One starts on pole. The other starts sixth, after a qualifying run in which his truck went up on two wheels with trees dead ahead. Red Bull athletes Christopher Polvoorde and Bryce Menzies won the Baja 1000 together a year ago. Friday, they’re trying to beat each other. Both talked to Backfire Racing ahead of the green flag.
Most racing rivalries run on bad blood. Christopher Polvoorde and Bryce Menzies share a Baja 1000 trophy instead.
They’ve shared a truck and a Baja 1000 win, and the kind of friendship you only get from trusting someone with your life at triple-digit speeds in the middle of nowhere.
When the 2026 SCORE Baja 1000 starts Friday, November 13, they’re racing each other.
Polvoorde has pole. Menzies starts sixth. Both say they’re coming to win, as drivers do.
We talked to both drivers about qualifying, and about what it’s like to go from teammates to opponents on a course that’s new to everyone.
Red Bull set up both interviews.
Red Bull’s presence in Baja makes sense. Nothing out there is manicured. It’s rough terrain and absurd horsepower, with hundreds of miles for something to break.
Desert racing deserves a bigger audience than it gets, and Red Bull is putting these two in front of one.
Getting two of the sport’s biggest names on the record the day before one of its most famous races is the access we want for readers.
Both had plenty to say.
From a Shared Victory to a Head-to-Head Battle
For Polvoorde, this isn’t a routine matchup.
Before they were teammates, before they were Baja 1000 winners, Bryce Menzies was someone he admired.
“I grew up looking up to Bryce,” Polvoorde told Backfire Racing. “So now to be considered a teammate with his, and now a threat to him, it’s … special.”
Their partnership helped deliver an overall Baja 1000 victory in 2025, a career-defining moment for Polvoorde and another major achievement for Menzies, who also won the event in 2023.
Now they’re preparing to face each other.
Polvoorde called Menzies a close friend and a serious threat, both at once. They’d spent part of Thursday together at a Red Bull event, giving rides.
But friendship has its limits.
“As soon as we put on the helmet, it’s a different … dynamic,” Polvoorde said.
Menzies shares that competitive respect.
When Backfire Racing asked who he considered his biggest competition heading into Friday, he immediately named Polvoorde and Luke McMillin.
McMillin’s consistency makes him dangerous, but pole is the bigger problem: if Polvoorde sets a strong early pace, everyone behind him is chasing.
The driver who grew up looking up to Menzies gets to lead him into the desert.
Menzies, chasing, knows exactly how good the man in front of him is.
One Wild Qualifying Save. One Perfectly Executed Plan.
Qualifying gave both drivers a story, though only one would want to relive it.
Polvoorde secured pole position with a time of 2:34.868. Menzies finished sixth in 2:42.092 after a spectacular near-rollover that quickly became one of the most dramatic moments of the session.
From the outside, the save looked almost impossible.
From inside the truck, Menzies admitted he thought he was about to crash.
It started with shifting problems early in his run. Frustrated and worried he was losing time, he began pushing harder. Then he entered a corner that tightened more than expected.
The front-left tire caught, the truck lifted onto two wheels, and suddenly Menzies was looking out his side window at dirt and trees.
He thought the truck was about to roll.
He tried steering into the situation to bring the truck back down, but the recovery took an unexpected turn. With large trees blocking his path, Menzies considered reversing.
His co-driver had another idea: keep going.
Menzies hit the throttle, powered through the trees, and somehow got the truck back onto the course.
The truck survived. His qualifying time took the hit.
Polvoorde went the other way.
He skipped the hunt for every last fraction of a second and set one goal: keep it clean.
“Kept it clean and tidy was what I kept telling myself in my head,” he explained.
It got him pole.
Polvoorde credited his background in stadium and short-course racing for helping him switch instantly into qualifying mode. In short-course competition, drivers fight for tenths of a second with little time to settle into a rhythm. Desert racing, by comparison, demands hours of sustained concentration.
Experience in both helped.
He didn’t need the most dramatic run of the day.
He needed the fastest clean one.
Does Pole Position Really Matter in a Race This Long?
In Formula 1, pole position can shape an entire Grand Prix.
In Baja, not so much.
The SCORE Baja 1000 is as much a test of navigation and mechanical survival as of speed. The desert will throw something at you that nobody planned for.
A driver can be brilliant for hundreds of miles and lose it all to a broken part or a wrong turn.
Menzies knows that better than most.
Despite starting sixth, he isn’t especially concerned about the gap to Polvoorde.
His reasoning is simple: this race is too long to panic over qualifying.
