You could easily fill every day of the calendar with some event or festival being celebrated somewhere in Texas, and by looking at a cross-section of these, you’d get a fairly coherent view of the breadth of Texas cuisine, culture, history, fauna, flora, and general weirdness, but you would be hard pressed to find any event that managed to embody the bigness of the state, how immense it is, except for maybe the Pan-Texas Motor Rally.
Every ten years, on a year that ends in a “2,” the entirety of Texas becomes a racetrack for teams rushing from one corner of the state to the next. It has been called one of the greatest races in America, the “NASCAR Killer,” or the “Hillbilly Le Mans.”
The race begins in Anthony, NM, just over the border from El Paso, and proceeds east to Orange on the Louisiana border. From there, the race follows the coast south to Matamoros before bending back north to Texhoma, OK. As the crow flies, the race encompasses over 1,900 miles of driving, though due to the indirect nature of the roadways, you can easily add an 300 extra miles to this number.
The race is famously lax on rules, though those that exist are treated as strict commandments. The first rule states that the race’s start, end, and rally points are set and must be reached by each and every team, though the route one takes between them is open to interpretation. Because of this, racers have been known to veer off major highways in search of shortcuts and exploits on the backroads. This is not to say that the race doesn’t have a main route. Due to the layout of Texas’s highways, a core route has developed over the years that follows I-10 for the first leg, and Routes 59 and 77 for the second. The final leg of the race, the stretch northward towards Oklahoma is the only one that has been resistant to developing a preferred route given that the northward drive lacks any major roadways. It’s also for this reason that the last leg of the race is sometimes called the “Blue Highway Tangle,” given that it takes place largely on backroads and it is where racers are most likely to scatter and diverge across wildly different routes. The only other rule in place is that the cars and drivers that start the race must be the ones to finish it. This is largely implemented to prevent teams from turning the race into a relay rather than an endurance contest, switching off tired drivers for fresh ones and broken cars for working ones pulled off of trailers.
The race began as a highly illegal sport which is the reason why it is held so infrequently. In its earliest days, racers had to deal with police blockades and tire traps, and teams often employed a series of blockers to distract and draw law enforcement from the racers. Today, the race is no less illegal, though many members of the Texas Highway Patrol, Texas Rangers, and countless local law enforcement agencies are fans of the Rally, having grown following it, cheering for its participants, and sometimes even racing in it. During the Rally, they are known to turn a blind eye to the recklessness of its racers. The few members of law enforcement who have attempted to stop or slow the race in recent years have faced ostracization from their fellow officers, and occasionally assault from the race’s crowd if such spoil sports can be identified.
Following the race has always been a struggle for its audience. With a racetrack as large as the state, there is no good place to sit and observe the full breadth of the race, though fans are known to rally and tailgate along highways in order to catch sight of their favorite racers, if only for a moment. To follow the rest of the race, fans used to crowd around CB radios, listening in on the chatter of teams and bad-mouthing between racers, charting progress on roadmaps hung in dive bars across the state. In recent years, the advent of livestreaming has led to a new way to experience the race. Some racers mount cameras in and on their car, allowing viewers to follow the full extent of the race as if they were along for the ride.
With the success of the Pan-Texas Motor Rally, some have suggested a new, bigger race spanning the United States or even both of the American continents. These Pan-American Rallies have been vehemently dismissed in Texas given that most suggested routes either skirt the state or avoid it entirely. These same individuals argue that it is Texas that makes the race great and not the other way around, and that any kind of poor mimicry, however grand, is doomed to failure.
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