Baja 1000: How innovative WiFi solutions are turning off-road racing into Formula 1

The world of modern Formula 1 is defined by data. Every moment of every lap is tracked with accuracy, and graphics packages detail a driver’s location on the track, his speed, his gap to other drivers, and so much more. But in the world of long-distance off-road racing, racing has long been conducted in the absence of live, accurate data.

This year, though, that has changed — at least in the SCORE World Desert Championship, a series of four races in Baja California that includes the iconic Baja 1000. Optima Batteries and Clarios have teamed up with the series to outfit most of the series’ competitors with Starlink WiFi panels, enabling fans and teams to be more connected to competitors than ever before.

Connectivity is the name of the 2024 Baja 1000 game

“Would you watch Formula 1 if it didn’t have a leaderboard?”

Cam Douglass, marketing director of Optima Batteries, posed that question to me out in Ensenada, where I had joined the team for the 57th running of the Baja 1000. He asked me to think — to really think — about what F1 might look like without adequate data at hand.

“You might [watch] for a little while because it’s cool and fun,” he said, “but if you didn’t understand who’s in the lead, or who’s coming up in the ranks, or who’s vying or a second, first, and everything else, it’s a challenge to think you’d be engaged for the whole race.”

And he’s right. Tune into any one of the countless vintage F1 race replays on YouTube, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find much data about what the hell is happening if there’s no live leaderboard displaying information. How fast is the leader going? How quickly is second place catching up to the leader? Who’s been lapped, and who’s in the points? It’s hard to tell.

That’s been the story down at Baja up until 2024. SCORE International, the sanctioning body that organizes the Desert World Championship (a four-race off-road series located in Baja California), has been able to provide live streams and some tidbits of information about the location of the cars and bikes tackling the intense desert race — but that information hasn’t been particularly accessible.

If you were to have tuned into 2022’s Baja 1000, you might have been able to see some clips of Trophy Trucks and dirt bikes powering through silt and sand, and you might have a rough idea of how much time has elapsed since they left the ceremonial start line.

But you wouldn’t have too many camera angles, nor would you be able to situate any particular truck in the larger scheme of the leaderboard; after all, Baja competitors leave the start line individually, at certain intervals, and the winner is determined to be the driver or rider who crossed that distance in the shortest amount of time. Theoretically, a Trophy Truck driver be the first driver to cross the line, but the driver just behind him may have started five minutes later, and therefore would be crowned the victor.

Optima Batteries and Clarios determined that, this year, they were going to transform the sport by providing live data and making it easier to follow every moment of the Baja action.

Full disclosure: Optima Batteries invited me to the 2024 Baja 1000 for my first taste of off-road racing down in Mexico. They took care of me on site and arranged interviews with key personnel. All opinions are my own.

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While the concept is simple, its execution has relied on ample outside factors — namely, the ability for competitors to be able to connect to the Internet while in the middle of the desert.

Communication was previously done between a driver and his team, who would be dispersed throughout the race course in “chase trucks,”or vehicles designed to provide assistance in the form of tools or manpower. They could chat with a satellite radio, but SCORE International couldn’t keep tabs on the 200+ competitors cruising the course at any one time.

So, for the fans at home, it was tough to keep tabs on what was going on. You could watch the ceremonial start, where trucks, UTVs, and motorcycles take off one at a time from a downtown location. You could watch the finish. For the 20-odd hours in between, though, you would have almost no information to rely on. You’d have great visuals, yes — but that was about it.

Cam Douglass of Optima explained that the Baja 1000 has now gravitated from a 24-hour live stream that shows really cool trucks racing off-road in the dirt to, now, something that you can watch and see a leaderboard and follow your favorite driver, your favorite truck.”

The introduction of Starlink, a satellite internet company owned by SpaceX and founder Elon Musk, changed the game.

To access Starlink, all you need is a satellite panel that connects to a cluster of Starlink satellites out in orbit around Earth. Plug the panel into a power source, and you suddenly have access to to the Internet, even out in the middle of the desert, where you might not even have a cell phone signal.

The panels themselves are very light, making them easy to mount to Trophy Trucks and UTVs (though they’re currently a little too big to be easily mounted to motorcycles or dirt bikes).

Those panels mean that drivers can stream the race live from inside the cockpit — but it has also opened up the ability to create a more robust and accurate timing system that can be accessed during the Baja 1000, not after it.

