We love to race – that’s just the long and short of it all. While a very small handful of men and women are fortunate enough to enjoy the thrills of life as a professional racecar driver, there are yet handful more who can afford it off to the side; plenty of entry-level events let you race just about anything you own. Still, for most of us regular folks, having a dedicated racecar to daily-drive or racing a dedicated commuter or family car just doesn’t make sense. But rather than let the professionals and ballers have all the fun, us commuter-driving, regular guys find our own things to race.
Sometimes, it’s less about budgetary constraints and more about the fact that it can be raced out of necessity. Scenic-railway operators probably didn’t build and operate the steam-powered railroad to drag race steam engines. But when you have three engines and three straight tracks laid out in the same direction for miles it’s bound to happen eventually. From the everyday things you have laying around at home to things you, as a civilian, aren’t even allowed to touch – if it can be raced in any way, shape or form – it probably is. You’re about to see wingsuits, wheelchairs, and anything in-between, whether a turbocharged bike motor on a piece of driftwood is blasting over 100mph across the water or a 2,000hp tugboat is charging full speed down a crowded river – this is racing baby.
19 Great Scenic Train Racing
As far as real train racing goes, it does still exist although your millennial-minded attention span may prefer the NAS-Trains version better. The thing is, thousands of tons hooked up behind a locomotive, no matter how powerful, is going to take some time to get rolling; and it won’t be fast. If your idea of fun is not watching ancient machinery labor up grades at a crawl for sheer entertainment this may not be the extreme sport for you. However, if you happen to have a little bit of wonder in your heart about how a fire-powered array of mechanically-timed levers and valves can harness 7,000hp from expanding gasses, take a peek.
18 Segway Derby
Maybe you’re a little bit further over to the left of the clean-energy camp. Maybe watching a fire-breathing steam locomotive pump thick blasts of jet-black exhaust straight up into a crisp Spring morning in the mountains would send little daggers through your eco-friendly heart.
If I’ve just described you in a nutshell, do I have the sport for you...competition Segway racing!
You get to wear a sporty, ‘90s-era special-ed helmet and a cool mesh vest with your very own number while embracing all the thrill competitive Segway racing has to offer. Just strenuously lean that whole 12° forward while trying to make your weird, pear-shaped body as streamlined as possible.
17 Paper Airplane World Championship
If Segway racing is just too intense for you, you can always try a more sedentary sport. Imagine the buildup as you sit in your pit area laboring over your aircraft – every fold must be crisp, clean and perfect. Sweat beads up and drips from the tip of your nose as the clock ticks down – you're almost up for your second pass and your down by six points with only one shot left at the championship – this pass must be perfect. This is paper airplane racing at its finest. Think you got what it takes to fold with the best of them? That best of them happens to include professional quarterbacks by the way – so bring your A game son.
16 Detroit International Tug Boat Race
Whenever we picture boat racing, they’re usually colorful boats; sharp, slender and smooth as they blast through the water like a bolt of lightning. Out here in Motor City, the race looks a little bit different though.
Ever since the late-‘40s the tugboat race was a loosely organized event yet became very beloved and popular.
One captain was determined to win the race to clean up his tug Sachem’s name after a 1950 accident claimed the lives of all 12 crew members. In 1955, Captain Stahl finally did just what he set out to do – he won the Detroit International Tug Boat Race with his crew-ender.
15 Wing Suit Racing
It used to be possible to sweet-talk your way past any security guard; I am convinced of this fact. 33-year old Franz Reichelt knew this when he approached the guards at the Eiffel Tower with his prototype wingsuit and the intention to test it out. All he had to do to get past them was lie and say he was using a ‘dummy’ to test it. A dummy indeed, he proceeded to jump off the tower and subsequently plow face first into the icy ground as his invention let him down (literally). Wingsuit flying has come a long way since those days, and Red Bull even has wingsuit competitions, which seems only natural for the company that owns one of the few aerobatic-rated helicopters in the world. They really do give you wings.
14 Wheelchair Racing
How amazing is wheelchair racing? Pretty amazing – and that’s not sarcasm talking (maybe a little bit). But really think about it – more so, what it symbolizes. It’s pretty much a celebration of people and their will to overcome – the broken that couldn’t be beaten.
