2015 King of The Hammers Makes An Impact

Well ladies and gentlemen, the 2015 King of The Hammers, an event with the utmost of buildup and hype surrounding it, is now a thing of the past. For the staff at Offroad Xtreme, it is bittersweet as this is an event that we look forward to every year and truly enjoy. For this year’s coverage, we are going to be doing things a little differently and really wanted to get our readers into the minds of the racers and fans and cover the overall experience that is King of The Hammers. We will have a series of articles and videos from the 2015 King of The Hammers to try and bring you the experience of just how incredible this event actually is.

The King of The Hammers is not your average desert race, nor is it your average rock crawling race. As one stop on the Ultra4 circuit, the King of The Hammers is an event that requires drivers and teams to make tough decisions whether to set their rig up for open desert or rock crawling since together they make up the vast majority of the course. With the two distinctly different types of racing and the considerably different vehicle setups that coincide, teams and drivers are forced to make compromises – to decide which parts of the course they think will be the most time sensitive and set their vehicles up accordingly. You cannot have the best of both worlds at KOH as desert and rock racing are two completely different kinds of setups and whichever direction teams decide to go with the setup will have a major impact on their success.

With a few first-timers going to the King of The Hammers with us this year, we can truly say that for ANY off road enthusiast, this is a must-go event for many different reasons. From the sheer power the vehicles produce to the sounds they make at wide-open throttle, the trucks are the real showstoppers of the event. There is something very different about KOH than say a typical desert race, and we’re not just talking about the types of vehicles. While there are wide-open desert sections that may resemble a Baja 1000-style race, the low-speed and rocky technical sections really help break up the race and give spectators excellent viewing locations – something not usually seen in normal desert racing.

The excitement at some of KOH’s most technical sections, such as Back Door, is truly electrifying as the crowd absolutely roars to life when they see a race vehicle turn in and decide to tackle the upcoming obstacles. Whether it’s their actual voices or the echoes created from the rock walls, it is very apparent that the crowd is enjoying themselves. When the race vehicles actually make their way to the obstacle with the hopes of conquering them, the crowd is deafeningly loud and absolutely overpowers the sounds of the race vehicles – it’s an amazing experience.

To add to the overall experience, the technical sections on the track which are typically a mountain pass carved through a couple of steep hillsides are completely lined with fans. The crowd is so diehard and crazy about this event that they line the most treatureous hillsides like mountain goats just in hopes of getting closer to the action – oftentimes putting themselves in pretty dangerous situations if they were to lose their balance.

With all the people that come out for KOH comes Hammertown, the makeshift city in the desert that shoots up one-week a year. Hammertown can be described in one word; crazy. The sheer amount of fans, crew members, volunteers, and media that come out and create this city is incredible. The desert floor is littered with RVs, race rigs, motorhomes, and more off road vehicles than your mind can even process – it is that big of an experience. When night falls, Hammertown takes on a completely different persona as well, almost like a mini Las Vegas with LEDs and neon lights everywhere.

From an outsider’s perspective looking in, it may be hard to understand what brings some 40,000+ people from all over the world to the middle of absolute nowhere for one week out of the year. But for fans, volunteers, racers, and the media, it makes perfect sense why this particular area of Johnson Valley that lays dormant 51-weeks out of the year becomes a home away from home and the site to one of the most spectacular forms of motorsports imaginable.