Fast Friday | Polaris RZR Star Car and Pastrana

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The 2017 Polaris RZR Star Car program invited a handful of celebrity professional drivers to race a modified 2017 Polaris RZR XP 4 Turbo EPS.

One of the guest drivers was Travis Pastrana, who took the Polaris RZR Star Car to the longest off-road race in the USA, the Best In The Desert Vegas-to-Reno race. In this video, Travis Pastrana practices for the 539-mile-long Vegas-to-Reno race.

VIDEO | 2017 Polaris RZR Star Car Practice | Travis Pastrana

So how did the race go?

The Polaris RZR Star Car race team for the 2017 Vegas-to-Reno race was Travis Pastrana and Jolene Van Vugt, along with navigator Bryant Shontz. Owner of the Polaris RZR Star Car, Jim Beaver, also planned to take the wheel on the last leg of the race. The RZR Star Car has a stock Polaris RZR engine, sealed from the factory, so aftermarket suspension components and setup are where the speed needs to come from in this race, Jim Beaver explained.

Pastrana was first at the wheel with Shontz navigating, and they ticked off around 211 miles through sweltering heat, dust, rocks, cactus. Van Vugt took the wheel for the next 100 miles, then passed the reins back to Pastrana for the next stint up to mile 400.

The team suffered its first big delay before pit-stop 6, when a bearing in the alternator went bad followed by overheating issues due to the extreme temperatures of the Nevada desert. And, like much of the field of racers, they continued to have issues and delays caused by the blistering temperatures and brutal terrain.

“I drove the Polaris RZR Star Car for 300 miles of some of the craziest desert terrain in the Vegas-to-Reno, and it held up to an amazing amount of abuse,” said Pastrana. “There were jumps and rocks and silt and every other kind of obstacle out there and the UTV handled it all.”

In the 2017 Vegas-to-Reno, around one-third of field of the 336 entries of trucks, motorcycles, buggies, and UTVs didn’t make it to the finish line due to crashes, mechanicals and flat-out exhaustion. Pastrana’s team was one of those who didn’t finish. At a scheduled stop, with around 100 miles to go, a crack in the custom cage was discovered.

Attempts to fix the problem lasted into the night, and Beaver had to make the difficult decision to call it quits, rather than risk being stranded overnight in the unforgiving Nevada desert.

“I sure would have liked to get a finish with the team,” Pastrana said. “But the whole experience was amazing and I can’t wait to come back and do it again.”

We hope he will.

The 2019 BITD Vegas-to-Reno race is scheduled for August 16 and is expected to be even longer, coming in at around 550 miles.