Ronnie Anderson scores maiden desert win in Mint 400 Limited – The Checkered Flag

Ronnie Anderson knows how to win in short course. He can now say he knows how to win in the open desert, and what better place to earn his first desert overall victory at than the legendary Mint 400?

Anderson, Racing a Polaris in the UTV Pro Open class, won the Mint’s Limited race on Friday after a frantic late run in which he had to pass numerous lapped cars and chase down classmate Ryan Piplic. Piplic was one of the favourites alongside World Rally-Raid Championship star Mitch Guthrie and 2023 winner Joe Terrana, only to suffer a flat tyre on the final lap. Despite losing a power steering belt as he pulled into pit, Anderson took advantage of Piplic’s issue to set the fastest time.

“It feels amazing, that’s my first desert overall win right there,” said Anderson. “Pretty happy to be able to do it here at the Mint 400. Legendary race and a really, really, really tough one that a lot of people like to win. Super, super excited. So proud of my whole team, they worked their butts off for moments like this. Wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

“We come from a short course background and usually we’re sprinters through and through, but learn pretty quickly here that desert Racing is more about the marathon than the sprint. It’s brutal; it actually wasn’t too bad lap one, but over the hundreds of cars going lap after lap after lap, by lap four it was absolutely brutal. There wasn’t a section on the course that wasn’t beat up, wasn’t whooped out, so attrition was definitely a big factor there. That’s where we got a lot of our track position there on lap four, a lot of people fell out there lap three and four, so we just played it smooth, consistent, conservative, and it paid off today.”

Prior to his puncture, Piplic had been leading Anderson by roughly twenty seconds and the Class 10 of Tyler Mills in the overall. Mills was the first car to reach the finish, though Anderson beat him by a minute. Abraham Gutierrez arrived shortly after Mills, coming up four minutes short.

Piplic salvaged a fourth overall and second in UTV Pro Open. While Terrana was unable to repeat the overall, he still topped the UTV Pro class ahead of Tim Fitzpatrick, Matt Burroughs, and Anderson’s brother RJ Anderson.

“The track sure is rough, it got super rough,” Mills commnted. “It felt good, but we just wanted to keep moving. I didn’t have any problem, we didn’t have any flats, nothing. We didn’t stop all day except for fuel and that’s it. I don’t think I passed that many cars ever in a race. There was lappers all over. Everybody got out of the way, everybody was good and we just picked our way.”

Guthrie was not the only W2RC competitor as he and some of his fellow American rally raiders skipped the championship’s Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge last week to focus on the Mint. Ricky Brabec, the Dakar Rally bike champion, and his Monster Energy Honda Rally Team colleague Skyler Howes traded in their handlebars for a steering wheel, a formula that worked to perfection when they won the UTV Pro NA class ahead of new Honda Factory Off-Road Racing driver Michael McFayden. Brabec’s girlfriend and W2RC SSV racer Sara Price, who was RJ Anderson’s team-mate in Extreme E for a brief spell in 2022, was ordered to switch to the UTV Pro class at the last minute because her Can-Am Maverick did not meet regulation for UTV Pro Stock and finished twelfth alongside Cameron Steele. The Brabec/Howes tandem narrowly beat Price and Steele in the overall by one minute.

Unlike the Unlimited race on Saturday that is reserved for trucks, the Limited race boasts a variety of vehicles like Beetles in Class 11 and even military vehicles. The latter was split into Vintage Military and Modern Military categories, with the former’s winner Alex Hernandez in a Humvee from AM General. United States Army contractor Flyer Defense supplied a quartet of General Dynamics Flyer 72s for personnel from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, which competed in Modern Military against the likes of Racing-dakar-effort-comes-down-to-if-we-can-scrape-together-budget/”>Polaris RZRs and Storm SRTVs.

Matt Trainham, the director of vehicle testing for Rivian, completed the race in an electric Rivian R1T.

The race was held a week after the Nitrocross season finale in nearby Las Vegas. Faces from that weekend who appeared Friday included Blake Wilkey, winner of both Nitrocross Baja Bugs and the Mint’s Class 11, and UFC Hall of Famer Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, finishing eleventh in UTV Pro Open. Cerrone will also run the Unlimited event.

Concurrent with the Limited race, Nic Whetstone crushed Unlimited qualifying as the only truck with a time below four minutes; defending champion Eric Hardin qualified third. Kyle Jergensen, the 2022 Mint 400 Unlimited winner, topped Group 1 qualifying for Unlimited Truck SPEC trucks.

The Potts family had a difficult Friday when Carib Potts flipped his Class 10 in the Limited race, then Cole Potts rolled his Unlimited Truck in qualifying; consequently, Cole will start at the back on Saturday as the fifty-eighth truck off the line. In spite of his accident, Carib still mustered a top ten in Class 10 in ninth, albeit completing just a lap. he same could not be said for twenty-three others in the Limited race who failed to reach the finish. UTV Pro Stock drivers Kenneth Clifton, Erik Reynolds, Jesse Sword, and Loni Unser were disqualified for illegal exhausts and other disallowed components for the class. Loni, daughter of Johnny Unser and Pikes Peak International Hill Climb competitor, was making her Mint 400 début and had been leading the class until a “string of bad luck” hit on the final lap.

Limited class winners

Unlimited qualifying results

Group 1

Group 2