He expects the early miles to feature tight, technical, high-speed roads with limited passing opportunities. His plan is to sit behind the leaders at a competitive pace and wait for the course to open up around race mile 400 before getting aggressive.
He also pointed out that the first truck across the finish line isn’t necessarily the winner.
Elapsed time matters, meaning a driver can win without passing every competitor who started ahead.
Polvoorde actually agrees with his former teammate.
When asked whether Menzies was right about starting farther back not necessarily being a disadvantage, Polvoorde didn’t hesitate.
“No, no, he’s 100% right.”
He likes starting first: no dust from trucks ahead, and he dictates the early pace. But the first truck down the course also takes risks the chasers can avoid.
“It’s a golden ticket, but it also comes with some negatives,” he said.
Opening the road means meeting spectators, livestock and any other surprise before anyone else does.
Still, he plans to use it.
After approximately 16 days of pre-running, he’s confident in his preparation and ready to establish the pace that everyone else will have to chase.
“I think a lot of people don’t know what the pace is going to be tomorrow, and the fun part is I get to kind of set it.”
So Friday is clear road against patience: Polvoorde banking on open road, Menzies playing the long game from sixth.
Neither strategy guarantees victory.
Both could work.
A Historic Baja 1000, and a New Challenge for Everyone
Even Baja veterans are guessing a little this year.
The 2026 event introduces a historic Cabo-to-Cabo layout, with the start and finish in southern Baja.
That could shuffle the order.
Polvoorde believes the unfamiliar course may actually work in his favor.
Veterans like Menzies spent years memorizing Baja’s roads. On a new route, some of that memory is worth less.
Polvoorde has put in the pre-running, driving sections of the course again and again.
Menzies sees a different challenge: logistics.
Moving trucks, spares and people into southern Baja is a feat of coordination. Then add pit crews, night driving, lighting and the mechanical surprises nobody scheduled.
Spectators see horsepower and speed.
Teams see a logistics operation that starts long before the first truck leaves the line.
And in Menzies’ view, that’s one of the things fans rarely get to appreciate.
Trophy Trucks Have Changed. So Has the Racing.
Ask Menzies how off-road racing has changed, and he points directly to the machines.
Modern Trophy Trucks are built to take violent hits at extraordinary speed and keep running for hundreds of miles.
Menzies says the technology has changed how hard drivers can push.
Drivers once had to baby the equipment. Today’s trucks can take far more.
He described drivers operating at 90 to 100 percent of their machines’ capabilities for extended periods, with races sometimes separated by mere seconds after hundreds of miles.
For the sport, that’s exciting.
For the people behind the wheel, it’s exhausting.
Menzies works with a personal trainer three days a week and incorporates additional cardio into his routine. But he believes the mental demands are even more significant than the physical ones.
Ten hours or more of concentration at the limit is hard for anyone outside the sport to picture.
Polvoorde has developed his own methods for staying sharp.
Alongside gym work and cardio, he uses sim racing as a mental training tool, deliberately spending three or four hours concentrating without distractions.
The goal isn’t a faster sim lap. It’s practice at staying locked in.
In Baja, the driver who’s still sharp when exhaustion hits may beat the one who was faster early.
The Dangers You Don’t See on Television
Both drivers wanted fans to understand something else.
Baja runs through remote country where conditions change in an instant.
Rocks, ruts and dust are the easy part; livestock and spectators are not.
For Polvoorde, cattle are among the biggest concerns heading into Friday.
He described encountering more livestock during preparation for this event than he could remember seeing on a racecourse before.
And as the first driver on the road, he may be the first to discover where those animals are.
He has firsthand experience with the danger, having struck a cow during a previous race.
At race speed, that can end very badly.
Remoteness adds risk: help isn’t always close, and competitors often end up relying on each other.
It’s one reason Polvoorde believes the camaraderie among off-road racers is so strong.
The same drivers battling for victory are often the first people willing to stop and help when a competitor is in trouble.
Everyone knows what being stranded in the desert means.
Both drivers also had a clear message for spectators: enjoy the race, but stay well clear of the course.
Menzies specifically warned against standing on the outside of corners, where a vehicle that loses control could leave the intended racing line.
Polvoorde echoed the warning, pointing out that fans can often get a better view from a safer distance anyway.
“There’s no point on standing on the race course or taking that extra step. It’s really not worth it.”
For all the excitement surrounding the event, neither driver wants the weekend remembered for an avoidable tragedy.
More Than a Trophy
For Menzies, the Baja 1000 was a long wait.
