Two Gears. Overall.

June 1995. Tecate SCORE Baja 500. Early Trophy Truck years — the unlimited production trucks are still figuring out who owns the peninsula, and Curt LeDuc is in a Jeep Grand Cherokee for Don-A-Vee, not a Ford or a Toyota or a Chevy pickup that the desert already recognizes as the answer.

He starts. Goes for third. It isn’t there.

SCORE’s own Legends desk tells the rest without needing garage poetry: Chrysler Jeep, Dana sixty, tall gears — and somehow still a hundred-fifteen miles an hour available in second. LeDuc tells Clive Skilton over the radio he is not stopping. He is driving angry. Soft on the exact radio transcript and the splash-and-go order of who he passed when — treat that oral as color. Hard on what the sanctioning body still prints.

Ultimate Racing History’s Trophy Truck sheet for that Ensenada run puts the course a little over three hundred eighty-three miles and LeDuc’s Jeep home first in seven hours, twenty-four minutes, forty-five seconds. Jason Baldwin’s Ford is second. Ivan Stewart’s Toyota is third. Hard on that stopwatch and that finishing order. Soft on mph press that bounces a tenth either way — prefer the elapsed time.

SCORE’s all-time Baja 500 Cars & Trucks overall champions sheet does not hedge the year or the machine: Curt LeDuc, Jeep, SCORE Trophy Truck, 1995. The manufacturer roll under overall four-wheel winners lists Jeep once. Ford, Toyota, Chevy keep stacking. The Jeep column stays at one.

That is the spine. Lost a gear. Kept the truck in the marked world. Took the Baja 500 Trophy Truck overall anyway — and so far the only Jeep the SCORE Baja 500 overall sheet has ever written down.

Soft on calling it the last time anything weird will steal a SCORE headline from the usual truck brands; the desert does not sign forever contracts. Soft on the 1995 dual-column years when Trophy Truck and unlimited cars each carried their own overall language — prefer SCORE’s dated LeDuc/Jeep line and the manufacturer table over inventing which sheet “really” mattered. Hard on 1995: Curt LeDuc, Jeep Grand Cherokee Trophy Truck, 7:24:45, Baja 500.

Here is why that June still matters when the feed only frames the newest light bar and the newest Ford.

Trophy Truck was supposed to look like a pickup. Most years, it does. In 1995 a Massachusetts Jeep guy who started by welding cages for club racers took the SCORE Baja 500 overall column in a Grand Cherokee that had already thrown away third gear — and the all-time sheet still has exactly one Jeep written there.

If your Baja timeline only starts when the Ford and Chevy trucks already own everything, fair enough. Just remember the one that did it with two gears and a Jeep badge — 7:24:45, Ensenada, overall.