Sometimes small and light beats big and fast.That’s what happened at last weekend’s Mint 400 in the blazing Nevada desert southwest of Las Vegas. Racer Kyle Jergensen was driving a SPEC truck in the Mint, going up against the full Unlimited rigs with roughly twice as much horsepower and twice as much speed. But, to finish first, first you have to finish. The winning truck and crew.Jergensen trailed two-time defending race winner Adam Householder’s Unlimited 2WD truck over three of the four 100-mile laps in the desert just east of the California state line. Until the final lap, when Jergensen and the #222 The Beast/Camburg/Magnaflow truck took advantage of a busted tie rod on Householder’s big truck and passed him with 100 miles to go to put his SPEC truck on top of the podium, giving the SPEC class an upset overall win against teams with twice the horsepower.“Our game plan was to let them make mistakes, and they all made mistakes,” said Jergensen. “We made no mistakes—no flats, no nothing, the truck was perfect, the team was perfect. That’s what won us the Mint today, no mistakes. We actually had a surprising amount of dust behind us (from eventual third-place finisher Ryan) Arciero for a couple laps. Arciero is fast enough that we can’t pass him. We have half the horsepower and half the top speed, so we’d do what we could in the tight stuff.”Jergensen picked up the charge on the third lap to become the biggest challenger to Householder’s two-year winning streak. He sliced three minutes off the gap between himself and the race leader and got it down to 46 seconds at the first pit on Lap 3, then shaved it further to just eight seconds. After a slightly longer pit stop for Jergensen at the end of the lap, the 2022 overall winner would trail the 2024 and 2025 winner by just over a minute going into the final circuit.Then, 20 minutes after Householder needed to make a tire change just a few miles into Lap 4 came the break that changed the race when Householder’s lower A-arm failed. Winner JergensenAs Jergensen had already put himself in the lead both physically and on time, he hung on to secure the victory by more than four minutes over Sourapas and Arciero. By the end of the race, the front-runners were managing not only their equipment, but also an unforgiving course that only got rougher as the day went on.Brett Sourapas finished second overall.“I feel like every single year we race here we say it was rougher than the previous year, but this was no joke,” said Sourapas, the top finisher in Unlimited Truck 4WD. “Lap 4, you can’t even get on top of anything. When we finished the opening ceremony, my paddle shifter wasn’t working, I could only downshift. My right-hand man Evan (Weller, co-driver) was shifting up for me the entire race, so he had his hands full. We got four well-deserved flats, it was super rocky out there, but all in all we’re happy to be here.”Third-place Ryan Arciero“Today went fairly well,” Arciero said, after winning his class and finishing third overall. “I lost third gear, our high gear, so the third and fourth lap, the fastest I could go was like 90, 95 miles an hour. We had no top speed and we were just hoping for attrition at that point. I know the Mint has it, and when we saw Adam pulled over on the side of the road, I knew we had it. But I knew we had to catch and pass Kyle since we started side by side, and that was going to be a tall feat.”Too tall, it turned out, and Jergensen won.Jimmie Johnson’s truck.The Mint also saw the return of seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Jimmie Johnson. It was Johnson’s first time racing in the desert in more than 30 years, teaming up with Troy Herbst as part of a multi-truck effort for the top-rated Terrible Herbst Motorsports. While Johnson started near the rear due to a rollover in Friday’s qualifying, he finished the first two laps of the race without major incident before handing the truck over to Troy Herbst, who brought it home sixth in class and 12th overall with a 7:31:34.479. Brock Hager won the Limited race the day before in a Polaris RZRThe day before that race, SxS pilote Brock Heger, who has been winning all the SxS races in SCORE down in Mexico, once again outpaced the entire field in the Limited race to secure the overall win in his Polaris RZR Pro R Factory UTV, to lead Polaris to a back-to-back victory. Joining Heger on the podium was Polaris racer Mitch Guthrie Jr., who drove a strong and consistent race from start to finish to secure second overall.The Mint 400 is one of the most storied events in American off-road racing. It started in 1968, the year after the first NORRA Mexican 1000, as “just a clever public relations stunt” to promote the Mint Hotel’s annual deer hunt. But its proximity to Las Vegas helped make it into something more, something of a cultural phenomenon. And when Rolling Stone assigned a writer named Hunter S. Thompson to cover the Mint 400 in 1971, well, read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to get an idea what it once was.The doctor will see you now.A while after the Mint Hotel was sold in 1968, the race lay dormant for 20 years, the Mint was torn down, and racing wandered off to Mexico for a while. In 2008, the Southern Nevada Off-Road Enthusiasts (yes, SNORE), along with General Tire and brothers Matthew and Joshua Martelli revived it. It’s now run by The American Off-Road Racing Championship (AORC), a group created through the unification of Best in the Desert (BITD) and Unlimited Off-Road Racing (UNLTD). Their next race is the Silver State 300 April 22-26 in Tonopah, Nevada. Check it out.