Rod Hall (racer)
Rod Hall is an off-road racer. He was inducted in the Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2005.[1] He has spent his entire adult life around four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Racing career
His racing career began in the 1950s, when organized off-road competition was just beginning. Traveling from his Hemet, Calif., home to races in the Rocky Mountains and desert Southwest, Hall quickly earned a reputation for going faster than other competitors – and surviving races with less vehicle damage.
As the popularity of organized off-road racing mushroomed in the late-1960s, so did Hall’s success behind the wheel. In 1967 he won the inaugural NORRA Mexican 1000 Rally (the race now known as the SCORE International Baja 1000) and has raced in every 1000 in the race’s 39-year history. Hall today is the only racer to have competed in every Baja 1000 in a four-wheeled vehicle.[2]
Hall remains the only driver to win Baja overall in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. To date, he has accumulated over 160 major event wins and more than a dozen SCORE/HDRA & Best in the Desert (BitD) championship titles. His string of 35 consecutive race wins in the early 1980s remains the longest unbroken string of race victories in off-road racing history.[3]
In addition to being the owner of Team HUMMER, Hall is partner with Mike Winkel in Reno’s Rod Hall/Winkel HUMMER. His franchise was the first stand-alone Hummer dealership in the country. Hall regularly conducts BF Goodrich tire seminars, HUMMER Happenings for dealerships and corporate excursions in HUMMER vehicles.
Along with sons Chad Hall and Josh Hall, Rod drives one of the three production race vehicles for Team HUMMER. Hall is the driver of the new Hummer H3 SUV race truck, which debuted in the 2005 BitD “Vegas to Reno” competition and helped Hall earn his record 18th Baja 1000 victory in November 2005. Hall retired the Hummer race team from full race series action in 2009, but continues to field a Hummer entry at the Baja 1000. Hall captured his record breaking 19th, 20th and 21st Baja 1000 class wins in his H3 in 2007, 2009 & 2012.[4]
Hall's remarkable racing career is now helping to shape the skills of drivers that are graduating from Rod Hall DRIVE. Rod Hall DRIVE is the only off-road driving school that provides students with championship proven driving techniques in high performance, high speed four-wheel drive desert machines. The Rod Hall DRIVE off-road driving school is located at the Wild West Motorsports Park in Reno, Nevada.
References
- ↑ Biography at the Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame, Retrieved March 12, 2007
- ↑ score-international.com
- ↑ Biography at his official website
- ↑ score-international.com