The Baja 500 isn’t for the faint of heart. But it is for the Atturo Trail Blade BOSS.
“It was a brutal, violent race” Driver Cooper Reynolds Gross said this month after finishing the 50th edition of legendary off-road race while rolling on 37” BOSS tires. “There were no moments of calm, some sections were less like racing and more just a game of survival. but the tires blew everyone away. They are still useable for another race after genuinely pummeling them."
The truck is back at the race shop on the same tires Driver Marc Stein started the race on. Driving the middle section, Driver and Crew Chief Mike McComas was able to utilize the almost paddle-like tire traction of the BOSS to work past massive logjams and rock crawl around obstacles few others could.
“I thought they would be burned down to the carcasses,” Mike said when he handed the truck over to Cooper. “I was beating them harder than I have ever beat a tire just to get through some of that stuff but they had a lot of life still left in them so we left them on.”
Cooper said the grueling terrain along Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula featured incredibly steep, silty or sharp rocky hill climbs where his Atturo-branded truck’s tires were spun up to 80 or 90 mph, using every one of its 500+ horsepower while going only 15 or 20 mph, but handled 537 miles of the worst the Baja could throw at them.
“It was the hardest race any of us had ever run,” Cooper said of his Ace Motorsports team. “The tires performed beautifully. Zero flats on either the race truck or any of the chase trucks wearing either the BOSS or Trail Blade M/T. The truck fought her best but the terrain proved so brutal that nobody in any limited classes made it all the way around, being restricted to stock parts, we lost 1st gear, our transfer case ended up stuck in 4 low and our front diff blew up leaving us in 2wd low range. And the power steering failed with 200 miles to go but we fought on all the way until the motor quit back on the pavement in Ensenada. What an adventure.”
And it’s not over yet as the race team is planning to tackle Baja 1000 in November to secure a championship.
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