This behavior is really what sets man apart from all the rest of the animal kingdom.
If a bear loses the use of his legs, he's gone. If a man loses the use of his legs, he builds a wheeled contraption with a seat so he can go race other wheeled contraptions to see which one goes the fastest. The thing about it is, you or I would probably be hard-pressed to even finish one of those grueling races.
13 Uni-Motorcycle Racing
Stay with me folks…this is where it gets a little weird – when a motorcycle has too many wheels. Yes sir, one too many to be exact. Legend has it that a man was in a bar one night when he said to a friend, “…you know, I’ve raced on four, three and two wheels already. What’s next?” Alas, borne of an intoxicated stupor – uni-motorcycle racing is now a thing; a phenomenon of a thing that people are latching onto with wild-eyed savagery in their eyes. Essentially, it involves riding the ass-end of a motorcycle across unpaved terrain on a makeshift sled of your fashioning. The only rule is there are no rules – also you can only have one tire.
12 Lawn Mower World Championship
The United States Lawn Mower Racing Association – yup, it’s a thing. Established in 1922, it’s actually been a thing for a while. The lust for competition is fierce within us conquest-oriented sapiens. With an, ‘anytime, anyplace - yeeha,’ attitude amongst the ride-on mower demographic, this sort of thing was bound to happen sooner rather than later. I wasn’t even aware there were race-able lawn mowers back in the ‘20s, but there were. Today it is a sanctioned sporting event for only the most elite mower jockeys. Think you’re man enough? You’d better be willing to crotch-pound that cheap foam seat for 15 miles and 60 laps around the track. Sound like a tall glass of no? Me neither.
11 Tank Biathlon
Yep, that’s a thing. Who dunnit? Well, Russia of course. Who else would do something like this? (We probably would, honestly). The biathlon is a rigorous gauntlet that tests the highly-tuned skills of today’s tankers in a friendly battle between the biggest guns on wheels (you know what I mean).
See, the only bad guys here are the decoy targets that are positioned throughout the course at ranges of 1,968’ to 5,905’ and gunners must hit each target or incur penalty laps.
It looks like we’ve finally started to learn how to play nice with our war toys, but the game just might be rigged – unless you don’t find it suspicious that Russia has won every single Tank biathlon since the event’s inception in 2013...
10 Drone Racing
Well, you saw this one coming, but you may not have seen just how hard. With the proliferation of our favorite, newest little tech-toy, the competitive racing between such devices would be quick to follow. The first drone race probably happened not long after the first time two guys with drones walked onto the same field together – but drones have already come a long way since their recent beginnings. We’ve already passed the 100mph mark and don’t be surprised when the guy next to you unpacks video monitoring equipment – video-piloting or RPV (Remote-Person View) involves piloting your rig via drone-mounted cameras to give you a pilot’s view of the action.
9 Glider Racing
Most races feature an active power source for propulsion to generate from – gliding, however, is one sport that passively transfers energy into lift from the reacting air rising beneath it. Contrary to popular belief, gliders do not just slowly sail towards the face of the earth; if conditions were right a glider could stay aloft until the wings rotted off. Pilots were actually getting taken out by falling asleep in their gliders during ‘endurance’ races where the challenge was to stay airborne for as long as possible. We haven’t glider-raced like that since the ‘40s, but 600-mile glider courses raced with GPS navigation aids help to give the sport a precision and accuracy that keeps a healthy membrane of interest surrounding modern glider racing.
8 Thai Long Tail Boat Racing
If you like boat drag racing, cool. Buy a Hemi, stuff it with expensive parts until it’s literally bleeding horsepower by the thousands and slap it into an aerodynamic shell that can rocket across the water faster than you’ve ever gone in any car.
If you happen to live in a country that doesn’t have the resources for all that nonsense you could always strap a turbocharged motorcycle engine on a piece of driftwood, bolt a prop to the back of an eight-foot output shaft and blast down your local canal at over 100mph.
So who’s the real hero here? Is it the million-dollar boat racer guy with his safely engineered, modern speedboat – or that brave little skinny holding onto that rocketing piece of driftwood for dear life in shorts and sandals?
