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Our day ended up being pointsless but not pointless. Perhaps spending another hour feeding a wild donkey apples out of our snack box was not the best use of competitive time. Alas, among the many rules we hadn't read was the one about making checkpoints before they closed. Fixable but at the cost of an hour's lost time and a 50-point penalty for requiring on-stage mechanical assistance from base camp. Anderson mapped us to several difficult checkpoints and rewarded my improving driving with a rare "Good job." Near Mojave, California, we were coming into the Trona Pinnacles-which were definitely not referred to by several participants as the "Trona Penisacles," because we are grown-ups and respect the grandeur of geological marvels-when the Bronco Sport shook a motor mount loose. We were warned the fourth day is often the hardest, but it started out great. On the third night, ants got in the tent. Where was this taken? "I never had any idea where the hell we were," Scherr says.
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We were about to turn around, truly the worst feeling, when I got out and went full Inigo Montoya: "Guide my sword." And there it was, hidden behind a berm and bush, the most beautiful stretch of gravel going our way. Another time, we noticed a crossroad on the map but saw no crossroad in sight. Then they ran up a hill, backlit by a pink-tinged sun like a dang Lisa Frank folder, and we both cried. Driving through a canyon, I looked up to see wild horses all around us nine-year-old me would have died. I was timid behind the wheel and did not understand the navigation, so Anderson was doing a lot of coaching, and neither of us had paid attention to the rules, so we kept racking up penalty points.ĭespite this, we weren't doing that badly: Of the six teams in our class-formerly called Crossover but changed to X-Cross for 2020-we finished the second day in third place and experienced moments of transcendence amid the friction.
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I had been expecting a series of dirt maintenance roads, and instead, we were picking our way across boulder-laden trails and over hills so steep you could stand at the bottom of one and see the vehicle's roof as it climbed. In her defense, while I hadn't flipped us off a sand dune, I was not prepared for the intense demands of the job. Scherr uses her new compass skills to set a heading. The reborn Bronco, and the addition of the Bronco Sport, is Ford's own see-if-I-can-do-it-better moment, and the engineers are upfront about going tire to tire with Jeep, Subaru, and Land Rover. The Badlands trim amps up the off-road cred with seven all-wheel-drive modes (lesser models get five), rubberized flooring that cleans easily, and a torque-vectoring rear axle.
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In the ever more blurred distinctions between SUV, truck, and raised-up car, the Bronco Sport sits at the edge of the crossover class, with a square trucky shape and surprising off-road capability. The Sport is the pony to the big-horse Bronco. Anderson came with actual qualifications: a Baja win, time spent as a navigator for off-road legend Walker Evans, and experience as an endurance racer on horseback-making her the perfect co-driver for the Bronco. We've covered my skill set, or lack thereof. They were there, like their vehicle, to test themselves against a brand-new challenge. They're members of the Bronco marketing team and novices in off-road driving, map navigation, and motorsports competition. Erica Martin and Jovina Young made up the second duo.
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The A-team consisted of professional off-road racer Shelby Hall and experienced navigator and overlander Penny Dale, both of whom had come close to winning previous Rebelles but never quite nailed it. The three-car Ford team was a mix of newbies and veterans. And if they've already done it once, to see if they can do it better.
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