Mickey Thompson’s Off Road Warriors was a film produced the 1980s to act as a promotional tool for short course off road racing, a sport that the man had himself invented and was promoting hard. The video is a feature length production that has lots of great elements. In the interest of time we have decided to skip almost an hour into it to show you one of our favorite clips which is Dave McClelland calling a short course off road race in only the way he can. The voice, the excitement, and the delivery is all there as you would expect our of a consummate pro like Mac. It also leads us to believe that if he were not calling drag racing early on in life he would have ended up as a famed racing announcer of any genre!
The other things we love in this video are the trucks. Unlike today’s stadium racing trucks and short course off road stuff, these things were high pitched, stiffly sprung, and generally not nearly as good as their modern brethren. It makes for a great show as they jump awkwardly and bash into each other, shedding parts and driving both he crowd and the announcers wild.
Like happens in many different types of races, the story here is not the battle for first but rather the battle for second. Those guys are clawing at each other like maniacs and the dude in first is pretty much on cruise control. When this film was made, the popularity of this style of racing was just beginning and it would later explode into something that not event the driven and optimistic Thompson himself could have envisioned.
Enjoy this time machine trip back into the 1980s!