7 Yacht Racing
Volvo yacht racing is a global race with a changing route held every three years and covers almost 40,000 nautical miles, as was the case of the 2008 event. Usually departing from Europe in October, the nine or 10-leg races will circumnavigate the globe in a nine-month journey from port to port.
Each yacht is manned with nine professional crew members that, on some occasions, race constantly for more than 20 days at a time.
It’s got all the makings of a good old ‘lost at sea’ survival story with each of the crew members specializing in his own area of expertise; medical response, diesel repair, electronics, nutrition, sail-making, etc.
6 Bandit Big Rig Racing
It’s been isolated and enjoyed in secluded pockets of interest for some time now, but big rig racing is making an upward climb into the ranks of popularity with the obscure blend of heavy transportation and competition racing coming to a full head in 2018. The last time big rig racing was organized to any degree was back in the ‘90s until the Great American Truck Racing Series bellied up. The Bandit events, however, continue to sell out venues and the interest people have in watching 13,000lb machines muscle for position, door-to-door, down a track as fast as they can go only seems to be growing.
5 Robocar Racing
When statements are accepted that personify the theoretical existence of the self-awareness we assume artificial intelligence to perceive, you should know our time as the dominant species on Earth is limited. Robocar’s website, in a brief introduction of their autonomous racing technology, curiously words a sentence referencing the AI’s ability to ‘sense.’ “…allowing teams to fully understand how the car thinks and feels on a racetrack…”
From what it’s looking like, the all-electric and completely unmanned Formula E cars will be standardized with common hardware; the difference being the AI logic that’s proprietary per team.
This is one of the biggest steps forward in the advancement of autonomous driving technology; eventually, it’ll all filter down into the streets of your neighborhoods in one watered-down form or another.
4 Warbird Racing
Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. The Reno Air Races ensure there’s a place to for the thundering legends to spread their wings and command the awestruck attention of a generation of people that never got the chance to see them roar into the sky in the line of duty. There’s almost nothing quite like the sound of a P-51’s 27L, V-12 Merlin screaming down the runway at takeoff power – but the hydroplane race-boat motor that replaced the factory Merlin increases displacement by around 40% and develops around 3,200hp for the three-bladed, contra-rotating propellers. She’s been racing since the 1980s and is more powerful and dangerous than ever before – as a civilian aircraft of course.
3 Camel Racing
Laugh if you will, as the substitution of the camel in place of horses for many arid, land-locked nations has been the butt of an age-old joke that never gets tired. However, the better-suited camels are actually very intelligent creatures with only slightly lower top speeds that their horse counterpart although racing camels can be almost just as fast. It would be a close race. Camels take the win in the desert with the uncanny ability to move at average speeds around 6mph for up to 18 hours and even move more weight. Think of camels as the base model F-150 with a big motor and a granny gear.
2 Shovel Racing
Would you believe if I told you that the Annual World Champion Shovel Races is in its 39th installment as of 2018? Convincing me that it’s a good idea to slide down a steep, snow-covered hill at 60mph sitting on a 1/16” steel plate with a long wooden stick inches from my junk is going to be a hard sell. Somebody sold it to someone years ago, however, and it’s been a thing ever since. It actually started out as resort workers used the technique to quickly travel from one location to another and now the type of shovel you can sled has to be regulated to stop overzealous sled designs from compromising safety.
1 Reno Balloon Race
The Reno Balloon Race is a three-day racing event held annually early in September that amazes spectators with a canvas of colorful hot air rising silently and gracefully into the atmosphere.
Another product of the early ‘80s, it’s a little bit more technical than shovel racing.
Things like temperature lapse rate, fuel burn, and wind layers must factor into each successful flight however, it is arguably safer than sliding down a mountain on a shovel. Since its humble 20-balloon beginnings, the GRBR now sees closer to 100 balloons each year and over 120,000 spectators. Not NASCAR spectacular, but it’s definitely bigger than your crappy high school triathlon.
Sources: tugrace.com, americaloveshorsepower.com, rmrracing.com, redbull.com, letsmow.com, boatdesign.com, dragzine.com, autoweek.com, renoballoon.com.