Sand Blast

With his new wife's blessing, Indy Car star Buddy Rice spent his honeymoon racing a two-ton truck with five dudes across the Mexican desert. Ah, love

Inside Buddy Rice's RV, love fills the air. The blue-and-gray Newell camper is parked in downtown Ensenada, Mexico, where the IRL star arrived a week earlier with his new bride, Michelle Noonan, the day after their Nov. 5 wedding. They were married at the Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, outside Phoenix, their hometown. A few dozen friends and family witnessed the event, and the Reverend Horton Heat provided music. Now, inside their rolling honeymoon suite, the couple's adoration is evident in every not-so-furtive glance.

Of course, the bride isn't the sole object of Buddy's affection. If she were, they wouldn't be camped in an Ensenada parking lot. But Michelle has known about his other love right from the start, ever since they began dating six years ago. "I knew what I was getting into," she says. "Buddy loves to race. Anything. All the time."

Rice, the 2004 Indy 500 champ, spends most of the year in race cars. Two months of preseason testing are followed by 14 IRL events, practice at Indy for the month of May and four IROC races. "Even when I'm home, I drive go-karts," he says. And in three days, he will race an event he has never entered before, an event that isn't part of his contract with Rahal Letterman or his deal with sponsor Red Bull-an event that will test him in ways he can't imagine.

He couldn't be happier.

The Baja 1000 is a strange race. There's little prize money (winners in 26 classes earn $600 to $15,000, depending on the number of entries) and only a couple of hours of taped TV coverage. Yet drivers are subjected to extremes of heat, cold, frustration, exhaustion, confusion and fear. Fewer than half of the 359 entries-ATVs, motorcycles, cars and trucks-will finish the 708.8-mile course within the 30-hour limit. The event is a machismo siren song that has lured the likes of Steve McQueen and four-time Indy champ Rick Mears, men (and a handful of women) who have come here to measure themselves on a poorly marked mix of desert roads, mountain trails and lunarlike wilderness.

Rice has left behind his regular ride-a 650 horsepower, 1,200-pound, open-wheel Honda/Panoz capable of going 230 mph-for a seat in Baja's marquee division, Trophy Trucks. His No. 16 Desert Assassin is a gorgeous monster: a 5,000-pound navy-blue Ford 150 jacked on 36 inches of suspension, with nine shatterproof headlights and 740 horses turning the rear wheels. The $400,000 truck has no windshield or windowsthey were removed to protect drivers from shattered glass-but it can hit 135 mph and, more impressive, fly six feet in the air at 90 mph through the 30-mile section of bumps known as the San Felipe whoops. Because the race is so grinding, most teams use three pairs of drivers. Buddy will climb into the Desert Assassin at the 540-mile marker for the ride to the finish.

But first, he must study. A few days before the race, drivers were given a booklet containing a comprehensive list of rules and protocol. The 24-item document includes not-so-subtle reminders that Baja is far from a typical go-fast, turn-left day at the wheel. For example:

No. 2: "You must bear the ultimate responsibility for your personal safety."

No. 3: "Be advised that spectators may engage in malicious activity by building ramps, digging ditches and placing objects on the course."

No. 5: "The roads used for this race course are open to the public. You must expect at all times to encounter oncoming traffic as well as cattle roaming freely on and around the race course."

The briefing is meant to sound ominous because the course is dangerous, and sometimes deadly: About 10 racers have died in the event's 38-year history, says race organizer Sal Fish. But even after hearing that Fish calls this year's course the most technically harrowing yet, Rice reacts with his characteristic cool. "I haven't been nervous in quite a while," he says. "I don't see myself starting now."

He is sitting at a small table in his RV while Michelle wanders through a fiesta in town. He looks over a map of the course, which begins in Ensenada, circles east through the Sierra de Juarez mountains, south to the beaches of San Felipe, west to the Pacific and back to Ensenada's Deportivo Antonio Palacios baseball stadium. Buddy pays particular attention to the daunting mountain pass called the Summit and to the Matomi Wash, a steep sliver of sand and silt that swallows any vehicle that hits it at less than 80 mph.

The challenges of the course haven't changed much since 1967, when 68 racers charged from Tijuana to La Paz in the first Baja 1000. Back then, drivers communicated with hand signals instead of in-helmet intercoms, and relied on maps instead of GPS systems. They did their own repairs: No one thought of putting mechanics and a garageful of tools into support trucks to follow each vehicle.

