Written by:
Kevin Krefting
01/15/2007
Los Angeles, Calif.
The MillenWorks Baja special Toyota FJ. (Dan Streck photo)
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If you missed Saturday night's broadcast of "Two Roads to Baja" on SPEED Channel, you've got three more chances – it re-airs Wednesday at 3 a.m. and again at 12 p.m., and finally on Saturday at 10 p.m.
Where Dana Brown's documentary on the 2003 race, "Dust to Glory," captures the epic panorama that is the SCORE Baja 1000, Director Jeff Zwart's new film about the legendary off-road race is more of an intimate character study, focusing on just two race teams from the more than 450 that entered last year's 1000-mile blast down the Baja peninsula.
The teams chosen shared one thing in common: both had entered a Toyota FJ Cruiser in the Stock-Mini class. Other than that, they brought to Baja vastly different résumés.
For Rod Millen and his MillenWorks team, this is a business trip. They're the closest thing you'll find at the Baja 1000 to a factory team. Toyota Racing Development is backing the MillenWorks FJ, and there's every expectation of winning the class and giving Toyota what it's paying for: irrefutable proof that new FJ Cruiser isn't just a cool, hip retro-mobile, but an authentic, hard-core off-roader.
One of the world's most accomplished rally, hill climb and off-road racers, Millen has been picking up trophies by dropping his right foot for more than 30 years. The New Zealand native is one of the true masters of car control, and his prowess has made him the go-to guy for car companies seeking to prove their products on the gravel-covered fringes of motorsports.
He's had a long association with Toyota, joining their off-road racing program in 1991 and dominating the Mickey Thompson Stadium Off-Road Racing series, becoming the only driver in the 12-year history of the series to win three consecutive Grand National Sport Truck titles. In 1994, he drove an All-Wheel-Drive Toyota Celica Turbo to one of many victories at Peak's Peak, setting the record for fastest time up the 156-turn Colorado mountain road. (Like Millen, Two Roads director Jeff Zwart has more Peak's Peak championships than you can count on one hand, reeling off a string of class and overall wins driving a variety of Porsche models).
The father and son team of Rod and Ryan Millen. (photo courtesy Toyota)
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Rod Millen's clearly a no-nonsense guy, in the driver's seat and out. Over the years, MillenWorks has evolved into far more than just a race shop, creating advanced concepts of productions cars and engineering the next generation of amusement rides for the entertainment industry. It's also become one of the premier high-tech engineering labs in the country, developing many of the military's stealthiest off-road vehicles. You never know where you'll see the next unveiling of a MillenWorks vehicle: the SEMA show or a Pentagon briefing.
For the other team, Team Necessary, running the Baja 1000 is a lark, an idea hatched over some cold ones that snowballed into reality.
Kevin Necessary, an L.A.-based commercial photographer, had a new FJ, a working blow-torch, an understanding wife and a few up-for-anything friends. And that's still enough to get the ball rolling towards the starting line of the Baja 1000, arguably the most accessible big time event in all of motorsports.
It's a tale of two teams, and Zwart's documentary could easily have swiped a subtitle from a Dickens novel: for both MillenWorks and Team Necessary, it was the best of times, and worst of times.
I'm not going to say any more. Tune in if you want to see the twists and turns, and how it all comes out it in the end. Zwart does a beautiful job of taking us down the two roads – Millen's and Necessary's – each faces adversity and each achieves its own form of victory.
And while it isn't given a single line to speak, the most important character in "Two Roads" may be the FJ Cruiser. Per SCORE's Stock-Mini rulebook, Millen and Necessary are racing street legal FJs, modified only to a limited extent.
Yet they've got to travel down the same treacherous course as desert racing's radical, purpose-built, million-dollar-a-copy Trophy Trucks. The FJ's may reach the end of the course long after the Trophy Trucks, and in one case, long after the official time limit of 48 hours, but as "Two Roads to Baja" reveals, the Baja 1000 is all about the journey, not the destination.
Rich Conklin is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine. To learn more about RACER, click here for subscription information.