Cam Douglass explained how it works. Out on the course, SCORE and Optima identified roughly 20 areas where timing loops could be installed. These loops are composed of a few Starlink panels connected to lithium Optima 31 batteries (designed for RVs, marine technology, and overlanding equipment) and a timing loop buried in the sand.

“We wanted to do this with batteries rather than have a bunch of generators,” Douglass told me. “Generators aren’t as reliable, and they’re not as quiet. The batteries will run for days, and we only need it for a day.

“The system runs the electronics, not only for the timing system, but also for the Starlink that has to send that [information] to the studios so that these guys calculate who’s in what position.”

That’s called “corrected timing,” where a driver’s time is calculated based on how far they’ve traveled and how long it has taken. Corrected timing takes into account the fact that every driver or rider left the start line at a different time, therefore giving viewers a more accurate understanding of intervals between vehicles.

The idea of broadcasting timing and scoring for Baja is relatively new, and was inspired by Chip Polvoorde, father of young Optima-sponsored racer Christopher Polvoorde.

“Every time [the race team] goes out for a beer, we just get so frustrated [because] this event is so cool,” Cam Douglass said. “When you’re here and you experience this off-road event, it’s one of the most incredible things ever.

“But how do we get that feeling to the people in the States that are watching it at home?”

Enter Chip Polvoorde.

“[Chip] took it as a personal mission to say, how do we make this sport better?” Douglass told me.

“He brought that idea to us and to Clarios, and Clarios said, there’s a wonderful tie-in with Optima, but also from our communications and software standpoint. That’s a huge initiative for Clarios.

“It’s not just that we’re selling batteries; we’re selling a system that will integrate into a vehicle. Even if it’s integrating through Starlink, it’s still all about this system that we’ve been able to create.”

Sixty days later, the first version of this technology was ready to make its debut at the first race of SCORE International’s 2024 season, the San Felipe 250.

“We were nervous, and it didn’t work as well as we liked,” Douglass admitted, “but it worked a heck of a lot better than nothing.”

“What were the challenges?” I asked.

“Trucks running into the timing equipment,” he said.

See, in off-road racing, there is a roughly outlined race course dotted by checkpoints that drivers have to pass in order to prove they’ve tackled the full course — but there’s a lot of leeway in exactly where the driver can go. If the traditional course path is unusually rutted or dangerous, a driver can divert and take a different route to the next checkpoint.

Clearly, that can create problems when there’s timing equipment set up in the middle of the desert — and drivers kicked off the season by running into the batteries and Starlink panels that had popped up out of nowhere.

That being said, it taught the Optima and Clarios crews how to better organize their timing loops in the future. Now, the team seeks out areas of the course where there’s a natural funnel; that means drivers have to drive over that piece of land, and it also means the equipment is less prone to random run-overs.

Other challenges arose as well. Though Optima had run its lithium 31 batteries through ample testing, it hadn’t accounted for what might happen if a heat wave were to strike, and the sun were to beat down on the batteries all day long. Douglass admitted that two of the 10 batteries got so hot at San Felipe that they shut off — but it gave Optima a chance to correct that fault before the battery went out to consumers.

And, finally, the timing isn’t constantly updated. The Optima team aimed to set up its timing loops in such a way that, roughly every hour, trucks and bikes will pass through and provide an opportunity for SCORE to provide corrected timing. But a lot can happen within that hour, and fans won’t know exactly how a flat tire will impact the leaderboard until the next timing loop.

Yet this is still the beginning of a massive evolution in the off-road racing world.

“I think this could transform the sport,” Douglass said. “I mean, seriously transform the sport.

“To what degree? I don’t know. I mean, the wish is that hey, we can be as big as F1 some day.”

But for now, some of the biggest transformations have been coming on the team side.

“It’s a game changer for teams because, now the live stream is available to the guy in the helicopter. The co-driver can listen in. Whenever anyone goes through the timing system, there’s a delta — so everybody wants to know how far they are from somebody else, which can help them decide, should I make that pit stop, or should I wait?

“I used to sit there with a stop watch in a chase truck trying to time it out. There’s a lot of strategy involved during the race that the timing helps.”

For fans of a sport as technologically advanced as Formula 1, an hour-by-hour update to the timing board can seem like child’s play. But in those long-distance races carving through the middle of absolutely nowhere, that information is huge.

We’ve seen what greater accessibility to a sport can do, with Netflix’s Drive to Survive turning the unlikeliest viewers into dedicated F1 fans. Perhaps this is off-road racing’s DTS moment.

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