Words: Aaron Grimes - Photos: Jesse Rae & Kelly Lund
In May 2025, I joined a small, ragtag crew chasing a relic down the Mexican Baja peninsula in hopes of finishing the NORRA 1000, an off-road rally affectionately known as “the happiest race on earth.” The machine we were following was built in 1969. It had lived many lives, repaired and reimagined but still true to the time and place it was born. The same could be said for its driver, Alex Earle. Together, they made an unlikely pair: a man and the Hugger Orange Jeep Commando, both stubbornly holding on to their history.
I first met Alex in Iceland in 2022, during AETHER Apparel’s fall and winter campaign shoot. We convinced him to come along as a clothing model because he sat perfectly in the center of a rare Venn diagram: rugged good looks, a complete disregard for creature comforts, and a deep affection for old cars that cause more problems than they solve. I met another friend on that Icelandic trip, Remi, and now we were all together again in Mexico.
This was my first race, first time in a chase crew, and first time in Baja.
I grew up around cars and the people who loved them. Some of my earliest memories are of my grandfather painstakingly restoring an Austin-Healey to factory standards, like it had just rolled off the line that morning. That was love. My dad’s version looked different. He hacked a VW Bug into something unrecognizable and sent it off jumps in the dunes with a grin on his face. That was love too.
Then there were the other kinds of people. The ones who treated a car like it didn’t exist until it broke. For a second, the reality of what that machine had been doing for them would hit, and then they’d just walk away. That kind of indifference never made sense to me. Fix the damn thing.
Rolling into Ensenada, Mexico, where the race was set to start, put me squarely in the first group. Over 200 racers and countless support crew gathered at the starting line, located not far from the American border. The race cars were split into different classes ranging from modern trophy trucks, buggies, vintage vehicles, motorcycles, and more. The NORRA is a staged endurance race that takes place over several days. For a newcomer like me, this took some explaining. When I think about a race, I think about getting first place, but it wasn’t long before I realized that wasn’t on the mind of most contenders. For them, and what would prove to be just as much of an accomplishment, the goal was simple: to finish.
A race car on its own is a vulnerable thing. You need a support crew and chase vehicles filled with spare parts. Some teams bring a rolling repair shop and a spare car to match. Others make do with a pickup and a box of bolts. Alex Earle and the Jeep Commando, under the name EARLE MOTORS, were firmly in the second camp. That’s where I came in.
When I signed up, I knew nothing. My job was simple enough: find a jump seat in whatever chase truck had room and hang on. My goal was to document the trip. I wanted another set of eyes, so I called my friend Jesse. I kept the pitch vague because anyone who needed details probably wasn’t cut out for it. He said yes, and asked if he could bring his 8mm Bolex. Suddenly we had an old race car, an old man (sorry Alex), and an old camera, all from 1969. It felt right. The NORRA itself was founded in 1967.
Our crew was a mix of strangers who somehow fit together. There was Wiley, quiet but curious, the kind of guy who’d stay up late talking about the robots he was building in his garage. Taylor flew helicopters for the fire department and treated danger like a household chore. The scar on her face came from wrestling a mountain goat off a cliff. The last time she was in Mexico, she’d ended up in jail over what she called “a misunderstanding.” Remi was the philosopher of the group, the kind who could make you question your own opinion halfway through your own sentence. Kelly and his wolf dog, Loki, looked like they’d stepped out of a survival catalog. Most of us had never met before, but we all knew Alex. That was enough.
The first night, I set up my tent on a slab of concrete in the vehicle staging area, surrounded by race cars. A mix of mariachi music and idling engines lulled me to sleep. Occasionally, sparks from a nearby angle grinder lit up the roof of my tent. Jesse was awake and out looking for tacos. I just wanted the race to start.
The route the racers follow in the NORRA is cobbled together from back roads and dirt tracks, the co-driver (Lily) has the job of keeping the race car on track. They have a singular goal, A to B and do not deviate. A chase crew on the other hand is not allowed to go A to B, they are restricted to the main road, which in Baja is a pothole riddled single-lane highway: two-lane blacktop.
What this means is that the next 5 days were a whirlwind of frenzied attempts to both be in position to anticipate the place that Alex & Lily would whizz by, film their passing/remaining dust cloud, and then hop back into the chase vehicle and hurtle back to the main road to get ahead of them. Taylor and Kelly were behind the steering wheels of our chase trucks and I have never witnessed such driving. We were the menaces of the road. Every contestant had a chase crew, but we took it upon ourselves to be the best. Often we would pass the same group of cars 3 or 4 times in the same day, usually at 120 mph. It helped that our chase drivers had adopted a sense of team rivalry amongst themselves. It was a competition.
Jesse and I would hang on for dear life, combing through satellite images trying to find access roads to get into position ahead of the Jeep as our camera gear went flying. Sometimes we would pull up to the racetrack just as the jeep was barreling towards us, other times we would be lying in wait only to realize they had passed by long ago. On either side of this adrenaline-filled 30 second alignment of racer and chase crew were hours of driving, talking, music, staring out the window at passing desert, and lots of thinking.
I thought about why anyone would do this race, what was the point, nobody was winning any money, most people had not heard of the NORRA or ever would. Why subject yourself to this torture for nothing. I thought about how my dad would talk fondly about his trips to Baja when he was my age and I wondered how much had changed. When my dad came here it was a farewell from home, a "talk to you in three weeks and not until then" type of trip. I sat on a boulder in the middle of the desert 100 miles from anywhere texting my brother about these thoughts.
Every night when we would make camp, Alex would take off his racing goggles and put on his reading glasses to meticulously go over every inch of the Jeep, tightening, tuning, and testing. The goggles-to glasses transformation reminded me of when Indiana Jones becomes Doctor Jones, and Alex even looked like him. Most of us would be sitting around the campfire drinking, but he would be lying in the dirt with a headlamp, the last to bed, making sure the Jeep was in perfect shape.
Even with all that care and attention, the Jeep still broke down catastrophically on the fourth day. Finding a replacement ring and pinion gear in the middle of Mexico is nearly impossible, let alone installing it at two in the morning. The chaos that followed could fill its own story, and it does. We captured the whole thing for the film, which is a must watch. In the end, Alex and Lily got the Jeep back together and finished the race, taking second in their class.
