THE DUST
Twenty Hours, Forty-Eight Minutes, Four Wheels
Larry Minor and Rod Hall drove a Stroppe Ford Bronco 832 miles to La Paz in 20:48:10 and beat the entire 1969 Mexican 1000 field — bikes included.
Updated September 9, 2026
Twenty hours, forty-eight minutes, ten seconds. That is the number SCORE’s all-time overall table still carries next to Larry Minor and Rod Hall for the 1969 NORRA Mexican 1000 — Ensenada to La Paz, 832 miles, in a Bill Stroppe Ford Bronco. The fastest motorcycle that year, Gunnar Nilsson and J.N. Roberts, needed 21:35:52. Forty-seven minutes and change, over a peninsula, against a bike.
The Bronco beat the motorcycle winners by 47 minutes and 42 seconds. Over a course that long, it is a result worth stopping on: Hall and Minor had brought a four-wheel-drive Ford to the top of the whole field.
The truck came out of Bill Stroppe’s Long Beach shop, Ford’s desert arm at the time, and it was built to be driven hard for a full day rather than to win any single stretch of road.
Minor and Hall are both credited with the win, and they had history together: the pair had already taken the four-wheel-drive class at the very first Mexican 1000 in 1967. Hall spent the next five decades showing that his gift was pace management rather than hero speed. Anyone can be quick on the good road. Very few stay quick on the bad road without cooking the truck.
The field was not soft, either. The official yearly record shows 247 starters and 96 finishers — a 39 percent survival rate over 832 miles with almost no infrastructure, no GPS, and fuel wherever you could arrange it. More than half the field failed to finish.
That 1969 win stands on its own. Hall and Minor were quickest across 832 miles in the Stroppe-prepared Bronco.
That is what makes the result worth keeping. It is not a claim about drivetrain religion. It is one clock, one enormous course, and a result that says the sturdy option can also be the quick option if the machine is right and the people driving it understand what the day actually costs.
Hall kept proving the second half of that for fifty years — a run of 37 consecutive SCORE and HDRA wins with Jim Fricker in the Dodge years, and a record 25 Baja 1000 class wins that ran all the way to a class win at the fiftieth running in 2017, when he was seventy-nine. But if you only get one Rod Hall story, take the one with the time attached.