UPDATED! February 5, 2021
FINALLY!!!
On July 6, 2020, Praise is given where major credit is due>>>
The Stroppe Bronco Racing Program
is acknowledged in this video, produced by the FORD Motor Company...Better Late, Than Never!
Fathers Day SPECIAL 2020
Updated!
Why the 'The Racing Scene' video?
We'll be looking to the past, to
determine what to expect in the future...
Keep this in mind...
While the very badly designed rig and the 2019 Bronco-R team goofed a series of disastrous decisions in the Baja 1000 2019 event, a Stroppe Racing designed 40 year-old classic racing style Bronco, finished well before the time limit in their class 3.
A mostly Bill Stroppe designed 40 year old rig, one very similar to that driven by Jim Garner in the 60's, won the Baja 1000 2019!
The classic Bronco beat the class 2, 'SCG Boot' by almost 3 1/2 hours coming in 96th overall out of 275 entries! The SCG Boot is a modern day, multi-million dollar project, funded by Jim Glickenhouse.
The Stroppe rig beat the SCG Boot, a completely redesigned, what was a Vic Hickey designed, George Hurst sponsored 'Baja Boot', one that was driven by Steve McQueen originally!
The failed Ford Bronco-R team, couldn't make the finish line within the racing time allowed, 34 hours!
"With an army of top-flight drivers, co-drivers, mechanics, engineers, media guests, PR and marketing staff, the Ford folks were everywhere in Baja (for the race). That didn’t help when myriad of apparently non-production parts and silly mistakes like too light of a skid plate (they had to fabricate one in the field using a nearby stop sign) forced the team to quit and head back to Ensenada."
In the early 60's one man designed, built and ran a Baja racing effort, that puts some heavy-duty shaming on FORD Motor Company and modern off-road racing circles.
Let's put aside, for now, the broken, busted and failed Bronco-R from last years Baja 1000 and the rancor over the misguided original scheduled date for the consumer Bronco launch. Bill Stroppe, James Garner and Parnelli Jones and more, are our guides to looking into the desert sunrise of tomorrow mornings racing summer.
Today's Best In The Desert, Silver State 300, which was shortened to 220 miles. A really old Bronco, originally Bill Stroppe designed, was best in class.
Team 4535 Race report
"Sharing our last race recap as someone might find it interesting -As most things this year, the 2020 Silver State 300 was an interesting race, cut short by a forest fire, a downed chopper (everyone walked away) and a 48 year old drove a 48 year old Ford Bronco through some of the most torn up race course ever.
We might not have been the fastest but we were the oldest and didn’t finish last. First in class. The Bronco is actually mostly stock, built to race the NORRA Mexican 1000 in Baja Mexico in the Pioneer class we are required to run a stock suspension setup with original suspension points, Dana 44 front, rear ford 9 inch, stock size rear leafs (length and width) stock coil buckets, stock radius arms and limited to a single 2" reservoir shock at each corner. In addition we have to run a Ford small block, original transmission and transfer case as it was offered from Ford, so in our case we are running a 351w stroked to a 408, C4 transmission and Dana20.
There are obviously a few things we can upgrade and the additional safety items, which we take very seriously. But overall its probably more stock than most race vehicles and even production class racers out there. I knew going into this years Silver State 300 (SS300) the course would be tough, there were almost 300 vehicles starting ahead of us and a bunch are running 40" tires which as you can imagine plow massively deep ruts through the majority of the race course. Undeterred, our 1972 was prepped and we stepped up our tire game this race and crammed 35 inch tires under it to help us out and glad we did!
We traveled from Denver to the oven known as Las Vegas on Thursday, the day before tech, and arrived before sundown to do some quick prep for the next days safety and tech inspection before grabbing a good dinner and a good nights sleep. The next day we sprinted to registration so that we could get through tech early in the day before it got really hot. Tech went fairly smoothly, we have a few things to address but nothing major, we were good to go. We spent the rest of the day checking fluids, zip tying stuff to various parts of the Bronco, taking care of a leaking rear axle seal and a broken leaf spring retainer that had been diligently bailing wired from the last years Mexican 1000 (apparently the crew didn't appreciate my bailing wire retainment approach). We took a break during the heat of the day to relax, watch the drivers meeting and subsequent race changes from a lightening induced forest fire and then headed off to grab some food before hitting the parking lot once more to do final prep and a quick light aiming.
