The Indy Winner Who Built a Beer-Winged Bronco — and Beat Baja

Most guys who win the Indianapolis 500 cash the checks, hang the wreath, and call it a career highlight. Rufus Parnell “Parnelli” Jones did that in 1963 — pole, race win, the whole Speedway circus — then spent the rest of the decade proving he could break almost anything with a steering wheel.

Including, eventually, Bill Stroppe’s patience.

Stroppe was Ford’s West Coast race-car magician, the guy who could turn a showroom Bronco into something that looked like it might survive a desert. At a Christmas party in 1967, with a room full of racing people listening, he needled Jones about off-road racing. Jones said he’d already done his time in the dirt. Stroppe suggested maybe Baja was too hard for him.

That was the wrong thing to say to Parnelli Jones.

What followed was not a tidy Hollywood montage. It was a series of expensive lessons in how hard a peninsula can hit back. Early outings in Stroppe-prepared Broncos ended the way heavy right feet and stock axles usually end: bent wheels, blown tires, front ends that quit somewhere short of La Paz. Jones would run a Bronco like it owed him money. Stroppe would yell. The desert kept the receipts.

Jones won the 1970 Baja 500 in a tougher two-wheel-drive Bronco nicknamed the Pony — I-beam front end, double shocks, Stroppe navigating because he knew the road and Jones, famously, had not even pre-run it. That win mattered. It also wasn’t enough. Jones didn’t want a reinforced grocery-getter. He wanted something that could live with the way he drove and, if possible, beat the motorcycles to the finish.

So he went around Stroppe.

Dick Russell, one of Stroppe’s fabricators, got the lunch-napkin pitch: full tube chassis, fiberglass Bronco silhouette, aluminum guts, long-travel thinking, no fragile production ladder frame pretending it was a race car. Russell started building it at home. When Stroppe found out, he was furious — then he looked at the half-built thing, saw the fiberglass Bronco body that would keep Ford from having a corporate heart attack, and brought the project into the Long Beach shop.

They called it the Crazy Colt at first. Red, white, and blue. Johnny Lightning graphics. Light, strong, and built around the way Jones drove. It still wasn’t immortal. The tube-frame Bronco broke in the 1970 Mexican 1000 while Jones and Stroppe were leading, and they limped home way back in the results.

Then Olympia Beer showed up with sponsorship money, the paint went gold and white, and the machine got the name that stuck: Big Oly. Giant wing on the roof. Horseshoe logos. “It’s the Water.” The whole ridiculous, beautiful package looked like a brewery float that somehow learned how to jump whoops.

In November 1971, NORRA sent the Mexican 1000 south from Ensenada toward La Paz — point-to-point Baja, hundreds of miles of rocks, silt, cattle, night, and bad ideas. Jones drove. Stroppe rode shotgun. Big Oly was the weapon.

The tube-framed, fiberglass Bronco held together for the distance, and that was the whole ask. Official overall time: 14 hours, 59 minutes. First overall. Faster than the quickest motorcycle, Malcolm Smith and Gunnar Nilsson’s Husqvarna at 16:51. More than an hour under the previous year’s overall record (Drino Miller / Vic Wilson, Miller-VW, 16:07).

Fourteen hours and fifty-nine minutes from Ensenada to La Paz. In a Bronco that wasn’t really a Bronco anymore.

Jones later told Motor Sport magazine he’d floated a fifteen-hour-ish guess before the start. Race officials flying south ran a pool on finishing times. When a hotel owner named Nico Saad wrote down fifteen hours, people thought he was nuts. Jones came in under fifteen. He said he didn’t make any money at it. He also said it was enjoyable — which, coming from a man who had already won Indy and owned Indy-winning cars, is either the most California understatement in racing history or proof that Baja rewires your sense of fun.

Either way, the desert got the memo: an Indy 500 winner had just taken overall in Baja, and he’d done it in a purpose-built tube-frame truck that looked like a beer commercial and drove like a threat.

Big Oly wasn’t done. Jones and Stroppe won the Mexican 1000 again in 1972 (16:47 on the Mexicali–La Paz routing). In 1973 they added Baja 500 and Mint 400 hardware. Jones’s full-time off-road driving career wound down after a serious 1974 Baja 500 crash; the legend of the gold wing did not.

What Big Oly changed is bigger than one finish-line photo. Before that truck, a lot of “race Broncos” were still arguing with production frames and axles. After it, the template was obvious: space frame, light body, suspension that could take a beating, sponsorship loud enough to pay for the next one. Modern Trophy Trucks — the flying billboards you see on SCORE coverage now — are grandchildren of that idea. Jones wanted to beat bikes and get to La Paz first. Along the way he helped invent the shape of desert racing’s future.

There’s a self-own baked into the whole story, and it’s why desert people still tell it. The fastest man at Indy got talked into Baja by a fabricator who called him soft. He broke a string of Broncos proving the fabricator wrong. He snuck a tube-frame monster past his own builder. He slapped a beer wing on it. Then he set a record that made the previous year’s overall look polite.

True races. Still kicking. Not because somebody wrote a tidy myth — because the timesheets, the SCORE/NORRA winner lists, Parnelli’s own telling of it, and that ridiculous gold machine all agree on the same punchline:

Parnelli Jones went to Baja to prove a point.

Big Oly made sure nobody forgot it.