After the Start, Ampudia Takes the Baja 1000 by 13.553 Seconds

Alan Ampudia has won the 59th SCORE Baja 1000 — unofficially, and by the width of a breath. The Mexican driver completed the gruelling desert loop with a corrected time just 13.553 seconds clear of Bryce Menzies, settling an epic that had swung on a single 70-mile stretch of Baja California Sur. The result, reported on Saturday morning, remains provisional until SCORE International publishes its certified results, but it is a genuinely new development: when the race started on Friday, Christopher Polvoorde was on pole and the field faced almost a thousand miles of desert. By Saturday, the historic Cabo-to-Cabo course had a winner.

Ampudia, the 35-year-old from Ensenada driving the No. 1 Team Papas and Beer Ford Raptor, was not the man in front for most of the race. Menzies, the Las Vegas driver who had chased a first Baja 1000 victory for more than a decade before finally winning one, led the field through the first 700 miles and looked in control as the leaders turned for home. What followed was the kind of reversal that has made this race famous: one long, punishing sector, and a margin that collapsed from minutes to seconds.

The seventy miles that decided it

The decisive ground was the 70-mile segment between race mile 700 and race mile 770. Ampudia covered it in 1:00:42. Menzies needed 1:06:44. The six-minute swing erased a 54-second deficit and put Ampudia more than five minutes ahead on corrected time, a lead built on corrected timing rather than what spectators saw at the roadside, because the trucks started at staggered intervals based on qualifying and were tracked on live corrected time throughout.

Menzies, who had been the pace-setter for the opening 700 miles, refused to let the race go. He attacked through the final 120 miles and cut deep into Ampudia's advantage, but the gap proved just too large to close. The two trucks reached the finish line in San Jose del Cabo four minutes apart in real time, yet the staggered starts meant the true margin was the 13.553 seconds recorded on corrected time — one of the closest finishes in the modern history of the event.

Behind them, Luke McMillin finished third, continuing a remarkable 2026 season in which he had arrived at the finale with three consecutive victories and the championship lead. Polvoorde, who had taken his third pole in four races this season, finished fourth — a strong result that fell short of the win his starting position had promised. Ampudia had qualified third, Menzies sixth after an off-course excursion in qualifying that sent his truck through the shrubbery, and the starting order proved no guide at all to how the race would end.

A historic Cabo-to-Cabo course

This year's race was different from every Baja 1000 before it. For the first time in the event's 59-year history, the entire course ran within Baja California Sur, a 978.60-mile loop starting and finishing in San Jose del Cabo and passing through Los Barriles, La Paz, Ciudad Constitucion, Loreto, Todos Santos and Cabo San Lucas. A total of 274 entries from 37 American states and 19 countries took the start, making it the finale of the four-round 2026 SCORE World Desert Championship and one of the largest fields the race has seen.

The route was designed as a test of everything desert racing demands: high-speed sections along the East Cape, technical mountain passes, silt beds and the long, lonely stretches of the peninsula's interior where a single mistake can cost an hour. Ampudia, the reigning two-time SCORE Trophy Truck champion, had entered the race third in the championship standings on 296 points, behind McMillin on 335, and his victory caps a season in which he also won the SCORE Baja 400 in September. Menzies, meanwhile, had arrived as one of only three drivers — alongside Ampudia and McMillin — to have won all four SCORE championship races, a group honoured with the SCORE Baja Grand Slam Award.

The supporting classes produced their own stories. Justin Davis took the unofficial win in Trophy Truck Spec, while Cameron Steele claimed the Trophy Truck 2WD category, adding to a long record of Baja success for the veteran Californian. A Honda Passport Baja Spec hybrid vehicle also drew attention during the race, underlining a wider shift in desert racing towards consistency and reliability over raw horsepower. The variety of the entry — from unlimited Trophy Trucks to motorcycles, quads and utility vehicles — is part of what keeps the Baja 1000 the oldest, longest continuously held desert race in the world.

What remains provisional

For all the drama of the finish, the result is not yet final. SCORE officials have not posted the certified results, and competitors have a 40-hour window from their individual start times to complete the course, so the timing records remain provisional until the official data is released and reviewed. That caution is familiar in Baja: in past years, timing penalties applied after the finish have changed results, and the organisers' data-tracking review is part of the race itself.

The 2026 season ended with the closest of finishes on a course that had never been raced before, and Ampudia — the local hero from Ensenada, driving a truck built by Mason Motorsports — has added another chapter to a career that already includes a Baja 1000 overall victory and two Trophy Truck championships. Menzies, for his part, leaves Baja California Sur with a second place that will sting: he led for 700 miles, lost it in 70, and came up 13.553 seconds short. In a race measured in hundreds of miles, that is as close as desert racing gets.