Brock Heger has accomplished plenty in his off-road racing career, scoring back-to-back class titles in Championship Off-Road before carrying that momentum to a 2023 SCORE International Pro UTV Open crown. With both short course and long-distance desert races under his belt, would he ever set his sights on something bigger like, say, the Dakar Rally?
“I wouldn’t say no,” he remarked.
Heger’s comments came at Polaris Factory Racing‘s media conference on Monday revealing their 2024 programme, where they will pursue the SCORE World Desert Championship again as part of an expanded slate with King of the Hammers, the Mint 400, and Vegas to Reno. The conference was held three days after Polaris won the Dakar Rally in the SSV class with Xavier de Soultrait.
Soultrait’s victory was the seventh at the Dakar for Polaris but the first since 2017, the inaugural year that a side-by-side category was formally included in the Dakar programme, snapping Can-Am’s reign. He and Sébastien Loeb Racing team-mate Florent Vayssade combined to win four stages in a Polaris RZR Pro R Factory, a racing-purpose RZR that Polaris Factory Racing currently uses for their American desert racing division. Unlike the American car, the rally model has a windshield and side pods to house spare parts and tools, among other differences.
SLR, whose eponymous owner finished third overall in the top Ultimate category, collaborated with Polaris Engineering to prepare the cars with support from Scanlon Clarke Incorporated run by Craig Scanlon and Travis Clarke. Polaris Engineering and SCi both oversee PFR’s operations, while Scanlon serves as team principal.
But could Heger and his team-mates Cayden MacCachren and Max Eddy Jr.—and perhaps even Scanlon and reserve-slash-fourth driver Dylan Schmoke—possibly take the Dakar RZR for a spin themselves? Like anything in motorsport these days, it depends on if they can afford the trip.
“It really just comes down to if we can scrape together budget to to make it happen,” said PFR technical director Alex Scheuerell, who spoke with The Checkered Flag prior to the Dakar about the Pro R Factory. “As you probably know, it costs a lot of money to to go race over in Saudi Arabia. If we can get some financial support and figure out the logistics, everything is on the table for sure.”
Costs to compete in the Dakar can range in the tens of thousands as teams have to pay the entry fee plus expenses for travel, crews, bivouac benefits, and media rights. The 2024 entry fee for cars including those competing in the SSV (formerly T4) category was €30 thousand, though discounts can be applied depending on the driver like €3 thousand being slashed for rookies.
“I don’t think there’s any one of those guys sitting at the table that wouldn’t jump at the opportunity,” concurred team general manager Ryan Thomas. “I don’t think it’s off the table.”
In the meantime, the team prepares for their first race of 2024 at King of the Hammers, which begins next Monday. Besides entering the Can-Am UTV Hammers Championship, they will also field a stock RZR Turbo R in the event’s rock race to help them gain rock crawling experience.
After KOH and the Mint 400 on 6–10 March, they will not only try to defend their SCORE Pro UTV Open title, but be the best performing UTV as a whole. The team won the class at all four SCORE rounds during their début season in 2023 as Scanlon claimed the San Felipe 250, Heger scored the Baja 500 and Baja 400, and MacCachren the Baja 1000; however, Can-Am’s Rodrigo Ampudia prevented them from sweeping the UTVs outright as well when he topped them in San Felipe.
“We race for a couple reasons. Number one: to show the market who’s the best, who makes the best equipment, who is the best drivers, who’s just the best overall,” explained Scheuerell. “You can go win classes and stuff, but if you’re not the best side-by-side out there, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really mean much to us and I don’t think it means that much to the public either. It’s also about learning from the racing. If we’re not the best and we’re slower, we’re breaking more often or whatever, what have you, we want to get those learnings and we want to feed that back into the product. We work very closely with our with our RZR engineers and the stuff that we’re learning through racing is going right back into into the product.
“At the end of the day, we just want to be the best. We want to be the best sport side-by-side out there, and to do that, you got to win overall.”
Eddy, a five-time Baja 1000 champion who doubled as Scanlon’s co-driver in 2023 before taking over as a driver, set the bar even higher: “How do you top sweeping the races last year? You follow it up by sweeping the podium 1–2–3.”
The 2024 SCORE season begins in San Felipe on 20–24 March. The Vegas to Reno, part of Best In The Desert, is scheduled for 14–17 August.
