Amy Lerner takes on NORRA 1000 in honor of the greatest off-road racer who ever lived

Ten years ago, Amy Lerner went to Baja with a camera and came back with something considerably more significant than footage. She came back with a story – one that would become the award-winning documentary One More Win, a film about Rod Hall, the most decorated off-road racer in the history of the sport. This weekend, she is going back to race to continue that story.

Getty Images

This time, Lerner is competing in NORRA's Baja this weekend – the same event where, a decade ago, she filmed Hall during what neither of them knew at the time would be his final race. Hall had competed in 50 consecutive Baja 1000 races – the only person ever to do so – and won 25 of them, including the overall in 1969 in a Ford Bronco. For those of us who might not know, stats like that are not just crazy; they seem impossible. He also accumulated over 160 major event wins, including 12 Baja 500 class victories, and his string of 37 consecutive race victories in the early 1980s remains the longest unbroken winning streak in off-road racing history. The numbers are almost too large to hold in your head. He remains the only driver to ever win the Baja 1000 overall in a four-wheel drive vehicle. Nobody else has come close, and nobody is likely to. Honestly, Hall is in uncontested GOAT territory in a way that feels nearly herculean; at least as mythical as he is real. 

Amy Lerner told the story with her whole heart

What Lerner filmed at the NORRA Mexican 1000 ten years ago was supposed to be the opening chapter of a racing biography – Hall preparing for his historic 50th consecutive Baja 1000 run. But plans change, and stories shift. Shortly after that NORRA race, Hall received a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a form of Parkinson's disease, and what had been an oil-drenched race documentary quietly became a deeply human film about a man fighting his own body to finish a very different kind of race. He made it to the 50th Baja 1000 in 2017 – his son Chad co-driving, and Rod Hall passed away on June 14, 2019, at 82 years old. Lerner was there for all of it.

"Looking back on those moments, I still get very emotional," she said of filming Hall at that final NORRA race, where he competed in the legendary Bronco he'd won the Baja 1000 in, driving alongside his granddaughter Shelby for the first time. That detail – three generations of Halls in a Bronco on the Baja Peninsula –is the kind of thing you couldn't write if you tried. Lerner had the sense to point a camera at it instead.

For this weekend's run, she's fielding a Polaris RZR Pro R Factory built by SCI – a machine modeled directly off the RZR platform that won the Dakar Rally, equipped with a MoTEC racing system that allows real-time adjustments to suspension modes across different terrain types. In Baja, where the terrain changes underneath you faster than you can think about it, that kind of adaptability matters more than raw horsepower or really anything else. Lerner's co-driver is Sara Bossaert, who has raced alongside her at the Dakar Rally, Rally Classics Morocco, and the NORRA 500 in October 2025. These are not casual weekend adventurers. Lerner and Bossaret are serious racers, hitting one of the toughest races in the world with historic resolve and a couple of hard noses. 

Amy Lerner is not to be trifled with

This brings us to the wider story of who Amy Lerner is, because it is worth telling, even if only briefly here. She came to desert racing through the Rallye Aicha des Gazelles – the all-women navigation rally held in the Moroccan desert – and never really slowed down after that. She progressed through the Rebelle Rally and the Mint 400, won her class and the Dakar Challenge award at the Australasian Safari Rally, which earned her entry to the Dakar Rally itself. In 2021, driving a proper vintage rally-spec Porsche, she finished 15th in the inaugural Dakar Classic. Most recently, she claimed a class win at Rally Classics Africa. She has also, somewhere in between all of that, produced an award-winning feature documentary about one of the greatest athletes in the history of the sport. The resume is, by any reasonable standard, extraordinary.

There is something powerful about returning to the place where a story began and choosing to honor it by doing the thing you both loved. Rod Hall spent his entire adult life going fast in the desert because it was the truest expression of who he was. Amy Lerner is following the same expression of herself. You just can’t read stories like this and not be stoked. 

As of the press release, Lerner was on day four of the NORRA 1000. Today she is moving into the final stage of the race. Give ‘em hell, Amy.