Autoblog gets filthy at the 2014 Griffin King of the Hammers [w/videos]

Filed under: Motorsports, Videos, Off-Road, Racing



Another year has passed, the Mojave Desert's Johnson Valley OHV Area was saved, 40,000 spectators moved into the sand and scrub for a week of man-against-the-end-of-the-world racing, we have recently returned and even more recently recovered from another week on the Means Dry Lake Bed witnessing the King of the Hammers.

If you aren't familiar with King of the Hammers (KOH), the short story is that it's one of the hardest races in the world, combining desert racing (100-plus-miles-per-hour through the desert like the Baja 1,000), rock crawling (inching over rocks the size of Chevrolet Suburban SUVs at 3 mph, like Moab) and rock racing (higher-speed rocky sections). That sentence might not seem so bad, but here are the stats: this year's race was 198-miles long; competitors came from 31 states and 8 countries; it took the winner a few minutes more than 8 hours to finish; the time limit for competitors is 14 hours, and out of 158 starters, only 32 made it home before the cutoff. The rest, in the seat for more than 14 hours, were still trying to get their trucks through gargantuan quarry obstacles with names like Sledgehammer, Wrecking Ball and Chocolate Thunder. At 10:00PM. Having been racing in the dark for five hours already. It's that hard.

For the long story, check out our pre-race post and race recap from last year's event, the first time we'd been to KOH and realized that a new Mad Max sequel is made every year on a dry lake bed north of Palm Springs, not in a studio.

Read on to enjoy our report on the race, on last year's King Randy Slawson, and on Autoblog series hosts Jessi Combs and Patrick McIntyre of The List winning one of the week's races using one of the Mopar-powered spec-series rig that you can rent to run the Hammers yourself.

Hammer time hasn't been this awesome since MC wouldn't be touched.Continue reading Autoblog gets filthy at the 2014 Griffin King of the Hammers [w/videos]

Autoblog gets filthy at the 2014 Griffin King of the Hammers [w/videos] originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 13 Feb 2014 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.



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