Meet The Mad Man Racing A Tesla Cybertruck In America’s Most Grueling Desert Race

The Mint 400 is not for the weak. Held in the rural desert hills and mountains south of Las Vegas, it’s America’s biggest and most challenging off-road race. In addition to open, high-speed desert sections, competitors have to negotiate rocky terrain with sharp, skidplate-piercing stones, and dust that can drive visibility to zero. The landscape subjects competitors to hours of slams, hits, and jostling, pushing them to the edge of sanity, just for a chance at victory.

When I say “the weak,” I don’t just mean people. The Mint 400 is hell on the machines, too. In the Unlimited classes last year, only 26 of the 65 competitors actually finished the race, a finish rate of just 40%. Even the most prepared competitors can have their race ruined by an errant rock in the middle of the course.

Any rational person would, then, strive to race on a proven platform to have any hope of finishing. There are dozens of different race classes to choose from, from open-class, full-on trophy trucks you’d see flying through the Baja 1000, to near-stock side-by-sides, to tiny, sub-200cc motorcycles.

A platform that’s never raced in the Mint 400? The Tesla Cybertruck. While the ultra-viral, stainless-steel refrigerator on wheels has been out for a few years now, no one has been brave enough to turn a Cybertruck into a legit race-ready desert racer. That is, until Arizona-based custom car builder Chewy Barrientos came along.

The Great Experiment

Chewy’s decision to run a Cybertruck in the Mint 400 came on the heels of another project. Founder of his shop Kilowatt Customs, he had been working on customizing EVs for about three years when a friend connected him to a man named AJ from The Original Baja Shop, a facility in Riverside, California that builds all sorts of desert-ready one-off machines. AJ was attempting to build a Baja-themed Tesla Model 3 desert runner, but couldn’t get all of the electronics to play nicely.

“I see the car, I see his problems,” Chewy told me over the phone. “I fix it all real quick in like two hours, everything’s working.”

That car, which would end up being called the Baja E, generated a lot of buzz in the off-road and EV customization communities. Here’s a video of it at SEMA last year:

“We [went] to the Sand Sport Super Show, and it got a lot, a lot of attention, and a lot of traction. We ended up going to SEMA with our car. And again, it just kept getting a lot of traction.”

Chewy and AJ stayed in contact and decided to join forces again for a second build in January. But this time, it would be more than just a show car that could rip up the dunes—it would be an actual racing machine. Amazingly, when AJ pitched the idea, Chewy didn’t even know the Mint 400 existed.

“He’s like, ‘Why don’t we take the Cybertruck and enter it into the Mint 400?'” he told me. “Full transparency, I’m kind of new to the scene. So when he said the Mint 400, I didn’t even know what it was.”

Nonetheless, they saw it as an opportunity to get more eyes on their respective businesses and skill sets.

“That’s where we got the idea,” Chewy told me. “Let’s do something new.
Let’s do something that hasn’t been done. Let’s make Teslas appeal to others, introduce a new market to this industry because, as of right now, there are no Tesla drivers doing off-road races, at least not to this level.”

What Does a Cybertruck Built For the Mint 400 Look Like?

From pictures of the truck alone, you really wouldn’t know this machine has been heavily modified to compete in the Mint 400. Aside from a wrap, some lighting, new bumpers, and some different wheels and tires, it really just looks like a normal Cybertruck. All of the body panels are still there, as are all of the stock lighting and fenders.

The biggest difference, visually, happens on the inside, where a full roll cage has been installed by AJ of the Original Baja Shop. For older cars, this isn’t such a big deal. Just rip the interior out, and weld in a cage, job done. New cars are a lot more complex, since most use a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus to connect all of their electronics together into one centralized computer system. Change anything, and it drives the car haywire. But Chewy was prepared.

“These cars are basically like a computer on wheels, it’s like an iPad,” he told me. “You remove one thing, you remove a door trim, or a window sensor, or the window switch … you remove anything, and the computer starts throwing codes, and it puts you into limp mode.

“But I’ve been working on Teslas for a long time,” he added. “I’ve been building a lot of these off-road cars. I know these cars very well. I know how to bypass certain things, how to work over the limitations that the car gives you. It really was a little bit of a challenge to get it all to work.”

The result is an interior that appears mostly stripped, with all the necessary gear (bucket seats, nets, harnesses, etc.) needed to pass the Mint 400’s technical inspection. But it still has the massive central infotainment screen and the infamous steering yoke (something that feels far more appropriate in a race truck than in a street truck).

All of the other changes can be found in the chassis and suspension. Amazingly, Chewy and AJ decided to retain the factory air suspension for the race, albeit with a bunch of heavy-duty, billet aluminum upgrades to make sure it doesn’t blow out at the first set of rocks.