He spent roughly 12 years chasing a victory in the event before finally winning in 2023, a triumph he still considers one of the defining moments of his career.
The race had become his personal kryptonite.
His journey into off-road racing began with dirt bikes before injuries pushed him toward four wheels. His father eventually bought a small Volkswagen race car, and Menzies progressed through different classes as his career developed.
Today, he hopes his own children might one day discover the same passion.
They already drive small recreational off-road vehicles, and Menzies enjoys seeing the family-oriented side of the sport. He hopes to pass along the kind of bond he shares with his own father.
Polvoorde’s origin story is equally unexpected.
No one in his family had a racing background. He grew up in Southern California, and his introduction to motorsports came when someone who owed his father money traded him a go-kart.
From that go-kart came a pro career, and a Baja 1000 win alongside someone he’d grown up admiring.
The 2025 win meant more than the trophy.
Polvoorde spoke about the crew chief who took a chance on him when he was just 13 or 14 years old, leaving an established racing operation to join his young team.
More than a decade later, they stood together at the Baja 1000 finish line as winners.
That’s why winning again in 2026, with his own team this time, would matter so much.
Polvoorde admitted his season has been rough.
A Baja win wouldn’t be another line on his résumé.
It would be the team’s answer to a bad year.
“We’ve had such an up-and-down year where we came to win a race and we’re going to give it our all,” he said.
A Full-Circle Moment for Polvoorde and Red Bull
This is also Polvoorde’s first Baja 1000 as a Red Bull athlete.
Not bad for a family with no racing background and a go-kart that settled somebody’s debt.
“It’s one of the things you dream of,” Polvoorde told Backfire Racing.
He described autograph lines and fans all over Cabo, and a feeling that this is something historic.
“A lot of times you don’t feel like you’re part of history, but I feel like right now this is definitely one I’ll remember forever.”
That’s why Red Bull’s backing of off-road racing matters.
The sport has great athletes and wild engineering, and Red Bull’s support puts them in front of people who might never find them otherwise.
For longtime Baja fans, these drivers are already familiar names.
For anyone new to desert racing, this weekend is a good place to start.
Friday the 13th. Two Friends. One Finish Line.
Then there’s the date.
The green flag drops on Friday the 13th.
And yes, Polvoorde admits he’s superstitious.
He has pre-race routines and rituals, and declined to say what they are.
Menzies is looking forward to racing for southern Baja’s fans, many of whom rarely see the sport’s biggest names in their own towns.
He described pre-running sessions that already felt like race day because of the crowds cheering along the route.
Add a new course and a stacked field, and this could be a weekend people talk about.
Polvoorde leads the field into the desert, hoping 16 days of pre-running and one clean lap translate into another win.
Menzies starts sixth, trusting experience and patience, and waiting for his moment.
Luke McMillin and the rest of the Trophy Truck field will have their own plans.
Somewhere in those hundreds of miles, every one of those plans gets tested.
Newcomers get a race where the terrain fights back and the finish line is the only thing that settles anything.
For longtime fans, it’s another chapter in a competition that has spent decades proving that horsepower alone doesn’t win in Baja.
This year, two friends who shared the top step of the podium are chasing the same prize from separate trucks.
One has the clear road ahead.
The other has a score to settle with the qualifying clock.
And when the helmets go on Friday morning, friendship will have to wait.
So which wins in Baja: clear road from pole, or patience from sixth? Tell us who you’ve got, and why.
A Special Thank You to Red Bull
Backfire Racing extends a special thank-you to Red Bull Media House, Lauren Morris, and Yahaira Garcia, Red Bull’s 4-Wheel Off-Road Manager, for helping coordinate these exclusive interviews with Christopher Polvoorde and Bryce Menzies ahead of the 2026 SCORE Baja 1000.
Lauren and Yahaira arranged access and connected us directly with the drivers.
We like covering the people, machines and stories in disciplines that mainstream outlets skip.
Red Bull has long understood that some of racing’s best stories happen far from traditional circuits, and its off-road backing gives these athletes a platform.
We’re grateful to the Red Bull team for welcoming Backfire Racing into the action and helping us bring fans closer to the people and personalities behind the machines.
Thank you, Lauren, Yahaira, and everyone at Red Bull for making it happen.
And to Christopher, Bryce, and every team preparing to take on Baja tomorrow: good luck, race hard, and stay safe.
We’ll be watching.
— Backfire Racing
Exclusive interviews conducted by Backfire Racing on November 12, 2026, ahead of the SCORE Baja 1000.
Lead photo via Red Bull media with modifications
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