Rice likes the raw, rugged element of Baja because he considers himself a throwback. His 5'8" frame is stocky and soft. He speaks simply and is about as excitable as a mortician. "I should have been driving in the '50s and '60s," he says. "Like my hero, A.J. Foyt. Guys like him would do the 500, Le Mans, Baja and the 24 Hours of Daytonaironman stuff. That's how I think about racing."

As he talks, it's hard to believe that Buddy, who will turn 30 three months after the race, has never tackled off-road racing before, or that he didn't even own a dirt bike as a kid. Although his résumé includes the 2000 Toyota Atlantic championship, plus three IRL victories and 25 top-10 finishes, he has no idea what he's in for when he finally snaps down the five-point harness and grabs the wheel of the Desert Assassin. And he thinks that's kind of cool. "This is totally new to me," he says. "But it's still a car-engine, four tires. It comes down to you. You're in control."

SATURDAY IS RACE day, and at midafternoon, Buddy leaves his bride in the RV and rides in a Team Assassin support truck about 90 minutes south to Valle de Trinidad. He expects to climb behind the wheel by 10 p.m., but quickly learns that trouble is part of the Baja game. During the earlier sections of the race, the Ford's power-steering belt fell off repeatedly, the steering rack locked up and half the lights were smashed.

Shortly after midnight, while Michelle sleeps, the Desert Assassin roars into the transfer spot. Buddy hops aboard and is joined by co-driver and navigator Cameron Steele, who's pulling double duty. Steele rode the first 400 miles after another team member dropped out, and he has now been awake for more than 24 hours. ("He was delirious," Buddy says later, after their final leg. "He was banging on his helmet. Instead of calling out signals, he sang.")

Rice drives at a crawl through the section called Llano Colorado, 30 miles of narrow mountain switchbacks with a rock wall on one side and a 200-foot cliff on the other. The terrain is terrifying, particularly in the dark. "I don't want to throw caution to the wind," Buddy says with typical understatement.

About two hours later, finally clear of the mountains, the Assassin sprints 20 miles-reaching 100 mph-on graded roads to the coast at Cerro Solo. For 40 miles, the waves of the Pacific crash on the left as the course weaves north from the beach to the road, and then to a bed of soft, blinding, choking silt.

Just after dawn, outside the town of Uruapan, Rice steers through a 30-mile section of VW Bugsize boulders, rock steps and ruts big enough to envelop the Assassin. Next, he splashes through the natural springs of El Mezcal, soaking the truck and those inside. The spray might be fun in the daytime, but it's bracing in the early-morning cold. As the course winds through the hills of Ojos Negros, the temperature dips to 24° and ice forms on the dashboard. Buddy, who's wearing thin driving gloves, can't feel his fingertips.

The last nine miles are the grittiest of the day. The power steering completely fails and the Desert Assassin handles like a supercharged Zamboni. It lurches into Ensenada's baseball stadium, seven hours and 168 miles after Rice strapped himself into the driver's seat. At this point, it matters little that his IRL car could cover the distance in less than an hour, or that the Assassin's finishing time of 20 hours 37 minutes 52 seconds places Buddy and his crew 15th out of 30 entries in the Trophy Truck class. He climbs out the window, grabs a cold beer and soaks in the cheers of thousands of fans who have waited through the night to witness the finish. He's exhausted and ecstatic, thrilled that he has finished but disappointed that the race is over.

IT'S SUNDAY AFTERNOON now, and inside Papas & Beer, Ensenada's year-round spring break hot spot, love is in the air, thick as the stench of tequila. The 25 Desert Assassin drivers and support crew are reliving every wretched mile of the race. Rice stands in the middle of the party, the center of attention, armed with a beer and a slice of pizza. He talks about his favorite part of the course: driving fast on the beach right before dawn. "We wanted a top-10 finish, but it didn't happen," he says with a shrug. "That's racing. It was fun … so different."

As he laughs and jokes with his teammates, it quickly becomes obvious why Rice chose to spend his honeymoon racing in the desert. He's a simple guy, in a good, pure way, like an old muscle-car 428 hemi with a four-barrel carb and four on the floor. He doesn't need cameras or paychecks as much as he requires thrills and adventure.

Suddenly, Buddy grabs Michelle and twirls her around to the music. The newlyweds laugh. They don't speak of the honeymoon they missed, but of the future they'll share. "Next year, Michelle wants to come down here and practice with me," Buddy says. "We want to tear up Baja together."

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