FOR YOU ARE DUST

FORD'S BREATHTAKING BRONCO RAPTOR IS THE MINT 400 DESERT RACE MANIFESTED.

PRIMM, NEVADA, is a sad place. The roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Casino hasn’t run in years. The outlet mall is shuttered. The best restaurant in town? It’s a battle between Denny’s and IHOP inside casinos on either side of I-15. But there is one overwhelmingly great thing about Primm: the Mint 400.

And Ford’s new Bronco Raptor is the Mint 400 manifest as a consumer product.

The Mint is more than an off-road race. It died once but was resurrected. It has outlived the downtown Las Vegas hotel after which it’s named, survived the scorn of environmentalists, and leveraged the psychedelic attention of Hunter S. Thompson into enduring legend. It’s a mix of dust, sand, mud, endangered tortoises, high-octane racing fuel, and obscure IPAs. It’s a multiday carnival of communal camping, kids driving ATVs, trucker caps, and, inevitably, dogs wearing sunglasses.

California’s Bill Stroppe built the first racing Bronco to compete in the initial Mexican 1000 (now Baja 1000) run in the fall of 1967. Piloted by Ray Harvick and co-driven by Stroppe, it led most of the race before breaking. But the experience was enough for Stroppe to goad and tease his friend Parnelli Jones to take on off-road racing. So Stroppe built another production-based Bronco for Jones and him to take on the first Mint 400 in 1968.