Now, here's where you can help. Being the Competition Director of the
British Motor Club of Utah, I am in charge of setting up the "Silly Car
Tricks" funkhana. Anyone have some good, novel ideas on what sort of
things I could include here?
Oh, lots!
How about a Push-O-Cross? This can be part of the Funkhana. The engine
must be off (it helps if the driver is a little off, too). One person shoves
the car, the other steers it around obstacles. Simulates getting the race
car off the trailer and back into the garage around the parts car. Better
be a fairly short course, though. Give extra points to people who do this
with a locked diff and slicks that are going flat.
(Actually, we were going to do something even sillier at the Healey meet
four years ago; we had two Sprite chassis that we were going to set up with
teams of three people, one driving and two pushing, and we were going to
have drag race-style eliminations. I didn't get to go to that meet...)
If circumstances permit, you can have the passenger try to sink a
basket from a moving car. If you don't have a real basketball hoop,
use a trashcan. You'll need course workers for this one.
There's always picking tennis balls off the tops of pylons and putting
them back down on the next one in a slalom, so the driver does one and
then the passenger.
Then, in keeping with our recent mediaeval themes, you could have
Motor Jousting. No, not driving at each other at high speed, but
you could have something like a piston ring on the end of a hook,
and the passenger uses a broken-off radio antenna to try to spear
the ring as the driver zooms past.
And of course, there are the traditional backwards autocross and
blindfold autocross, both excellent ways to scare the onlookers
(not to mention the course workers!)
You can also come up with cute carnival-type games. Like trying to throw
a tennis ball into a coil spring from 10 feet away. Or pitching throttle
plates into an SU dashpot. Or the Ring And Pinion Toss. Or the Tappet
Roll. Or a Fishing Game where the player has to reach into a box with
one of those remote claw pick-up devices and try to find some prize in
among the crufty spark plugs, old brake pieces, and greasy bolts, without
looking into the box. One way to handle these games is to award tickets
worth so many points for each game, and the person who has the most points
at the end of the day wins a prize. So for instance you could fill the
box with junk on which you'd written various number amounts of points,
and people get a coupon worth the number of points written on the thing they
pull out of the box. These are good club fund-raisers because you make
people pay a quarter or 50 cents to play, and then give them a shot at
winning a prize donated by the Kind Sponsors of the event.
What else... Try to pop balloons by throwing SU needles. Fill up a lever
shock with an oil gun (a race, like those shoot-water-at-the-balloon-horse-
race games). Stack a bunch of empty Castrol bottles and try to knock them
down by chucking a piston at them. Hours of family fun!
--Scott "What if Walt Disney had driven an MG..." Fisher
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