One of my favorite people, awesome headshot photographer David Noles, once told me about the wonderfully weird sport of handcar regatta. It's gorgeous kinetic sculptures racing on rails near Petaluma, California. I was all set to photograph it last year when my plans were, um, derailed by the underwear run in Salt Lake City.
But Noles is wonderfully persistent and mentioned the same folks stage "Death-Defying Figure 8 Pedal Car Racing" at Maker Faire near San Francisco. "Death-defying"? How can I pass that up?
The pedal cars are elaborate contraptions carefully constructed by members of the Fun Bike Unicorn Club. The club, founded in 2010, describes itself as "a loose collective of whimsical builders, inventors, artists and rabble-rousers who happen to love bikes and unicorns!" Who doesn't love bikes and unicorns?
Maker Faire is a smart, creative and sophisticated two-day event by and for smart, creative and sophisticated people who make things. It's the kind of place where you might see insanely cool stuff like an enormous fire-spitting dinosaur or a gaggle of homemade Wall-E robots. It's like Burning Man without all the sand, and immensely popular with families drawn by tons of amazing hand-on activities, teaching workshops and surreal scenes like a roving muffinmobile with a man inside dodging a paper rocket.
With so much weirdness, it was hard to stay focused on my objective: The Unicorn Village and its homemade pedal cars. They're beautiful, inspired by the cycle cars of the early 1900s. They come in all shapes, sizes and styles. One of my favorites looked like a silver bullet, while another reminded me of a bulldozer.
"In essence, I think we're going back to the days of being a kid and building a go-cart," Todd Barricklow, a founding member of the club, says in a fine film about his gorgeous racer. "Except I think we're a little better at it now."
"I mean a lot of other adults that still want to live that in their mind are building hot rods. And that's great. But the last thing I want is another vehicle that has a motor on it. And since we're all into bicycles, that's what we're building. It's like a little pedal hot rod. And it's fun."
The cars are typically made of old bicycles, salvaged steel and recycled stuff. There are but four rules in Death-Defying Figure-8 Pedal Car Racing, because any more might impinge on the death-defying nature of the action. Cars must be pedal-powered (duh) single-seaters, with no less than four wheels and "it better have some good brakes." The fourth rule is the race must be death-defying.
I never want to see people injured playing weird sports. That said, I half expected a spectacular NASCAR-esque wreck at intersection of the figure-8, which was laid out in a parking long about the size of three tennis courts. However, the pedal cars never reached anything approaching death-defying speeds, so pileups were largely averted. If the course were a little smaller, it'd make for closer calls — and crazy collisions.
"We could have just said, 'Let's do an oval track,' but a figure 8 adds a whole element of mystery," Barricklow says. "I don't know what's going to happen when we get into the X-zone."
Of course, close calls were the order of the day at the club's Whiskey Drome, a homage to velodromes of yore that would travel the country to wow the populace with acts of two-wheeled daring-do. It reminded me of the Wall of Death, a motordrome I photographed a few years back at Evel Knievel Days in Butte. Surreal and silly.
