Red Bull Soapbox Race

This past Saturday, Candace and I went to one of this year's two American Red Bull Soapbox Races, which are held in different locations worldwide (the other American event this year is in Los Angeles). Going into this thing, we weren't really sure what to expect, so we were kinda surprised to see that the place was packed (uncomfortably so), the event was quite technologically-advanced (with plenty of high tech big screens for people to watch), and the 50 participants (who all had to apply with Red Bull to race based on their team gimmick) didn't race at the same time or even in heats, but as one-off time trials.

Teams were awarded points by a panel of judges based off their look, fan approval, pre-race skit, creativity level, finishing time (if they finished at all), and how awesome their crash was if they crashed. Therefore, this whole thing was more of a joke than anything else, but it was still somewhat amusing. Of the 25 teams we stayed to watch (the first half), my favorites were the South Park-themed "Team: Respect My Authoritah!" and a Fur Bus-themed team that had a great crash and was actually pretty funny despite the somewhat lame gimmick. While the South Park team only got the people's choice award and the Fur Bus team didn't even place in the top three, the official winners were also pretty good: a German beer brewers team and a Roman chariot race-themed dual chariot soapbox car with moving horses.

Anyway, perhaps the two most unfortunate things about the whole race though was that it was very difficult to get a good vantage point to see the soapbox racers, and the hill where the event took place wasn't steep enough to allow for any fast times (in fact, many cars ran out of steam by the time they hit the last quarter of the track. Overall, the event was fun in retrospect, but it was kinda miserable while we were there, as it was really hot, my back hurt, food was hard to get to, and navigating to and from our decent spot in the crowd took around 30 minutes. Ugh.