Southern California, Zanon was introduced to the Baja racing scene at an early age.

“The dream of racing Baja 1000 started when I was a child, a little kid going down to Mexico with my family when I was very, very young,” he told me over the phone. “Going to Mexico with family, down to Ensenada on a pretty regular basis to see all the trucks, and thought it was pretty cool.”

Zanon says his family was never into cars or racing, but seeing those trucks in person fly through Ensenada was enough to plant the seed of passion within him.

“I worked at Target in high school,” he told me. “[I’m] obviously not going to be able to afford a trophy truck, but back then in high school, I was seriously thinking, like, ‘Yeah, I could just find a way to get a long travel kit for my F-150 and then just go do the race.'”

That didn’t happen, of course. Zanon, now 35, remained passionate about off-roading, and daily drives a current-generation two-door Bronco Badlands that he regularly takes off-roading (when he’s not flying UH60s). Last year, he finally decided to chase his dreams.

“A year ago, I finally decided, ‘You know what, if I don’t do this now, I’m never gonna do it,'” Zanon said. “I decided I’m 100%, I’m giving this everything I’ve got. And I’m racing 1000 next year. It’s been the dream since I was a kid. I’ve got some good traction with the off-road community. I’ve made a lot of new connections, so it just made sense just to give it everything I’ve got.”

From Junkyard Parts Car To Desert Racer

Amazingly, Zanon didn’t plan to buy a vehicle for this event, instead opting to cut up his own daily driver, which is about the most hardcore enthusiast thing I can think of.

“The original plan was that I was actually going to use my other Ford Bronco,” he told me. “It’s not the brightest thing to take your daily and turn it into a race car and go race Baja. But if I take this thing to Mexico and ball it up and never drive it again, it’s chasing the dream, right? I had fully accepted the possibility of never driving my daily driver ever again after it was raced.”

Thankfully, Facebook Marketplace came to the rescue in June, presenting Zanon with what was an essentially perfect starting point for what would become his race truck.

“I found another two-door Bronco that was a total loss,” he told me. “It was in the salvage yard, getting ready to get sold to a Pick-a-Part place to be parted out. It was essentially the same car as the one that I was planning to race anyway. Two-door, 2.3 in-line four, manual transmission. It was just involved in a rollover, so the body panels and stuff were pretty messed up.”

Aside from the body panels, this Bronco was in fairly good shape. The drivetrain was totally functional, save for the rear differential. Zanon paid $14,000, which I think is more than fair, especially considering the Bronco had just around 17,000 miles on the clock. Then the real work began.

The body wasn’t really an issue, since Zanon had OEM panels lying around from his other Bronco, which had since been equipped with aftermarket fiberglass panels. The most daunting challenge, he says, was the safety equipment.

“The biggest thing was the roll cage,” Zanon told me.
”That definitely took the most amount of time, because SCORE is very particular about the roll cages. The problem was also, nobody had really done what we had done before. This is the first sixth-generation class-three Bronco ever. All of the cage work, it’s all basically first time. I didn’t have anyone to call for advice on how they did theirs because no one had done it before.”

Zanon, being a first-timer, didn’t have any big-name sponsors to financially back his efforts.

“Then there’s no massive money sponsors that pay for the race,” he says. “Everything was self-funded, so it had to be as low-budget as possible.”

To that end, the Bronco wasn’t as modified as you’d expect. The turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder and seven-speed manual were left completely stock, as were many of the body panels. In the end, Zanon managed to convince a couple of suppliers to hook him up, despite his lack of experience.

“I got really lucky with some big sponsors. Tom’s Off Road sponsored the differentials, and Billstein sponsored the shocks,” he told me. “But it was hard to get those sponsorships because this was my first race ever. I have zero racing history, zero racing background. 
So I’m going up to these companies saying, ‘Hey, uh, I’m about to do something that most professional race car drivers say is idiotic and impossible. Will you sponsor me?'”

Then there was the time crunch. Zanon didn’t really start work on his Bronco until September, leaving just over a month to have it ready for the 1000 on November 10. He says he pulled many sleepless nights, with 38 hours being the longest wrenching session. He has me beat by about a full day.

“Adding complexity to the whole situation are things not getting delivered when they should have been delivered, parts being backordered,” he says. “So then I’m rushing to find places that have them in stock. I needed to get CV [axles], and CVs are usually like $2,200 bucks, and there was no guarantee that they were going to get there in time. So I had to find a place that had them, and a place that had them in stock was selling them for a little over $4,000. 
So I paid twice the price for CVs to make sure we had a set for the race.”

Paying more for a single axle than what I paid for my entire Range Rover seems insane, but in the grand scheme of racing costs, it’s simply a drop in the bucket. Cost be damned, Zanon made it to Baja along with the 168 other entries and got to work.

36 Hours Of Non-Stop Action

“The biggest surprise that I had with the Baja 1000 was how slow you have to drive for the majority of the course,” says Zanon. “You watch the YouTube stuff, and it’s always the trophy trucks plowing through the desert at 120 mph. But almost the entire course, you’re actually driving fairly slow, which is why you look at the results for total times, and almost everybody other than trophy trucks and Class 1 cars are all under 30 mph averages.”

He’s right, obviously. Unless you have a purpose-built truck with 30-plus inches of suspension travel, driving over mostly untouched desert terrain isn’t a high-speed affair, but rather one of meticulous plotting and strategy. Go too quickly, and you’ll be breaking stuff or end-over-end in no time. Go too slowly, and you might get caught out by mud or silt.

