After the wild ride down the hill, the handmade race cars were parked nearby. Children, especially little boys, loved getting into the battered racers.
This post is a reminder about those fun and silly things we used to do before COVID 19. This was originally published in August 2017. Fun stuff will come again!
Red Bull has sponsored 19 soap box races around the world in recent years, but this was the first in Los Angeles I think.
In addition to the requirement that all the vehicles in the amateur category be handmade, each ‘racing team’ had to perform a dance at the starting line and they were judged on the quality of the performance. For those of us at the finish line, the silly and hilarious dances were shown on a huge jumbotron.
I have no idea why a tall, skinny white guy brought a Will Smith head to a soap box derby. Hmmm. Maybe he was part of one of the racing teams? Maybe a dancer?
After the brief performances came the timed runs down the narrow winding street where almost every one of the handmade racers suffered damage. Pieces of the cars fell off along the way or the race car driver ran into the straw bale barriers lining the route or crashed into the bales at the finish line. Fastest time was under one minute.
Okay. Here is some of what I saw.
This “mule team’ racer didn’t get up enough speed to make it all the way down the hill. It stalled at one flat curve and got human assistance to continue its run. I like the design even if it wasn’t a speedy one.Two of the handmade race cars parked on the sidelines after each finished its run. The rocket ship racer was damaged at the end when it crashed in the hay bales.Even a ‘big boy’ got a kick out of sitting in the pizza racer after the event. His girlfriend was taking a picture of him.Cameras at the start line and along the way allowed viewers at the finish line to see the start-line dances and wobbly runs downhill.Thousands of people lined the narrow street in Elysian Park to watch the races. The ‘official’ record of the finish came from the cameraman stationed at the end, behind the hay bales.There was free parking for the event at Dodger Stadium and a dozen shuttle buses took the thousands of people over the hill to the event. Red Bull Mini-Coopers had the best parking spots.
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