Book Excerpt: Mel Larson and That Lunatic Off-Road Desert Race
An excerpt from my book on the late Mel Larson, a wild-man NASCAR driver, helicopter pilot and PR frontman for the Circus Circus casino. We learn about Mel's role in the epic MINT 400 off-read race across the Mojave Desert.
From Real Men Wear Pink: the Mel Larson Story
Before the dust and grit even settled, it became known as The Great American Desert Race, taking its place among the spinning planet’s toughest and most outlandish off-road spectacles.
The Del Webb Mint 400 Off Road Rally was a truly wild and ungainly thing, a souped-up competition where rolling dune buggies, monster trucks, lunar-rover lookalikes, motorcycles, RVs and even a lumbering military tank had an equal chance at the guaranteed prize money.
Nevada’s annual extravaganza on wheels, America’s first-ever desert off-road race, drew both the curious and the kooky, including gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson who immortalized the event in his psychedelic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
With his cigarette holder clenched tightly in his teeth, Thompson termed the 400-mile race more stupendous than the “Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals” combined.
Along with misfit “Average Joes” with their garage-built contraptions, competitors included NASCAR driver Parnelli Jones, actors Steve McQueen and James Garner, comedian Jay Leno and astronaut Gordon Cooper.
The race eventually reeked of sex and danger, giving work to emerging starlets as cheesecake calendar girls, including Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter, Wheel of Fortune's Vanna White, and Playboy centerfolds Vickie Reigle, Tracy Vaccaro and Dona Speir.
To all who dared enter, the event was an eye-popping debacle of dust and broken machinery that littered the desert floor, and both drivers and their vehicles succumbed to the Mojave’s treacherous wrath.
Still, the racers loved it; they ate it up like the dust they inevitably swallowed.
Casino president Earl Thompson, reportedly arrived at the finish line and exclaimed, despite the sweat, dirt and sheer physical pain, “This is the best goddamn thing I’ve ever seen!”
Bill Muncey, the hydroplane racing legend who a decade later would die in a boat crash in Acapulco while traveling at 175 miles an hour, became a Mint 400 competitor with a begrudging respect for the sheer brutality of the race.
He termed the event Man’s Inhumanity to Man.
“My father was used to abusing his body,” recalled his stepson Roger Norman who later won the event in 2010. "Those speeding boats also took their toll. But that race was a whole different level of beating your body up. The hydroplane events were over in minutes. The Mint 400 never seemed to end. He was sore for weeks afterward.”
That deranged desert race also became a pivotal moment in the career of thrill-seeker and track-daredevil Mel Larson. As both competitor and race director, Mel embraced the crack-brained concept and almost singlehandedly brought order to all of the chaos, in the end probably saving the very future of the event.
The Mint 400 led Mel to work side by side with William G. Bennett, a gaming executive and real estate developer who like his previous mentors, later took Mel under his wing. Bennett eventually brought Mel to Las Vegas full-time and helped launch Mel to become one of the most successful and free-thinking casino promoters of his generation.
But back to that confounded race.
How does such a thing even come into existence?
And why would people want to enter into that desert hell-scape where vehicle tires blew, carburetors crumbled and bumpers and even engines might simply fall off.
Well, just ask Mel Larson.
“I don’t know,” he said once. “I thought it would be a lot of fun to get dirty in the desert.”
One day, Mel got a call at his Phoenix office from one of his old media contacts.
He’d met Norm Johnson in 1967, the year before when he rented the convention center at the Sahara Hotel to host closed-circuit coverage of the Indianapolis 500 speed race.
Always the savvy promoter, he’d asked Johnson, a local sports columnist, to do a write-up on the event.
The two became pals. Now the old reporter had a favor to ask.
Johnson had moved on to a job in the marketing department of Del Webb’s Mint Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas. That year, the hotel followed a local trend among casinos to sponsor a deer-hunting contest.
As Johnson describes it, a couple of salesmen wanted to sell him a dune buggy — that newfangled vehicle in the emerging off-road past time — as first prize. Johnson knew he needed to whip up some newspaper coverage, so he dreamed up the idea to drive the buggy to Lake Tahoe completely off road, staying far away from the highway asphalt, and then record exactly how long it took to get there.
At a downtown street corner, a NASCAR official and Las Vegas Mayor Oran K. Gragson kicked off the jaunt, which was chronicled by a photographer. It took the troupe three days to get to Lake Tahoe. The gambit was a success. Pictures ran in Life magazine.
Quickly, Mint hotel general manager William Bennett took up Johnson on his suggestion to start a road rally to keep the publicity coming.
“Make it happen,” he said.
As the thinking went, not only would an off-road race bring some continued newspaper headlines, it might even draw a few more gamblers to the downtown hotel.
Johnson knew Mel was steeped in the car racing world as a NASCAR driver and promoter who also owned his own drag strip in Phoenix.
He knew all the right players.
So Johnson picked up the phone.
“One of the first guys I called was Mel, and I told him about my idea of getting a bunch of guys to barnstorm across the Nevada desert,” Johnson recalls. “Then I asked him, ‘Would you come up and compete in an off-road race?”
As Johnson tells it, the line went silent.
“What’s an off-road race?”
Mel was a NASCAR thrill-seeker whose tires ruled the tarmac, not the dirt.
“You can’t really describe it other than it’s off road in the desert with dune buggies.”
“Well, I don’t have a dune buggy.”
“I’ll get you a dune buggy if you say you’ll compete in the race.”
