June 6, 1944. Nearly 160 thousand Allied troops descended upon Normandy by air or sea for what Eisenhower called the “Great Crusade” to liberate Western Europe and push toward victory in World War II.

June 6, 2026. 82 years later and over 5,720 miles away, 200 teams arrived in Ensenada seeking to etch their names in history as winners of the 58th Baja 500.

It was a long and grueling battle across 468.70 miles (or 380.14 for Sportsman classes), one through summits and filled with as much action as attrition. By the end, Luke McMillin narrowly hung on for his first Baja 500 overall victory while Tyler Lynn repeated for bikes.

Saturday’s Four-Wheeler battle was a family affair for the McMillins. Andy McMillin, sharing the #7 with Bryce Menzies, battled with his cousin Luke all day along with defending race winner Alan Ampudia. Ampudia led through halfway until Luke pulled ahead at the final on-track scoring split on RM 332. Things were getting so tight that Andy quipped they were basically in “full qualifying mode” and pushing their trucks to their limits. Their standoff continued all the way to the end, separated by a mere 28 seconds. Luke had 12 seconds on Ampudia, who blasted through the finish with a blown left-rear tire and beat the #7 by 16 seconds.

“We unfortunately had a flat like three corners to go. I hit a huge rut because I had the steering wheel all bent, so it’s a little tough to turn,” Ampudia stated.

The trio of trucks were separated by a mere 28 seconds. Luke had 12 seconds on Ampudia, who in turn beat Menzies and Andy by 16. While this left zero margin for error, none of the three received a penalty (the only Trophy Trucks to have clean days in this regard).

Despite Luke’s successes, the Baja 500’s overall always eluded him. He won in Class 1/2-1600 in 2011 and Class 1 the following year, but could never crack the race’s top step outright once he reached the highest level. The closest he came was in 2018 and 2019 when he finished runner-up to Rob MacCachren and Andy in 2018 and 2019, respectively, then was slowed down by a broken portal hub while leading last year.

With victory finally secured, he joins Andy (2010, 2017, 2019), his older brother Dan (2020), father Mark (1988, 1997, 2001), uncle Scott (1983, 1986, 2010), and grandfather Corky (1983, 1986) as Baja 500 overall champs. He’s also now two-for-two on the season after claiming the San Felipe 250 in March.

“It was a fight. It was a really big fight. It’s a lot of fun, though,” said Luke. “The truck was flawless today. We did have some hiccups here and there, but it was glued to the road and we were able to drive as fast as we want. We lost some time in the beginning and got down a little bit, down three or four minutes, and then started charging down the coast and making up time. Once we got over the summits, we dropped into the Wash, we turned it on in the desert.

“We were chasing my cousin and I was just smiling. Just like, ‘No matter what happens, this is just fun. This is what we live for.’ God, it was just so much fun. So intense.”

Several contending trucks were taken out before fate coalescing around the #1, #7, and #83. Among the Trophy Truck DNFs were Ryan Arciero, Paul Weel and Rob MacCachren, and Tavo Vildósola with an engine failure. MacCachren and Weel were debuting their #11 team and Gen-2 Mason truck, which Menzies also raced.

The biggest loser, yet again, was Christopher Polvoorde as he went from winning the pole to retiring after 80 miles with several mechanical failures; if it was any silver lining, at least he made it further than the three corners that ruined his fastest qualifying run at the 2025 500.

Max Gordon had a driveshaft issue but was able to reach the finish eighth in TT. He was among several truck drivers who received Good Samaritan time bonuses after helping a rider who crashed and passed away soon after.

The tragedy came during an unusually brutal stretch of incidents. Two separate head-on collisions occurred around the same time at RMs 276 and 352, the former of which involved a chase truck from Baldi Racing, while a helicopter for Thunderstruck Motorsports went down north of the Goat Trail. One of the vehicles involved was carrying a family that was covering the race for BajaTracker, and a GoFundMe has been launched to cover their medical expenses. Thunderstruck confirmed the helicopter pilot and medic onboard survived their crash before being taken to Ensenada for evaluation; their #282 driven by Bryce Swaim went on to finish third in TT Spec.

The Good Samaritan swung the Class 1 victory in Brendan Gaughan’s favor. Although he initially finished runner-up to Loren Healy, he was granted a 50:54 credit for helping, which promoted him to the win by less than six minutes over Healy even with a ten-minute penalty for missing a Virtual Checkpoint.

Healy and Vaughn Gittin Jr. entered the Baja 500 with their usual Ultra4 4400 Ford Bronco Raptors, but in Class 1 rather than Trophy Truck thanks to revised SCORE policies that permit rock crawlers in the former. While Baja isn’t exactly the rocks of Johnson Valley, Healy’s Raptor is in for a unique month as it will also compete in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in two weeks.

“We chose to race there rather than put big fenders on our vehicles. They are much closer to a C1 than a AWD TT,” Healy explained. The race also went well for Gittin until the transmission and driveshaft system broke at RM 340 and dropped him to sixth in class.

Bad luck struck Brock Heger hard. After being the fastest UTV for much of the day, the A-arm broke at RM 415 which sank him to 15th in Pro UTV Open and 69th overall. Both are respectively his worst class finish and second-lowest overall placement since joining SCORE in 2023, the latter only ahead of a 97th at his series debut in the 2023 San Felipe 250 where he still scored a top ten for Open UTVs. Teammate Cayden MacCachren suffered a similar fate with a transmission failure that limited him to a 14th in class.

Despite the troubles, Branden Sims still secured the UTV overall win for Polaris as a RZR-affiliated driver. Ethan Groom was the top RZR Factory Racing driver with a third in Open and 23rd overall, while Joe Terrana and newcomer Rodrigo Ampudia placed sixth in Open.

