The First Mint 400 Was Won by a Motorcycle at Midnight

The course markers said nobody would finish in under 18 hours.

It is 1968, and the Mint Hotel in downtown Las Vegas has put its name on something new: the Mint 400, a desert rally that starts and ends at the hotel and runs about 400 miles through the Nevada desert in between. There are checkpoints at places like Ash Meadows, Beatty, and Lathrop Wells. There are 101 vehicles. Most of them are buggies, Jeeps, and trucks.

The course was laid out by local buggy and Jeep people, and they made it as rough as they knew how. Sand washes. Lava flows. Dunes. Gullies that show up without warning. The map is drawn by hand and handed out the morning of the race. Some of the directions read like a treasure hunt. When you come to the white refrigerator, turn down the trail. At night, look for a mine shaft on a hill across the valley.

The four wheel crowd has a guess for the finish. The first ones home, the markers say, will take about 18 to 20 hours. One of them figures nobody will do it in under 30.

The motorcycles start in the middle of the pack. By Ash Meadows, the third checkpoint, the first six machines to arrive are all bikes.

One of them is a Husqvarna shared by two men. Gunnar Lindstrom, from Sweden, has the first half. J.N. Roberts has the second.

Lindstrom's left rear shock is finished by the time he reaches Ash Meadows. The crew swaps it and he goes back out.

About 20 miles before Beatty, the halfway point, he goes down. He lands hard enough to break his glasses under his goggles. He rides the last miles on instinct, not really sure where he is, and rolls into Beatty looking dazed. It turns out to be a mild concussion. He is fine a few hours later, with a new opinion about helmets.

Roberts takes the bike and heads out into the second half and into the dark.

Back in Las Vegas, nobody is in a hurry. The hotel officials did not want to staff the finish line at all until 12 hours after the start. The finish is nearly empty. One woman is waiting to check the winners in. The officials drag in around midnight.

At 12:20 a.m., Roberts takes the checkered flag.

His elapsed time is about 12 and a half hours, an average of about 32 miles an hour across a course that will wreck most of the cars that try it. More motorcycles come in before the first four wheeled vehicle shows up, more than three hours after Roberts. The Jeeps start arriving at dawn.

Roberts and Lindstrom split the $2,000 first place money, plus another $500 for the fastest time overall.

The guess had been 18 hours at the very least. The real answer was a Husqvarna, two riders, one new shock, and a pair of broken glasses.