“We’re actually running the stock Tesla air suspension, but we just did a lot of upgrades to the suspension components like the A-arms and some of the joints, some of the bushings,” Chewy said. “The dudes from Unplugged [Performance] hooked us up with their two-and-a-half-inch lift kit, and that’s actually what we’re running to give us the clearance and to make it more rugged than it already is.”

Unplugged Performance, one of Chewy’s sponsors for the race, is arguably the biggest name in the Tesla modification scene, known for selling suspension, aero, and braking upgrades to make Teslas function as performance vehicles. Since the Cybertruck’s debut, the company has also branched out into offering off-road gear for Tesla’s utility machine. In addition to the suspension changes, Chewy’s Cybertruck is running beadlock wheels, steel bumpers, and skidplates from Unplugged Performance.

It’s All About The Prep

The biggest question surrounding this build isn’t whether the Cybertruck can survive the challenging conditions; it’s whether it’ll have enough range to make it to the finish. Depending on the class you’re racing in, you have to complete anywhere from one to six laps of the Mint 400’s 95-mile course. The EV Open Production class, where the Cybertruck is racing, requires two laps to finish. The longest-range Cybertruck is rated at 335 miles of range according to the EPA, but factor in the driving conditions and all the extra weight from the safety gear, and range plummets dramatically.

“So, right now, at 100% charge, the truck’s range that it gives me on the screen is about 280 miles,” Chewy said. “[That’s] just based on a lot of off-roading that I’ve done and some of the testing that we’ve done within the last few weeks. We’re estimating that we’re going to get about half of that. So, best case scenario, we’ll get 140 miles of range.”

 

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Of course, 95 multiplied by two laps is 190 miles, which is more than the truck’s estimated range. Luckily for Chewy, Mint 400 organizers let EV competitors skirt away from the course after every lap to get a juice-up—something first done by Rivian back in the 2024 running of the race, when it competed using a modified R1T.

“One lap is 95 miles, then they actually let us stop our time, go to the charger down the street, Supercharge it, and then come right back and continue the race,” Chewy told me. “Rivian was one of the first EVs that entered this race. So they set the precedent of how it all works. When Rivian did it, that’s exactly what they did. They finished up the first lap, they went to the Supercharger down the street, or the Electrify America charger, and then they came back and continued the race to do their second lap.”

The obvious follow-up is, what happens if the Cybertruck runs out of juice while it’s on the course? Chewy and his team have planned for that, too.

Throughout the race, the truck will be shadowed by a chase vehicle—also a Cybertruck—driven by Jerry Perez. The great Emme Hall, who is competing in the Mint 400 and also writes for The Autopian, was the person who alerted me to this Cybertruck’s existence and to Chewy’s participation in the race. Shout out to Emme!

Despite being in the midst of an incredibly busy race-prep week, Hall found the time to speak with Perez on the team’s strategy yesterday. He revealed that the chase truck is towing a generator that can operate as a 50-kW DC fast charger, in case the race truck needs a juice-up anywhere beyond the standard charging stop.

Perez described the generator to Hall as a “last resort,” in case the truck uses way more juice than the team predicted. He suspects that it’ll still come in handy if Chewy and co-driver AJ are on the side of the course fixing parts. “[The generator] could charge them for 10, 15 minutes—that’s still significant,” he told Hall.

The chase truck is carrying a bunch of extra parts, too, in case something breaks.

“We have a ton of things,” says Chewy. “Just off the top of my head, we have a full set of front and rear air shocks, we have a full set of knuckles for the front and the back. We have extra tie rods. We have extra suspension bolts. We have two extra tires, and we have even more in our pit trucks—extra lug nuts, extra bead locks.”

As for other driving prep, Chewy told me the car has been out of limp mode for the past week, and it’s done a total of 20 to 30 miles of off-roading to make sure everything functions as it should.

“I’m a little bit of an off-road guy, I go to [the] Glamis [dunes in California], that’s actually where I take the truck a lot. When I drove it out there, stock, it handled okay.
But now with all the upgrades, oh man, it handles 70 to 80% better. It feels so, so good.”

Here’s a video of the truck doing some of the aforementioned off-road testing:

 

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Hilariously, the truck hasn’t lost any of its original self-driving functionality, despite all of the modifications.

The car has full self-driving,” Chewy said. “It drove us here, it drove us to the race, it drove us through the parade. It’s basically a fully functional Tesla, but with a very, very beefy roll cage and some upgraded suspension.”

The EV Open Production class is set to run today, with the team’s entire venture being livestreamed on the Butter_EV YouTube channel. People love to hate on the Cybertruck, so I suspect some folks might not have high expectations for this endeavor. But after speaking with Chewy, it seems he has a lot of the bases covered, especially with his co-driver, AJ, being a hardcore off-road racing veteran. The only competitor in their class is a factory-backed Silverado EV, which also raced last year. If the Cybertruck can finish and beat that truck, Tesla haters might have a bit less to say going forward.

Top graphic image: Chewy Barrientos