Desert racing is filled with monstrous trophy trucks. The top class of the sport features tube-chassis behemoths packing nine-liter V8 engines and enough suspension travel to smooth out terrain that would be difficult to walk across, let alone cross at full-send speeds. Honda is eyeing up the competition with a wicked machine of its own, and the goal isn’t simply to enter the race: it’s to win the whole damn thing.
The Honda Passport Baja Spec Trophy Truck combines one of desert racing’s best chassis setups with Honda’s powertrain know-how. Under the skin of this Passport-on-Steroids, Honda has stuffed what’s essentially the same engine previously used on its Acura ARX-06 prototype race car.
You have a twin-turbocharged V6 paired with an 800-volt hybrid system. The combined output is said to be over 1,300 horsepower.
As for the chassis, the truck runs on the Mason Motorsports Gen 2 setup. You have a transfer case sending power rearward via a pair of driveshafts. One heads out to each rear wheel, where it meets a gearset and gets the 40-inch tire moving. Mason says this system allows them to better transfer torque loads as required in the extremely challenging conditions that come with this sort of racing. Up front, power is delivered to the front wheels via a set of portal axles.
Both front and rear, you no longer have any sort of low-hanging differential that’s going to get bashed on trail debris… or wayward UTVs. The area under the truck is much cleaner, though you certainly have to carry extra parts in case something fails on the rear half of the truck.
Regardless, this is a wicked setup and positions Honda rather well before nary a wheel has been turned in anger. The one doing the turning is two-time Baja 1000 winner Bryce Menzies. He certainly knows what it takes to bring home a victory, and it will be great to hear his thoughts on this powertrain after the truck gets a few races under its belt.
Can Honda take what it’s learned racing at high-level endurance events all over the globe and apply it to the dirt? I certainly believe so. They just need to keep the silt and dust out of those turbochargers, and everything should go well. But it’s Baja… anything can happen.
Either way, the truck certainly looks badass. Here’s hoping it also performs that way, too.
I read the article, wondering why they called it a Passport, a vehicle Honda stopped making about two decades ago. But apparently there have been Passports in production again for more than half a decade. Huh. I guess this Baja version might make them noticeable.
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It’s good to see new Hooniverse content, and also good that this morning’s article got an impressive number of comments, so I am helping to keep this article from feeling lonely.
A Baja truck like this really lives or dies on its preparation, not just the headline power figure. In our Perth workshop we see the same thing with heavy vehicles and mining gear — a clean blast back to bare metal before any coating goes on is what keeps the finish holding up when it takes a real hammering. Fingers crossed Honda’s prep is as strong as the drivetrain.