Saturday morning is race day. We grabbed a good breakfast and headed out with the rest of the racer north to Alamo Nevada. A quick last minute truck stop to fuel up the chase trucks and top off the racer and dump cans we headed for the starting line. The Forest Fire was very obvious in the mountains above the starting line and the wind certainly wasn't helping the efforts. We knew we would be one of the last off the line and as it turns out we were third from last - which was just fine by me. To finish this race you have to keep above a 30 mph average pace. There are closing times for each pit and the goal for us was to run a consistent smart pace. Waiting for our start time we did last minute prepping and relaxed staying well hydrated. The start of the race was around 3500 feet and it was probably mid 90's, so not quite as hot as Vegas (108F) but still hot. The course would take us up to 7800 feet and back to 4000, so we anticipated the first three hours to be pretty warm in the Bronco and would keep an eye on our temps as we hadn't raced in this warm of weather, even in Baja.
The silver state race is in June, in the middle of Nevada, nuf said!
We lined up behind an ocean of 'golf carts' (and some Jeepspeed folks) - basically as far as you could see, never seen so many side-by-sides in all my life and they certainly were not stock!
We left the start line right at 1:30PM, almost two hours behind the first "Trick Truck" (Trophy Truck in Baja, its a trademark thing apparently between the BITD organization and SCORE racing group) and quickly ran into a bunch of stuck trucks in silt. The Bronco easily maneuvered around the stuck trucks and silt and we settled in to some nice power line roads to get up to speed and a feel for the course. About 10 miles in, we noticed our Transmission temps creeping up. We have a pretty beefy transmission cooler and after racing 4 days straight we never saw temps above 195F in Baja, even running long high speed stretches. As we kept up the pace were now at 220F within a few miles. We slowed down and ran conservative to the first Pit at race mile 27 or so, we didn't have anyone at this pit so we cruised through and slowed our pace as the transmission came down to around 200F. A few miles later we hit another long straight and opened the bronco up, sure enough our transmission temp quickly pegged out ~250F. We were pretty worried as we were really not pushing the Bronco very hard and so far the course was relatively easy. We knew the hard stuff was coming up and we would have a tough time keeping our finish pace if the transmission was overheating. Again, we slowed down for the next 10 miles or so and finally got into some technical narrow race course through the mesquite trees and through some very rocky and torn up gulleys. The transmission finally decided to cool off. At Race mile 74 we meet up with our chase team for the first time at Pit 2, for a quick 1 min stop for a visual and off we went.The next 15 miles were pretty rough, huge rocks, huge ruts, deep river bed silt and did i mention rocks? Yes, rocks.. lots of them, it looked like the bigger trucks threw dynamite out the windows as they went by. At mile 100 we started to hear some clunking from the suspension. We took some pretty big hits and thought we had thrashed the rear end or drive shaft. We pulled over and crawled under the bronco looking for the obvious stuff and just couldn't find anything. I knew we had about 20 miles to go to the next pit and the Bronco was still running and driving great so we jumped back in and headed on down the course to Pit 3. We radioed ahead to our crew about the suspension issues, the banging was more of a hammering and in time with certain cycles of the suspension. I knew it was on the drivers side and it was somewhere near the front. I suspected we had blown an air bump or lost a bushing. Pulling into pit 3 the crew immediately saw the front axle moving back and forth and sure enough we had lost the drivers side radius arm bushing completely, there was nothing left of the front half and the back half was already half gone.
The crew quickly assessed the situation, dug through the parts bins we started to formulate a fix, possibly using used bearings and random poly bushings, luckily digging further through the spare parts bins we found a used set of Radius arm bushings! The guys lept into action strapping the front axle and pulling it forward to get the radius arm out of the mount - bushings in we noticed the passenger side was just about done but still in place. Time was ticking, each pit has a closing time and if you are not underway before it closes you are done. Additionally we were told that the fire has worsened and they had shortened the race, the finish line would be at Pit 7. We decided that the bushing could wait as we had a fuel stop at Pit 4 and we would swap the bushing there. The next section seemed to be even rougher than the last as I tried to keep the passenger side axle from taking too big of hits. This section was filled with rocky washes with deep ruts and lots of high centering possibilities but we didn't have any issues and arrived at the race pit 4. Taking on fuel and we got the passenger radius arm bushing swapped in and even a little time for a couple of new decals.