That sealed it.
Well, Mel didn’t just compete. He also put the word out to NASCAR driver and friend Parnelli Jones, who came to the Nevada desert to take part. He brought Andy Granatelli and his line of STP products and Unocal Oil to Las Vegas as contingency sponsors.
The moment it was announced that the Indy 500 champion had entered the Mint 400, entries began pouring in. Mel had made that happen, so Johnson gave both he and Jones free rooms at the hotel for their marketing efforts.
Mel reached out to his contacts in the racing world including Bill Muncey, described by International Motorsports Hall of Fame and hydroplane historian Dan Cowie as “without question, the greatest hydroplane racer in history.”
Anyone who was at the top of their competitive sports, from motorcycling to hot-rodding and every journalist from the top newspapers and magazines, were invited to compete or cover the race, most offered free rooms at the Mint.
In the Mint 400’s inaugural 1968 run, 102 drivers competed on a 400-mile loop stretching from downtown Las Vegas to the dusty Mojave Desert burg of Beatty and back again. Most eventually threw in the white towel, failing to finish, including both Mel and even Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones.
The race course was simply that treacherous.
In 2013, Mel and Johnson sat down for a videotaped interview about these earliest days of the Mint 400.
What transpired was ten minutes of laughing, knee-slapping and the telling of perhaps tall tales, two old friends having a blast reliving this craziest chapter of their colorful pasts.
A grinning Mel admitted that he was blindsided by Johnson’s original call.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into or I probably would have said no,” he admitted. “So I came up, got me a dune buggy and we go out in the desert. Guys are jumping all over the place, up and down, and I thought ‘What the heck did I get myself into?’”
Right from the get-go, the race was a dust storm of chaos.
Johnson described how the original starting line was downtown on Fremont Street, where a police escort would accompany the entrants to the edge of the desert. That’s where the paved road ended and the sand and grit began.
For race-timing purposes, the original idea was to punch a time clock with a scorer’s card that was then handed to each driver before they roared off.
That was the plan, anyway.
“We assigned a card to every car and motorcycle, because motorcycles raced too,” Johnson recalled. “Pretty soon, the cars were leaving before we even got the time clock working and we had to start handwriting it in.”
An event employee named Joe who worked as the keno manager at the Mint casino, raced out to the halfway checkpoint — a gas station in Beatty. “Well, he gets up there and there’s already been about ten cars through the checkpoint,” Johnson said.
“Thank God the gas station guy knew they were coming. And when the race is done, Joe gets back into Vegas just dirty, filthy, just filled with dirt. He threw away his Gucci shoes.”
In the middle of the course loomed a monstrosity now known as Big Dune, which took its toll on even the most madcap drivers. “They called it the Walking Dunes because it moved depending on winds and everything,” Johnson said. “That was a shortcut if you dared to go up over that sand dune. You’d save yourself a long trip around it. A couple cars did try it and they ended up on their roof. “
The course stopped even a National Guard tank that entered one year from Nellis Air Force Base.
"The tank couldn’t even finish,” Mel recalled in the video.
“No,” Johnson added. “The silt was too deep. And a motor home that entered one year couldn’t even complete a lap. But if you wanted to drive it, you could enter the race. There were no restrictions.”
Mel admitted that he became as lost as the rest of the pack.
“Nobody had any idea,” he said, describing that 1968 race. “This was the first time, with all the silt, so everybody was just guessing what to do and half the time they guessed wrong. It was like a comedy cartoon.”
“How far did you get that first year? Did you get to Beatty?” Johnson asked in the video.
“We drove that car to Beatty,” Mel answered. “That’s where the girls were.”
“No,” Johnson laughed, “that was Ash Meadows.” (a national wildlife refuge.)
“I didn’t get to Ash Meadows then. It was totally new to me and half the people.”
“Nobody knew,” Johnson said.
In the end, the Mojave Desert won that day in 1968.
Most racers had been turned into losers. And they all blamed promoter Norm Johnson for their aches and pains.
“To cross the desert, we always thought it was just solid crust, but it was silt,” Mel said. “The carburetors got all clogged up. And you couldn’t see, your eyes were full. Your mouth and ears were full of dust. Half of us were looking for Norm to maybe kill him.”
But still the competitors came.
In 1971, author Hunter S. Thompson wrote his now-famous article Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while covering the Mint 400 for Sports Illustrated, a piece that chronicled Thompson’s race weekend drug-and-alcohol bender. The story was adapted into a novel and later into a film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.
All of it signified the Mint 400’s newfound relevance to American pop culture.
Thompson loved the Mint 400.
“In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one,” he wrote in Sports Illustrated.
“This race attracts a special breed.”
Indeed, it did.
Laughing like teenagers, Mel and Johnson explained on the 2013 video about how an Ash Meadows brothel that just happened to be along the race course brought some unlikely drama with the wives of some race executives.
“The wives were to take part,” Johnson explained. “We had a helicopter for ‘em and they wanted to go to Ash Meadows because they thought there was a restaurant there. They didn’t know that at that time Ash Meadows was a brothel.”
As he talked, Mel was laughing.
“So the helicopter lands at Ash Meadows and it’s full of silt because the race cars have already been through dust and everything. The girls get out of the helicopter and they all had to go to the bathroom. There was a line of girls lined up by this walkway. They get in line. Guess what line it was? The business end of the Ash Meadows line.”
Then came Mel's punchline.
“Three of ‘em even got picked out,” he laughed.