It’s an American event that is legendary the world over. The most extreme 4WDs contest the hybrid race/rally/rock climbing contest every year. Manufacturers produce ‘tribute’ builds in its honour. It is so popular that its pre-entries closed two months ago. So popular that it creates its own village in the Californian desert, Hammertown.
For context, it’s a couple of weeks after the Dakar Raid race and a couple of weeks before the SCORE San Felipe 250 off-road race.
It’s King of the Hammers, a four-wheel torture-fest in the California desert where rocks chew up driveshafts and spit out sheet metal like broken dreams across the dusty desert dirt. It’s like no other racing event anywhere in the world, on or off-road.
The vehicles that attempt this feat are almost all purpose-built for the task. They are chromoly welded frames with big V8 engines in the back (or the front) driving all four wheels. There is some debate as to whether independent suspension or solid beam axles are best. Most vehicles have a two-person crew to make it easier to winch out when stuck in the rocks.
The King of the Hammers 2023 once again hosted the annual pilgrimage of 4x4 fanatics to the Mojave Desert. It was a 17-day event in the desert encompassing many disciplines of off-road racing. With races for dirt bikes, side-by-side UTVs, trophy trucks, various classes of Ultra4 cars, rock-bouncers, buggies, and even a race for children, there is action for all.
Competitors racing the King of the Hammers are subjected to dizzying stretches of open desert terrain with dry lakebeds and spine-compressing whoops punctuated by narrow canyons of frame-twisting boulders and ledges that test a rig’s structural integrity as well as the driver’s navigational skills.
Vehicles are custom-fabricated and often sport V8 power, 40-inch tires on beadlock wheels, and low-low gear ratios to support super-slow-speed crawling as well as high-high ratios to cope with triple-digit speeds in the desert. Car and driver must be ready for the most gruelling rock-crawling and open desert conditions imaginable in a single-day off-road race.
King of the Hammers transforms the California desert into a thriving city of race pits, concert stages, media tents, and food vendors that some 50,000 off-road fans call home for the duration of the event. Hammertown is where the heart of the race action can be viewed live on humongous screens. A drone or helicopter view of the event from the sky reveals a sea of motor homes extending outward from Hammertown.
