You Won't Believe What Just Won King of the Hammers!
They say racing improves the breed. Well then, get ready for a whole new breed.
For the first time in the 18-year history of the event, a SxS has won King of the Hammers.
Kyle Chaney's Can-Am not only won the massive, day-long suffer- and dirt-fest out in the Mojave Desert's Johnson Valley, he beat the next-closest guy by a full half hour, and the guy after that, off-road and NASCAR racing great Robby Gordon, by over two hours.
The race wasn't without its unique challenges. Navigation was a problem, for instance. Just knowing where you are in all the dust and trackless desert was Chaney's biggest challenge.
'The course was crazy, we didn't even know where we were going as there was just nothing there. We had to pick where we were going. There is definitely a lot of luck involved in this, but we picked some good lines. Terry (Madden) was an awesome navigator, and the car stayed together. We just took care of the car all day. Guys were passing us and I just let them go because we had to keep the car together.'
Previous KoH winner JP Gomez, of the Gomez racing family that has won KoH before, finished second this year.
'Oh man, this is part of racing right,' said Gomez at the finish. 'You go fast, you get flats. You go slow, you get passed by Josh Blyler.'
But Blyer wasn't on the podium. That went to a famous name.
Robby Gordon rolled into Hammertown two hours and 22 minutes behind Chaney, Gordon was a last-minute entry in the race and drove one of the Gomez family's pre-runners.
'Thank you to all of you fans who come out and support us,' Gordon said to the crowd. 'Mike Jams (ceo of Hammerkings Productions, the company that runs the King of the Hammers), thank you, and Dave Cole (co-founder of the race), thank you for having this crazy dream and building King of the Hammers. It is insane. Everybody comes out here and has a great time.'
King of the Hammers is surely the hardest single-day beat-down in racing. It started 18 years ago by a group of friends who used to drive their 4x4s up and down the crazed, boulder-strewn madness carved into the hills around Johnson Valley, Calif., a dystopian hellscape in a land that appreciates dystopian hellscapes. The runs went up seemingly impossible canyons with boulders the size of washing machines and Volkswagons, some the size of single-car garages.
These pre-running pioneers from two decades ago named each canyon trail: Jackhammer, Sledgehammer, Clawhammer… They were all Hammers. Then one of the wheelers made the audacious claim that he could run all of the Hammers in a single day.
'No way,' the bros said.
'Way,' he replied. Or words to that effect.
Thus, The King of the Hammers was born.
Now, close to 100,000 spectators gather each year in a temporary fiberglass paradise of motorhomes and fifth-wheels called Hammertown, eating dust and cheering on the maniacs who come to race. KoH now stretches over two weeks, motorcycle races first, followed by four-wheeled competitions. The biggest and most prestigious of them all is The King of the Hammers.
Until now, it had always been won by purpose-built, vaguely Jeep-looking contraptions with four-wheel drive and tremendous jounce and rebound that could not only crawl over big boulders but bomb flat out across the hardened desert in between the Hammers. Your rig has to be able to do both to win. And this year, to everyone's surprise, it was a Can-Am UTV that won it.
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