Big boulders bounced buggies both beefy and benign in the 16th running of the world’s toughest race.
Is it better to step cautiously onto the rocky and dusty desert of the King of the Hammers course, way out in the Mojave two hours northeast of Los Angeles? Or is it better to just bash forth and destroy all in your path? For years—and years—various members of the Gomez racing family bashed, driving hard from start to finish and always finishing farther down the order than they’d have liked, never with a win.
All that changed this year when Raul Gomez came out on top at the brutal rock-stomp that is the King of the Hammers, surely the toughest one-day desert race ever conceived.
“My crew killed it,” said Gomez, who piloted a brand-new UFO Fabrication buggy that had only 20 miles on it prior to the race. “We put this car in the lakebed on Tuesday. We got about an hour with it, yet here we are.”
Here, of course, was at the top of the podium ready to spray the victor’s champagne.
Winner Gomez shows how tough the King of the Hammers is out in the Mojave desert.
KOH
Normally the lack of testing would be a detriment, noted KOH race organizers afterward. But it didn’t deter Gomez. If the new buggy wouldn’t run, his backup plan was to compete in his race-legal pre-runner. But when the new race vehicle arrived on the lakebed, Raul let car builder Joe Thompson drive the back-up buggy in the race. Thompson, whose UFO Fabrication shop has built all of the Gomez Brothers Racing buggies, made the most of the opportunity with a 14th place finish.
Gomez Brothers Racing has come very close to winning King of the Hammers many times. It seemed like not a matter of if, but when someone in the family would finally win. The only real question was which racing Gomez family member would do it: Raul, his brothers Marcos and JP, or his son Darian. All have been fan favorites for years for their no-holds-barred driving style, KOH noted after the event. While popular with fans, the Gomez’ approach had kept them from the top of the podium. Last year JP finished second and Raul finished third. The year before, Marcos was leading the race with just a few miles to go before breaking an A-arm on his rig.
Gomez takes the checkered.
KOH
But this year it was all Raul, all the time: nine hours, 16 minutes, and 17 seconds flat-out around three laps of the demanding desert course. The laps included high-speed runs across flat roads and dry lake beds, and amazing blasts up steep canyons strewn with boulders the size of Volkswagens. Gomez’ victory was made all the more impressive by the late delivery of his car, and the sheer dedication of builder Thompson and crew.
“Joe Thompson has been working on this car for nine days straight,” Gomez said. “His fiancé came up to me and said, ‘We almost got divorced.’” I responded with, “Well, did you?”
Apparently they did not.
There’s no AAA out here, but you can hire a helicopter. Here, @mwak_racing opts for extraction on the Jack Hammer section of the course.
@mwak_racing
Second place at this year’s KOH went to three-time King Jason Scherer, who was having so much fun that he didn’t even seem to mind finishing second.
“I think this was the most fun I’ve ever had racing,” said Scherer. “It’s always hard to come in second and say it was the best race you ever had, but that was real racing out there.”
Scherer had a little more time in his car than Gomez, and the car and the race went exactly as he’d planned.
“This whole week has gone great,” he said. “Everything that we did out here was checking boxes and executing our plan. The race went just as we wanted it to.”
Well, there was one glitch: “At the beginning, we couldn’t get the car to run and I couldn’t figure out why.”
Fuel mixture? Fuel injection not syncing? Computer scramble caused by the chip shortage? No, much simpler than that.
“Turns out my jacket fell in front of the air filter causing it to choke it off. Once we finally figured that out, we were able to go out, rip in the desert, and have a good time. That first lap was just awesome.”
Scherer’s first lap was the fastest of the race, a 1:43.37. But there were two more to go and Gomez got them. Scherer finished 17 minutes behind the winner.
A whole motorhome city with 65,000 people springs to life in the desert of Johnson Valley for the King of the Hammers.
KOH
Josh Blyler was third, taking just over 10 hours. Like Scherer, Blyler was also happy, with a caveat.
“We had a great day,” Blyler said. “I feel really bad for my dad, he was kicking our ass the whole day and we found him broke down out there. That really sucks, I really wanted him to kill it.”
The senior Blyler, Rusty, was only able to complete two of the three punishing laps, and finished 29 out of 101 entries. Marcos Gomez, Raul’s brother, finished just off the podium in fourth, while other brother JP Gomez also did only two of the required three laps for a 27th-place finish. In all, 26 of the 101 starters finished all three laps, 29 competitors completed two laps, 24 did a single lap. The rest, 19 starters, didn’t get a single complete tour of the circuit.
The race event itself just keeps growing. This is the 16th official King of the Hammers, named after a series of desert mountain “trails,” if you could call them that, each with the name “Hammer” as a suffix: Jack Hammer, Sledge Hammer, Claw Hammer, etc. A small group of about 12 local four-wheelers knew all the trails, and it was only a matter of time before they decided to connect them all in a single day and see who could do it the fastest, i.e., who could be the King of the Hammers.
From a single-day event in 2007, the Hammers this year stretched out over nine days, with events almost every day, including the Toyo Tires Desert Challenge for SCORE Trophy Trucks, the Baja Jerky Class 11 Showdown for Class 11 Volkswagen Beetles that normally race in events like the SCORE Baja 1000, the Holley EFI Shootout (kind of like uphill drag races over giant boulders), the Can-Am UTV Hammers Championship for UTVs, the 4WP Everyman Challenge for vehicles that are not as expensive to build as the big rigs running in the KOH, and, finally, the big event, now named Nitto Race of Kings. While the KOH and its supporting contests have grown, the main race hasn’t changed. It’ll bust yer Bronco.Or try to.
“This race was rough, but I don’t think it should be easy,” said Scherer. “This is a challenge and I don’t want the Hammers to be easy. I want you to earn it. I’m glad that it’s the way it is, I feel good. I could do another lap.”
Keyword: Gomez Family Finally Finishes First at Brutal King of the Hammers Desert Race