For a lot of us, racing means sleek cars screaming around a smooth track with grandstands full of people. But real racing—the kind that gets your blood pumping and your knuckles white—often happens miles from any asphalt, out where the land tries its hardest to break both man and machine. Starting December 7, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is throwing the doors wide open to that wild world with a new exhibit called Legends of the Dirt. If you’ve ever watched the Baja 1000 on TV and wondered what those battered trucks looked like up close, or if you grew up dreaming about Parnelli Jones flying a Bronco across the desert, this is the place you need to be.
The show runs all the way through January 2027, so there’s no rush, but trust me, you’re going to want to get there early and go back more than once. They’ve pulled together some of the most famous iron ever to leave pavement behind, everything from fire-breathing trophy trucks to twin-engine hill-climb monsters to the very first rig that ever won the brutal King of the Hammers.
Image credit: Petersen Automotive Museum
Walk in and one of the first things that hits you is just how different these vehicles are from anything you see on a NASCAR weekend. These machines were built to survive hundred-mile-an-hour runs across deserts, vertical rock walls, and jumps that would fold a normal pickup in half. And they didn’t just survive—they won.
Take the 1970 Ford Bronco known as “Big Oly.” Parnelli Jones—yeah, the same guy who dominated Indy cars and Trans-Am—took this bright red beast and won the Baja 1000 two years in a row, 1971 and 1972. Under that wild aluminum and fiberglass body sits a tube-frame chassis and a big Ford V8. There’s even a movable wing up top. Parnelli claimed it was for downforce, but he grinned when he admitted it mostly helped the Bronco “fly farther” when they launched off the big jumps. Standing next to it, you can almost smell the desert dust.
Not far away sits the Herbst family’s 1995 “LandShark,” the truck that changed desert racing forever. The Herbsts out of Las Vegas have been hammering the Baja peninsula for generations, and this thing—officially named “El Tiburón”—was their masterpiece. Back when every fast Class 1 buggy had the engine in the rear, builder Mike Smith stuck a big motor up front and hung solid axles underneath. Everyone said it wouldn’t work. It worked so well that most fast desert trucks still follow the basic recipe today. Just a couple weeks ago, Thor and Pierce Herbst brought home fourth in Trophy Truck Spec and 14th overall in the latest Baja 1000. Same family, same never-quit attitude.
Then there’s Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima’s 1993 Suzuki Cultus twin-engine Pikes Peak car. One look and you know this thing is nuts—two turbocharged 1.6-liter fours, one for the front wheels, one for the rear, making around 800 horsepower total in a package that barely weighs anything. Monster used it to take the Unlimited class win at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb that year. The overall record slipped away later that same day, but the car still looks like it could claw its way to the clouds tomorrow.
Image credit: Petersen Automotive Museum
Rally fans get their fix too. On display is the 1983 Lancia Rally 037, the very last rear-wheel-drive car ever to win the World Rally Championship constructors’ title. Walter Röhrl and Markku Alén drove the wheels off these things on narrow European forest roads, and the Petersen has one of the actual title-winning cars.
If rocks are more your thing, check out the 2010 Coleworx “Screaming Blue” rock bouncer. This tube-frame monster on giant tires was built for one reason: straight up cliffs most of us wouldn’t walk down without a rope. Nearby sits the very first Ford Bronco Ultra4 that Vaughn Gitten Jr. and Loren Healy drove to victory in the 4600 class at King of the Hammers—the race that combines high-speed desert running with rock crawling that looks impossible.
There’s even a Tanner Foust 2017 Volkswagen Beetle GRC car from the Global Rallycross days, proof that off-road racing isn’t always out in the middle of nowhere—sometimes it’s door-to-door in a stadium with 600 horsepower and jumps that send you twenty feet in the air.
Scattered throughout are some of the most legendary off-road motorcycles ever built, plus plenty of info on hill climbs that go back to the days of On Any Sunday, the movie that made half the country want to go ride in the dirt.
What ties it all together is the story of how off-road racing forced engineers to solve problems the road-race guys never had to think about. Modern all-wheel-drive systems, GPS that actually works when you’re fifty miles from the nearest cell tower, suspension that can take a six-foot drop at speed—most of that stuff started right here in the dirt.
Museum executive director Terry Karges put it best: “This exhibit represents one of the few automotive sectors we haven’t covered in much detail before.” Thanks to OPTIMA Batteries jumping in as partner, they’ve been able to do it right.
If you’ve ever torn across a fire road in an old pickup, chased a buddy through the dunes, or just sat around a campfire telling lies about the one that got away, Legends of the Dirt is going to feel like coming home. These aren’t museum pieces locked behind velvet ropes—these are the actual trucks and cars that went to war with the desert, the mountains, and the rocks…and came back with the trophy.
The exhibit opens December 7, 2025, and runs for over a year. Grab tickets at Petersen.org/exhibits and clear a whole afternoon. You’re going to need it. When the pavement ends, the real fun begins—and the Petersen just built the perfect place to remember why.
