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Ford has some of the world’s best testing facilities and proving grounds, but those locations are no match for the lifetime’s worth of off-road testing our products can get in just six days of running on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. In the NORRA Baja Mexican 1000, competitors in the 1,200-mile off-road rally travel the full length of the peninsula, stopping overnight in different towns each night of the journey.
As we have done since 2021, we took a nearly stock Bronco, either Badlands or Wildtrak models, (like the kind our customers can buy at a dealership) with only the required race safety equipment added; we then performed validation testing on several new parts while finishing 58th place overall out of the more than 150 vehicles that started the race. And soon, we’ll be headed back there.
I shared driving duties last year with Bronco Vehicle Engineering manager Jamie Groves. We split our time driving and navigating while performing real-time data analysis and failure root cause analysis, creating solutions to any issues that might arise along the way.
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Bronco SUVs have always been meant for Baja, going back to legendary off-roader Parnelli Jones, who won at NORRA in the 1960s in a Bronco. We wanted to make sure that we’re engineering a product that can meet all the traditional and future needs of our customers and uphold what Bronco has always been. We run these Badlands and Wildtrak models literally as stock as possible.
Off-road racing offers random and variable conditions that just can’t be reproduced elsewhere. These unique cases that arise through real-world scenarios are essential for validating vehicle durability and making sure our Bronco customers get an exciting, quality product that they can rely on out in the desert.
From an engineering standpoint, you want to control all the variables and have consistency — and off-roading is the complete opposite of that. You can’t even run over the same surface twice and get the same result, because the act of running over that surface has modified it. It provides all those fringe cases that we can’t necessarily model from an integration standpoint, and it provides the randomness of the input that’s required at a vehicle level to make sure we’re seeing what our customers can see.
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“Off-road racing offers random and variable conditions that just can’t be reproduced elsewhere.”Seth Goslawski, Off-Road and Trailer Tow Team Leader
Unlike the better-known SCORE Baja 1000, which is a non-stop off-road race, the gauntlet of desert terrains in the NORRA’s Baja Mexican 1000 includes stage rallying, which offers our team the chance to inspect the vehicle nightly and make any necessary maintenance. Last year, we completed the race in 30 hours, but it took some of our competitors anywhere from 20 hours to more than 60 hours to finish. The issues that arise over those 1,200 miles and the quick action our team uses to resolve them goes into each Bronco that rolls off the line at Michigan Assembly Plant.
This type of punishment is not new. We’ve been doing this kind of off-road durability testing since the Bronco returned to our lineup in 2021, and the Baja Peninsula is just one location, with the infamous Johnson Valley in Southern California being another, where we take our iconic SUV for real-world testing. And for the last three years, we’ve been doing it in stock class.
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The terrain at NORRA Baja Mexican 1000 is similar to the course for Baja 1000 but not quite as rough. Still, there is a variety of rocks, sand, silt*, and even water** crossings. We’ve leveraged the havoc these features can bring to make a better Bronco for our customers. These are some of the areas where we’ve been testing and making improvements over the last few years (and our nickname for that year’s entry, because it’s bad luck to go racing through the desert without one!):
It’s failures like those that we haven’t necessarily seen on durability testing that we’ve run in Dearborn that we do find in Baja that we can use to make purposeful changes to the production model. We also send traditional wear items such as shocks, bushings, and front lower control arms back to our suppliers so they can perform their own analysis.
We are trained for driving the Baja route by none other than Ford Racing off-road driver Brad Lovell. But we also spend hundreds of miles in the passenger seat as navigators, a task that rivals that of driving. The weeklong journey through Baja also yields learnings about the interior of the Bronco. This can lead to improvements with the SUV’s camera and other off-road features.
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Running at Baja is just one of the ways we’re making sure our products are made to help our customers pursue their passion. It’s something our customers can be proud of that they own a product that could go race at Baja — and maybe even win — even if they aren’t going to use it that way. And if you do, you can trust that we’ve done our homework and that this is going to be reliable in extreme environments.
Seth Goslawski is the Off-Road and Trailer Tow team leader.
What to Read Next
* Always consult the Owner’s Manual before off-road driving, know your terrain and trail difficulty, and use appropriate safety gear.
** Always determine the water depth before attempting a crossing and proceed slowly. Refer to your Owner’s Manual for detailed information regarding driving through water.
