Sal Fish, the man who once kicked his own partner Mickey Thompson out of the Baja 1000 — more than once, he’ll tell you — rode shotgun in an Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster through the same Mexican desert he turned into motorsport’s most punishing endurance race. Only this time, nobody was in a hurry.
Car and Driver took a 2025 Grenadier Quartermaster Trialmaster on the Slow Baja tour, a week-long crawl down the Baja California peninsula designed for vintage trucks and the people who love them. The Ineos, technically brand new, slipped right in with the old Jeeps, Land Cruisers, Scouts, and Series Land Rovers thanks to styling that looks like it was penned in 1983 and then frozen in amber.
That’s the strange trick the Grenadier keeps pulling. It houses a modern BMW 3.0-liter straight-six under a body so deliberately retro that vintage rally organizers don’t blink when it shows up. It worked as a pack mule too, absorbing everyone’s overflow cargo — donated dog food, a group cooler, extra camp chairs — while returning double-digit fuel economy.
Several other rigs on the trip couldn’t say the same, some running without functional gas gauges through stretches of Baja where the next station is a theological question.
The Slow Baja concept, organized by Michael Emery, is exactly what it sounds like: trace the legendary race route, but stop to eat, camp, talk, and actually look at the country. With Fish navigating, the drive became a rolling oral history. He told stories of planning race routes decades before GPS or cell phones, pointing his truck south and seeing what happened.
At one scenic coastal stop, he admitted the section was new to him. When asked why the race never came through, he paused. “It’s a dead end. In the ocean.”
Fish is 85 years old. He ran the Baja 1000 as its chief steward for decades, building it from a renegade desert sprint into an internationally sanctioned off-road institution. Riding with him through the terrain he shaped is the kind of access money can’t buy and press trips rarely deliver.
The trip also detoured to Baja Animal Outreach, where the group donated supplies and several participants left with rescued puppies. One photo shows a woman named Maysie Jukes holding a puppy with the expression of someone whose life just changed. Multiple dogs from the same litter were adopted on the spot by members of the caravan.
Camping was no-frills. A cheap popup tent wedged into the Quartermaster’s bed kept scorpions at bay, if not wind. The truck’s pop-up rear window let in cinematic amounts of Baja dust.
Pelicans cruised past at eye level from the elevated campsite. Sunsets were watched with strangers who stopped being strangers somewhere around day two.
The Ineos Grenadier remains one of the oddest propositions in the current truck market — a British-funded, Austrian-built, BMW-powered homage to the Defender that Land Rover stopped making. It costs roughly $75,000 and sells in numbers that would embarrass a Toyota dealer’s Tuesday. But put it in the environment it was designed for, loaded with dog food and driven by someone more interested in the horizon than the quarterly sales report, and the business case stops mattering.
The truck just works. Fish would understand. He built the Baja 1000 on the same stubborn logic: this thing exists because the desert demands it, not because a spreadsheet approved it.
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