© 2010 Brian Davidson/Uncharted

Photographs by Kevin Gallaway, Thad Garner and Laney Cheney

Guys like me don’t like driving over potholes. I hit one. I hear my poor Toyota pickup rattle, feel it buck, and I let fly with an ay-yi-yi or something else I don’t care to put in print.

Guys like Cody Fuquay, they don’t mind the potholes. I’m sure he doesn’t annoy his passengers, or his fiancée, by purposely driving over every hole and rut he sees, but if he happens to hit one, I can imagine him gripping the wheel as normal, smiling faintly, thinking, Come on, that’s all you’ve got?

Fuquay, 32, – Bronco Cody to his friends – drives off-road. He drives up roads gullied by rain and down into silt beds feet deep with engine-choking, tire-sucking dust. He goes rock-crawling, bucking around in a rig trundling over boulders as fast as his bones – and machinery – can take it.

“Off-road racing is more than just racing around a NASCAR track,” he says. “When you’re off-road, the shortest competitive race is 250 miles, and in those 250 miles, things happen.”

Flat tires are the least of it. Axles break. Bolts pop. Cotter pins shear. And there’s no way you’ll get AAA road service where off-roaders go. Where they go, they’re driver, mechanic, priest, confessee and scapegoat if something goes wrong and you don’t have the tools or parts with you to fix it.

He’ll test his mettle with more than a dozen other off-roader crews as he participates in the Griffin King of the Hammers endurance race at the Johnson Valley OHV Recreation Area, about 35 miles east of Victorville, California, starting Feb. 7.

“Desert racing is one of Cody's passions-- so it makes me happy that he is able to do it,” says Laney Cheney, Fuquay's fiancee. “Of course, I've never been to a desert race and just a couple days ago he showed me some video of last year's King of the Hammers. Drivers were tipping over and ramming into rocks and rolling and falling backwards off steep hills. So now I'm a bit nervous and may have to close my eyes sometimes while he's racing. But I am really happy he can do something he loves so much, and, honestly, I'm excited to watch him.” The pair will wed in March.

Fuquay describes King of the Hammers as “a two-hour car crash. It’s really abusive on your vehicle.” Last year, he says, vehicle mortality in the race approached 70 percent.

Like many racers, Fuquay started early. “I grew up around race cars,” he says. “My dad used to build drag racers. I learned how to be a mechanic, do fabrication, working with him.”

This kind of racing is a rough, every-man-for-himself environment. “The rule in the desert is if you come up on another vehicle and honk, if they don’t honk back, you can push them off. You don’t want to damage your vehicle, but you want to win,” he says. Drivers have to balance the desire to win with the desire to finish – and not finishing isn’t uncommon. “You can break a bolt and lose.”

That means before each race, drivers pore over their vehicles, looking for even the tiniest flaws. “I tore my whole vehicle down to the frame” getting ready for King of the Hammers, he says. “I’m looking at every nut, to make sure it has a lock washer or some Lock-Tite. You can have trouble with a ten-cent part –no cotter pin in a bolt – and lose. But I love this. I’m like my dad. I’m a gearhead. I love building a machine that can win.”

And it’s more than just gear, he says. “It’s determination.”

And quick thinking. As an example, last summer, he volunteered as a trail hand on a race, working to assist drivers in distress. While patrolling a silt bed area, he and his buddy got a call that a vehicle was stuck in the bottom of a ravine on a blind curve. They drove their rig into the ravine to bail the driver out. “As we were working, we suddenly saw this cloud of dust coming at us. The other racers were coming. We got him hooked up to our truck as fast as we could and took off up the ravine.” They raced with the racers, three guys in a pickup truck towing a disabled OHV, spitting dust and trying hard not to become an obstacle to the other racers. “When we finally found a spot to pull out of the ravine and get out of the way, just a second later the first of the drivers blazed by. He was probably driving in our dust.”

Fuquay works for Ruesch Motor Company, a Cedar City, Utah-based manufacturer of off-road vehicles – he and Chris Ruesch will race one of the company’s Panthers at King of the Hammers. The company builds machines specifically for the rough off-road and rock crawling action Fuquay enjoys. “We an produce for the mass market vehicles that come direct from the factory, with a factory warranty, for one-half to one-third the cost of buying someone else’s vehicle and customizing it for off-road.”

Ruesch is sponsoring two racers in the King of the Hammer event this year. In addition to the team of Fuquay and Ruesch, the company will also sponsor Troy Bailey, a three-time rock crawl champion.

The company, in a press release, says they're “pleased to be participating this year in what many say is the toughest race competition in off-road motor sports.”

Fuquay doesn't yet know at what place he'll start. UTV starting order will be determined at the drivers' meeting Feb. 10, his fiancee says. He'll be busy enough with last-minute scourings of his rig to make sure everything's working to fuss too much about those kinds of details until the time is right.
“People do all sorts of things for their passions,” he says. “I find passion in building something that can conquer things. To compete against someone else, to see your driving skills are better than theirs, that’s great. It’s a testosterone thing.”

For more information: www.kingofthehammers.com

PS: If you happen to catch King of the Hammers, drop us a line. And watch out for Bronco Cody's Ruesch Panther -- he'll be sporting some Uncharted logos. "I don't know if we're really sponsoring him, but he's promoting us," says Joseph Burkhead, Uncharted's communications/marketing director. "We are following him, showing what it's like to be in his sport and we're also providing Uncharted graphics to be placed on his vehicle and uniform."

John Milligan contributed to this story.