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It’s hard enough to cover off-road racing to begin with—the courses are usually hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles long and you never know where the action is going to take place beforehand—but trying to cover an off-road racer may be even harder. Those characters are illusory, fleeting, usually found way out in the desert testing or pre-running, and none of them have accessible phone numbers, regular office hours, or PR people with satellite phones. Yet racer and documentarian Amy Lerner managed to capture the late, legendary desert racer Rod Hall—in all his self-effacing, entertaining, hard-driving heroics—in a new documentary that is a tribute to not only Hall and his wonderful, loving family, but to desert racers everywhere who often toil in anonymity 200 miles from the nearest TV set and thousands of miles away from the recognition they so richly deserve.
One More Win is the story of Hall’s life behind the wheel way out in the desert. Hall is the only guy to have driven in all of the first 50 Baja 1000s, winning his class many times and winning it overall in 1969. Hall was there in 1967 when the then-NORRA Mexican 1000 first ran, and he kept coming back for an incredible half a century after that. His last race he had to be lifted from his wheelchair into the cockpit as a disease similar to Parkinson’s gradually took away the physical prowess and strength that had carried him for a lifetime.
It wasn’t just his own strength that kept him going. His loving wife Donna was by his side throughout 50-plus years of marriage, his racing sons Chad and Josh were with him, too. And one of the brightest lights in the filmic retrospective of a life lived far better than any of us will do it is his downright-darling granddaughter Shelby, who co-drives with him throughout parts of the piece.
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne 400 years ago. And no man completes 50 years of Baja 1000s and numerous other races by himself, either. We get to meet everyone in Rod Hall’s incredible life along the way, from his wonderful family to all his racing competitors and friends.
In addition to hundreds of archival shots, Lerner and crew shot their own video of Hall and friends for three and a half years, starting in 2016, following Hall across deserts, up mountains, into Mexico where all SCORE International races take place now, and into physical therapy for the progressive supranuclear palsy that would eventually claim his life.
“He really was a much-loved character and to capture why he was so beloved was kind of an important thing, rather than just look at his racing achievements,” said Lerner.
Lerner first met Hall in 2010, when Hall, wearing one of many, many hats he wore over the years, was teaching off-road driving to women racers who would be running in the Rallye des Gazelles in Morocco, of which Lerner was one.
“We stayed in touch and we’d see each other at events and he kind of became a mentor to me,” Lerner said.
That familiarity became a bit of an obstacle to the documentarian, not just because she knew and liked Hall, but because that familiarity would get in the way of an objective take.
“From that perspective, not leading people in interviews and being like, ‘Oh, I know that story,’ and ‘Yeah, you were there when this happened,’ was a little bit of a challenge,” Lerner said. “But it was part of the learning experience, because the first edit of the film that we did I realized that I’d edited it for me, and it had to make sense for other people. That kind of hit me in the face, like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to just, you know, step back and make sure that all of this is getting captured in a way that people who know nothing about Rod and nothing about off-road racing are going to understand,’ because as you saw in the film, it became more than just a documentary of a race driver. And that was probably the toughest part for me to stay back in neutral, especially when Rod was going through (treatment for his illness). He’s going through that towards the end of the filming.”
Hall passed away in 2019 at the age of 81, which was where the documentary ends. Lerner is happy to have gotten to do it, and said others had approached Hall about doing books or movies about his life, and he’d always said no. With Lerner it was different, and not because only was she a racer, too, having driven in everything from the Rallye des Gazelles, Rally Jameel, and Dakar in a replica Rothmans Porsche 959 to rallies all over the world.
“I think he believed my intentions, which were that I thought this was a man who had a really entertaining story. And it was a piece of history that hadn’t really been captured in a full, single-person-perspective way from the birth of a sport to half a century later. I thought that was kind of a cool thing.”
It is, indeed a cool thing, and you can see it on Amazon and Apple TV.
Share your thoughts and memories of legendary off-road racer Rod Hall in the comments below.