At this point we were told that the race was shortened once again - this time the finish would be at Pit 6, about 70 miles away. We decided to have the crew skip Pit 5 and we would just meet them at the finish, a bit of bummer but we enjoyed the last 70 miles as it was the best so far, lots of elevation changes from sandy washes then into the mountains (where we came across the helicopter crash from earlier) and then toward the end nice open roads and huge sweepers. We even got to run with our new light bar for a few of hours in the dark and with the temps dropping and faster course we were having a great time! A couple miles before Pit 6 we rounded a corner and crossed the finish line, a quarter mile later we were greeted by the BITD crew, race tracker removed and then headed down the road to Pit 6 - where there wasn't a soul in sight...We radioed our crew and were told they were a few miles down the road, apparently they were stopped from coming to the finish line - later found out there was allot of out bound traffic from the pit earlier and thats why they restricted two way traffic. So we headed off down the road and finally found them in a field, loaded up, had a beer and headed home. Upon further investigation we found that the brand new rubber bushings that I had installed recently in the race Bronco had metal re-enforcements in them. The metal re-enforcements were discs that fatigued the bushings and acted like a razor blade and destroyed the bushing from the inside out. I know the vendor I bought them from doesn't make them and have reached out to them to let them know. I will be replacing the rubber bushings with poly AND keeping a spare set of polys as backup.
Thank for letting me bore you! We have a bunch of 360 degree 4K video we are reviewing from the race and some on course actions shots and will post up soon."
The race footage will be posted here on BajaRacingNews.com!
James (Jim) Garner, the ultimate sportman racer and "the Best Father in the world".
According to his daughters!
The off-road racing career of Jim Garner, at least on one occasion, he was a team member of Parnelli Jones and Bill Stroppe. We'll explore that chapter of Jim's life.
The record of Jim Garner is still being written, no matter how many times people have talked about Jim, one thing is clear. He was a great guy and a great Dad.
Unlike his very jealous, fellow competitor, Steve McQueen.
Jim Garner (L), Steve McQueen (R)
Crazy enough, Jim and Steve were next door neighbors, which led to racing confrontations.
It was a common occurrence to see Jim and Steve racing their new 'minis' up and down the street, where they lived. The neighbor racing confrontations however, escalated.
Whenever Garner was away from home, McQueen used to delight in urinating down onto Garner’s balcony! Not just Jim's balcony, but his families. Jim's wife and children resided at the home.
McQueen was also known to place empty tin cans on the property shared with the Garners common fence top and use them for target practice with his 38 pistol!
Garner responded — witheringly — in his book. He revealed that the very ‘insecure’ McQueen was jealous of him because Steve suspected, wrongly, that his first wife and Garner, once had an affair.
In Jim's book, 'The Garner Files', Garner got his revenge by exposing McQueen for the lowly man he really was, describing McQueen as an utterly mediocre performer, frequently in trouble with many other people in the industry.
Garner would write, “Someone once asked me if Steve was ‘trouble.’ Steve was trouble if you invited him in for breakfast. He didn’t like anything".
Steve McQueen was a well-known racing aficionado, so it couldn’t have helped his relationship when Garner won the main role in the action-heavy film about Formula One racers, 'Grand Prix'. McQueen thought Garner "swiped" the role away from Steve.
Steve was typical of the many egomaniacs in the Southern California racing circles.
As Garner began work on his racing film McQueen set a similar film in motion, however, only Garner’s got made. To double down on McQueen’s disappointment, the professional racers that Garner worked with in the film, were impressed with Jim's ability to perform and act while driving a formula one race car.
Garner was happily married til the day he died, 58 years continuous, with his one and only wife. Never was Garner accused of public infidelity.
Unlike Steve, Jim was always there for his family.
Even with the motorsports, his acting and standing up for himself and others, in court and in public.
Have you heard directly from his girls?
Jim Garner the Off-Road racing legend
Put simply to begin this section, the Vic Hickey designed and Steve McQueen owned and Steve raced in Mexico, the 'Baja Boot', turned out to be a massive, expensive dud.
Steve's driving mistakes didn't help.
Whereas, the Bill Stroppe designed racing 'Bronco', that Garner raced, was and is today, a winning Baja racing package. To this very day!
More Loading>>> NOW, LOADED! Fathers Day SPECIAL 2024
Parnelli Jones, the ultimate professional racer!
The origins of the Bronco legends couldn't be told, without a complete understanding of how 'America's Racer' drove alongside Bill Stroppe in the early modern history of off-road racing.
We'll explore those vaunted history books!
'PJ' as Parnelli is known, still does interviews and long-time friend Linda Vaughn, 'the First Lady of Motorsports', says "lunch with PJ and her friends is a joy she looks forward to".
More Later>>>
Bill Stroppe, an expert mechanic and businessman, destroyed by a drunk
People close to Bill Stroppe and Edsel Ford explain the original Bronco builds differ greatly from the design tree being utilized today. Bill Stroppe not only used his engineering skills, he had certain standards.
Bill Stroppe’s association with the Ford family began in 1947, when he piloted his Ford-powered home-built speedboat—“The Miss Art Hall”—to victory in the Henry Ford Memorial Regatta on Michigan’s Detroit River.
In the early 1950s, he attacked the grueling Carrera Panamericana road race in Mexico with specially prepared Lincolns, taking Touring-class wins in 1952 and 1953.
