We Visit the Nitto King of The Hammers Powered by Optima Batteries! Or, the Idiot’s Guide on How Not To Go Off-roading
So we were ecstatic when Nitto Tires and Hellwig Products, makers of cool suspension stuff and supplier for several of MotoIQ’s truck project suspension goodies, invited us out to the desert to spectate the Nitto King of The Hammers Powered by Optima Batteries off-road race. Although we are newbs to the whole off-road truck thing, we know enough to have heard of the event and know that it is an extremely tough test of man and machine, combining the rigors of both off-road desert racing and bolder crawling together in one event.
Boulder Crawling is tough enough, but to do it at speed in a wheel to wheel race is pretty insane. The race is so tough that more trucks DNF than make it to the end, and it is perhaps the hardest off-road race around- at least in North America. The trucks, or whatever you might call these machines, are very sophisticated, as not only do they have to go through rock gardens, but they have to do it fast as well as go fast from rock garden to rock garden.
With cool tech and tough racing, this is something we just had to see for ourselves. One thing though, to a man, although the MotoIQ crew is pretty damn good around cars, we have mostly just seen trucks as tools to move our racecars around. We don’t know anything about off-roading and now we were going to go out to the desert and do just that.
Being pretty busy, we didn’t really research much or do any prep other than throwing our camping gear into the back of Project Tundra and Project Toyota 4-Runner. After all, this was not going to be hardcore off-roading and we have all driven down dirt roads and stuff, how hard could this be?
Arriving at the event and after picking up our media credentials, we first went to go check out Hammertown. Hammertown is like a huge temporary city in the middle of the desert. It is the home of 70,000 plus people over the course of the event, yes that many! One of the takeaways we got is the off-road truck market seems to be much bigger than the performance car market in our area! No car event can get these many people in our part of the country, much less get them to drive out to the middle of nowhere and camp in primitive conditions!
Hammertown has a bustling vendors row shown here and pits, worthy of a small trade show and thousands of camping spots as far as the eye can see. At this point, our jaws were dropping. Tons of humanity and trick trucks everywhere.