Zanon managed an average of just 23.6 mph over his 36-hour, nine-minute run. Compare that to the overall winning truck driven by Bryce Menzies and Christopher Polvoorde, which crossed the line in just 15 hours, 48 minutes. For the top dogs, this is a sprint shootout; for others like Zanon, it’s a multi-day crawl.

Amazingly, Zanon decided to “Iron Man” the drive, staying in the driver’s seat for all 854 miles, which seems borderline superhuman. He says things mostly went fine for the majority of the time, despite suffering three flat tires throughout his drive. It was only the last few hours that were truly terrible, thanks in part to some particularly bad weather that hit Baja during the latter half of the race.

“It wasn’t until the last two hours that things got pretty detrimental because the last 100 miles of the course, it was raining pretty hard,” Zanon says. “And we don’t have a windshield, right? 
So every puddle we hit, we’re just getting drenched. At first, it’s okay, but then it got cold, because we got higher up in the mountains. If you watch the live stream, you could hear it in our voices, and what we’re saying, we were struggling. Me and my navigator were hypothermic.
My arms were seizing up; I couldn’t rotate my wrists anymore. I couldn’t feel my fingertips anymore. At [that] point, I’m feeling good awake-wise, but once the cold set in, it was a struggle to focus.”

It wasn’t just the cold that made things tough. Rain turns dirt into mud, and there’s a lot of dirt in the desert. The water made things particularly difficult for Zanon, to the point where it seemed downright dangerous to forge on.

“Just to make things worse, with all the mud we were [driving through], the air pump got clogged,” Zanon says. These air pumps are used to keep visors clear of fog.

“So now we no longer have air pumping into our helmets, so inside of our visors are fogging up,” he continues. “We had rags [to] wipe our visors, but they were full of mud, so we were just smearing mud around in our visors. So we end up both driving with our visors open, just so we can see where we’re going. And when we would drive through puddles, you know, I just looked down, the water would splash the visor, and then I’d look back up and keep driving.”

That method worked for Zanon up until it didn’t. And it cost him.

“It was a second puddle that I didn’t see,” he says. “As soon as I looked back up, we both got splashed in the face with mud. So now my eyes are full of dirt and grime, and I can’t keep them open. My left eye, there’s so much dirt in it that it hurt to keep open, and the pain was so excruciating that I couldn’t open my left eye at all. My right eye, I could barely open it just enough so I could kind of see where we’re going… Because I could barely see, I ended up hitting something, and I blew a tire on the front passenger side.”

Because he was only three miles to the finish line, Zanon decided to drive the rest of the way on the flat, making for some excellent photos from the finish line (see below). Perhaps the most amazing part of this whole story: After SCORE dealt out all of the applicable penalties and time credits, Zanon and his Bronco were deemed quickest in Class 3. Technically, because he and his two competitors all finished after the Baja 1000’s 36-hour time threshold, they were all disqualified. But in the confusion, he was still given a trophy (which he still has). More importantly, the car finished under its own power.

 

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“Nothing broke,” Zanon says. “The Bronco made it the entire course, and the crazy thing is, it’s essentially a stocked Bronco, other than the shocks and the upper and lower control arms in the front and obviously, the rear differential. No engine modifications. The stock manual transmission, stock clutch.”

If that’s not the ultimate promotional material for the Bronco, I’m not sure what is.

He Didn’t Do It Alone

Racing in the Baja 1000 requires lots of teamwork. You can spend as much as you want on a shiny new trophy truck, but if you don’t have a team to support you for stuff like gas fill-ups, tire replacements, and the inevitable repair, you’re essentially dead in the water.

You need a navigator, too, just to let you know where you’re going. Zanon had two: Ken Brown and Austin Gillis, both of whom he met through the Bronco community. Brown has tons of experience in the off-road racing world, having participated in UTV racing for the past 17 years. He stayed in the car with Zanon for the first 24 hours, then Gillis swapped into the right seat.

“Austin [had] no race experience whatsoever, and he hopped in that navigator’s seat, and he picked it up immediately,” he said. “It was incredible how accurate it was with telling me where to go and making sure we didn’t miss any [checkpoints]. It was pretty remarkable… Austin had about a 30-minute lesson, and that was it, and we took off in a pull sprint.”

Then there was Zanon’s pit crew. It wasn’t a crew in the traditional sense—he couldn’t afford that. But the Bronco community stepped up to help him make his dream become reality.

“I am self-funded, there’s no money for some massive pit team,” he says. “It was all just the homies from the Bronco community that I’ve met over the last two or three years. I said, ‘Hey, do you guys want to help run pits for the Baja 1000?’ And ended up getting about 24 people to volunteer, almost entirely from the Bronco community. It’s funny because we were joking that we were down there with more Fords than Ford.”

Despite being a fully volunteer crew, the team took their jobs seriously, which very likely helped Zanon to finish with such a respectable time despite never having done this before.

“Those guys, I was so impressed,” he says. “Because we’re just a bunch of average people. We’re nobodies in the race industry. We’re just a bunch of homies that want to go race Baja.
And then I pull up to the first pit, and it looks like a professional pit. They got the tarp on the ground, lights set up, and they’re set up in their positions to work on the car. When I pulled up to that pit for that first time, I was just in awe about how good it looked. 
This average group of people ended up having pit stops that looked better than the professional teams.”

This Is Far From Over

Zanon achieved his dream of racing in the Baja 1000, but this is just the beginning of his competitive career.

“It was definitely an adventure, and we’re not done yet,” he says.
”This wasn’t a one-and-done thing. Regardless of whether we get a DNF or if SCORE changes our official results and gives us the win, we’re looking at the 2026 season, and we’re coming back with a vengeance. We’re going for that championship.”

For someone with a lifelong love of Baja, I wouldn’t expect anything less.

Top graphic credit: radmedia.co