His red, white and blue Mercury stock cars were a force in NASCAR through the 1950s, and in the ‘60s, his partnership with race driver Parnelli Jones was rewarded with victories in competition from the Indianapolis 500 to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
The idea behind the consumer SUV 'Bronco' began with Ford product manager Donald N. Frey in the early 1960s (who also conceived the Ford Mustang) and engineered by Ford engineer Paul G. Axelrad, with Lee Iacocca approving the final model for production in February 1964, after the first clay models were built in mid-1963.
As a brief sidelight, in April 1963, Ford really did attempt to purchase the financially ailing Ferrari over the course of several secret meetings, including a tour for Ford reps through one of the artisanal shops in which machinists carefully worked on Ferrari’s 400 Superamericas. While Lee Iacocca had a role in this scheme, it was more minimal than it appears in the recent film, Ford v. Ferrari.
Much of the travel and haggling was conducted by his subordinate, a metallurgical engineer named Don Frey, (previously mentioned Ford product manager Donald N. Frey) whose technical know-how genuinely won the eccentric carmaker’s respect for a time. Enzo Ferrari would call Frey “Dottore Ingegnere” (Dr. Engineer) and would wistfully doodle logos experimenting with mergers of the Ford and Ferrari names.
Back to the point, developed as an off-road vehicle (ORV), the Bronco was intended as a competitor for the Jeep CJ-5 and International Harvester Scout. Today, a compact SUV in terms of size, Ford marketing shows a very early example of promoting a civilian off-roader as a "Sports Utility" (the two-door pickup version).
Racing, in 1965, race car builder Bill Stroppe assembled a team of Broncos for long-distance off-road competition. Partnering with Holman-Moody, the Stroppe/Holman/Moody (SHM) Broncos competed in the Mint 400, Baja 500, and Mexican 1000 (later named the Baja 1000). In 1969, SHM again entered a team of six Broncos in the Baja 1000.
In
1968, Stroppe and Jones turned to the increasingly popular sport of
off-road racing, competing in the NORRA Mexican 1000, later renamed the
Baja 1000. In 1971, Ford announced a “limited production edition” of
Stroppe’s racing Ford Broncos called the “Baja Bronco.”
In 1971, a "Baja Bronco" package was marketed through Ford dealers, featuring quick-ratio power steering, automatic transmission, fender flares covering Gates Commando tires, a roll bar, reinforced bumpers, a padded steering wheel, and distinctive red, white, blue, and black paint. Priced at US$5,566, versus the standard V8 Bronco price of $3,665, only 650 were sold over the next four years.
Based on the Sport Bronco model, each one was sent to Stroppe’s Long Beach, California, shops where he installed rear-fender flares and trimmed the front fenders to make room for rock-climbing Gates Commando XT tires on the customer’s choice of 8.5-15 painted steel wheels or slotted-aluminum wheels. Also included in the Baja Bronco conversion were dual shocks at each wheel, a padded roll bar, rubberized steering wheel, front-bumper braces, trailer hitch, unique Baja Bronco tire cover and fender decals.
All successful racing and consumer ventures, until the drunk Benson Ford Jr., flake doctor Louis Fuentes and others destroyed Bill Stroppe.
The unfortunate meeting of Bill Stroppe and flake doctor Louis Fuentes
Drunk Benson Ford Sr. dies in 1978 after seeing his son destroying the early success of the Bronco brand.
Benson turns on his 'doctor'
Yes! 'Baja' Bill Fuentes is related to the flake fake doctor Louis Fuentes!
Declaration of Louis Fuentes: "Son, William (Bill) Fuentes"?
Do you have information to contribute to this reporting? Send it to bajaracingnews@live.com
The New FORD Bronco is scheduled to launch for consumers, soon.
The Baja 1000 and Mexican 1000 are scheduled to run, in 2020, whether these races actually run is a serious, serious question at this point. The only sure thing about desert racing today, is the past, the men of racing and todays desert sunset. The 2020 summer solstice.
Gary Newsome, Editor and Publisher
"The Racing Scene", by KING OF BAJA
Now you know why 'rod hall' was chosen as a tribute for the Bronco-R in 2019, 50th bull-shit. Because FORD Motor Company fucked up its own off-road racing history by the facts posted in this report!
FORD Performance takes another dump on its own 'racing history'.
Rod Hall had NOTHING to do with the history of the racing bronco. He was a monkey, strapped into thirty or more years of racing pedigree, of the Stroppe Bronco!
Bill Stroppe is the REAL history of the Bronco.
June 30, 2020; STILL EDITING & LOADING>>>
Gary Newsome, Publisher
KING OF BAJA EXCLUSIVE
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