The race was basically a honeymoon for Kaden Wells and his co-driver Emma Cornwell. The newlyweds, who got married in mid-May, won Pro UTV Forced Induction for Can-Am.

Trey Gibbs won Trophy Truck Spec in his class debut, clearing Brent Fox by nine minutes. Conversely, Jorge Sampietro’s race ended with his truck on fire in the pits. Terrible Herbst Motorsports suffered a double DNF in Spec as EJ Herbst’s #263 had a massive rollover with Ryan Millen while the #219 of Pierce Herbst crashed into a rut; the team salvaged a runner-up in TT 2WD with Tim Herbst.

Ezra Ebberts switched from Class 1 to Class 1/2-1600 after his original car suffered an engine failure in pre-running. The 1600 originally won its class at the Mint 400 in March before being disqualified, but it was perfectly legal for SCORE. He was the lone survivor of the three signed up for 1600.

Doing grand marshal and former Honda factory rider Steve Hengeveld proud, Tyler Lynn and his #1X SLR Honda team defended their 500 victory from 2025 by holding off Ciaran Naran’s Ducati by eight minutes. Shane Logan’s #3X was set back by what Norman Racing manager Eric Holt called an “unfortunate crash” when he clipped a rock on a blind rise, damaging the front brake and steering, though he and Daemon Woolslayer brought it home in third.

117 drivers (four finishers ran the Sportsman course) and 28 riders completed the race within the 18-hour time limit. Four drivers—Francisco Armenta, Eduardo Heredia, Elaxander Noble, and RJ Zanon—made it back to Ensenada but ran out of time. Doug Dillard’s TT Spec was the 113th and final Pro driver to finish in time, clocking in at 17:54:27, while the #120X Pro Moto Limited of McCoy Racing was the last bike with the very narrow time of 17:59:59.

McCoy Racing, consisting of Jake and Travis McCoy along with Jacob Yurkovic, had reached the finish with approximately ten minutes left but was recorded as a retirement. According to Yurkovic’s father Steven, the Stella staffer marked the #120X down as DNF because they didn’t turn in their Stella tracker, which had been destroyed in a crash. The Spica device, on the other hand, was still intact and corroborated the team’s argument, so they successfully protested to SCORE and are officially registered as the 28th finisher.

It was a tough race for the SCORE debutants. One of the trio hurt his knee when he crashed at RM 100, then the bike’s right-side case was damaged upon hitting a rock in the first summit. The latter blew a one-inch hole into the casing, which the team patched up using J-B Weld.

“Lots of learning and we had a great time with tons on stories. Our sons said [this] was the hardest thing they have ever done in their life,” Steven remarked.

Faelly Lopez and Kenji Oikawa were disqualified for not properly completing the course and going backward on it, respectively.

The 500 marked the debut of PCI Race Radios’ AdvenSense app, replacing Weatherman’s traditional VHF relay with an IP connection. With the race being just a week after product launch, there were bound to be a few growing pains like a 50-user cap in the channel that was eventually rectified and messages being relayed out of order because users were repeatedly pressing the push-to-talk button. It might seem as effective as a Discord voice chat at first glance and traffic wasn’t as much as in years past as teams move to internal comms via Starlink, but the improved audio fidelity was certainly a plus and PCI has high hopes for the product as it continues to grow.

“People have a tendence to ‘test’ the PTT [and] breaking things,” app developer Jeremy Ealand quipped.

Class winners

Four-Wheeler

Class	Overall	Number	Driver of Record	Total Time
Class 1	17	162	Brendan Gaughan	10:32:53.673*
Class 1/2-1600	72	1677	Ezra Ebberts	13:47:08.798
Class 3	117	301	RJ Zanon ^	19:47:31.975*
Class 5 Unlimited	93	513	Jesse Astorga	15:09:16.985*
Class 7	57	711	Richard Fant	12:30:36.927*
Class 8	DNF	N/A	No Finishers	DNF
Class 10	35	1000	Stan Potter	1:16:30.869
Class 11 #	120	1111	Eric Solorzano	16:05:54.763*
Pro Stock UTV	44	3931	Craig Scanlon	11:44:04.584*
Pro UTV Forced Induction	37	2935	Kaden Wells	11:25:20.678
Pro UTV Normally Aspirated	73	1957	Joe Bolton	13:50:11.544*
Pro UTV Open	19	1886	Branden Sims	10:33:59.639*
Sportman Truck#	DNF	N/A	No Finishers	DNF
Sportsman UTV #	118	1806	Edison Zurita	11:18:22.617*
Trophy Truck	1	83	Luke McMillin	9:10:54.149
Trophy Truck 2WD	13	16T	Cameron Steele	10:06:24.757*
Trophy Truck Legends	7	1L	Gus Vildósola	9:47:56.175*
Trophy Truck Spec	6	215	Trey Gibbs	9:46:07.591

Moto

Class	Overall	Number	Rider of Record	Total Time
Pro Moto 30	10	318X	Levi Gil	14:06:47.024*
Pro Moto 40	5	400X	Jason Miller	12:16:11.301*
Pro Moto 50	DNF	N/A	No Finishers	DNF
Pro Moto 60	13	600X	Harold Harris	14:46:10.103*
Pro Moto Ironman	6	725X	Kyle Phenix	12:57:39.504*
Pro Moto Limited	4	119X	Jorge Rivas Jr.	12:12:33.530*
Pro Moto Unlimited	1	1X	Tyler Lynn	9:49:12.741*
Sportsman Moto	22	210X	Luis Fernando Perez Murillo	10:11:17.983*
Sportsman Quad	19	119A	Cesar Lopez	9:20:37.567*

Featured image credit: Feel Baja Clothing