Countdown to the 2025 Baja 1000 – Rhys Millen on the art and science of off-road racing

Off-road racing might seem a constant frenzy of coping with chaos but Rhys Millen – who has raced the Baja 1000 in the Pro UTV classes and no-holds barred Class 1 buggies, and is a class winner in the Class 7 truck class – says doing it right takes subtlety and strategy.

"One element that I look at when I'm doing pre-running is noting surface color change," says Millen, who's back at this week's Baja 1000 with a Rhys Millen Racing-built, Toyota-powered Class 7 entry and hoping to emulate his class win on this year’s Baja 500. "Color typically represents stability. So if you have really light-colored sand, it's going to move around a lot. It's going to get dug out a lot. So if there's a dip – let's call it a medium dip – guaranteed it will be a really tight, deep dip come race day. Then you go into a medium-colored sand, and then to a darker sand or dirt which typically holds itself together. It's bonded together, and it won't change."

Such insights can give you a leg up off road, but you still have to get the tactics right, as Millen explains.

"There's always strategies that can be outlaid. That's one of the things that attracts me to the adventure of off-road racing," Millen says. "They're not say the same as what you would get in road racing, but there are still strategies that can be played out.

"You can choose to be up front. That means you're kind of first on the road outside of the bikes that may be started five or six hours before you. These are closed courses, but open to the public. So there's always the fear of, how committed are you in zones that are close to towns and so forth. Then it also comes down to if you're dealing with dust and other classes, do you short-pit the first one, knowing that you're going to stack back up, or understanding the course, as far as what race miles present, what challenges are there going to be? Silt? Are there going to be bottlenecks? You might get a 15-minute lead and then you're stuck in a bottleneck, and all of a sudden all of those risks are back to zero. So there's lots of challenges."

Rhys relates these insights and more in this episode of RACER Debrief, along with discussing his versatile career beyond the desert that’s taken in everything from the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, to drifting, to stunt driving in multiple Hollywood blockbusters. If you caught “F1: The Movie” this summer, you’ll have seen him in action – but let Rhys tell the story…