https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nR3x_LoK1c
Jetsprint boat racing remains one of the craziest form of motorsport that I’ve come across. The speeds are so fast that the action on video appears to be fast forwarded. A co-pilot uses quick hand signals to relay the upcoming turns as the pair navigate a swampy course at an incredibly high rate.
We wrote about Jetsprint back in 2010 and it remains affixed to a piece of my brain to this day. I think about it probably twice a month.
http://hooniverse.info/2010/04/07/release-the-sea-hoon/
What else is out there that some of us might not know about… but we should. Share your favorite lesser known form of motorsport below.
Hooniverse Asks: What's your favorite type of non-conventional motorsport?
By Jeff Glucker
Nov 1, 2018
By Jeff Glucker
Jeff Glucker is the co-founder and Executive Editor of Hooniverse.com. He’s often seen getting passed as he hustles a 1991 Mitsubishi Montero up the 405 Freeway. IG: @HooniverseJeff
The sheer insanity and ingenuity of Swamp Buggy Racing.
Oh man, as a kid I couldn’t get enough of the Swamp Buggy Racing. Used to watch on TV with my dad every Friday night.
Pre-Spike Network TNN sports were the best!
Absolutely loved, cherished (and amazingly still remember) watching Swamp Buggy Racing on Diamond P Motorsports on TNN (that’s The Nashville Network for you yungens) when I was a mere lad. I can still remember – Leonard and Eddie Chesser. Buggy names like Rubber Duck, Cold Duck. The ‘Sippi Hole’ and the Swamp Buggy Queen – hell yeah Naples, Florida. You created the greatest motorsport of all!
Rock Bouncing. I’m absolutely obsessed with it at the moment.
Those homemade steeltube cages are amazing.
The craftsmanship involved in many of the builds is truly spectacular. That it stands up to the abuse it’s subjected to is even wilder.
It seems so obvious that these guys should be sponsored by a laundry detergent company, and yet…
An obvious bias given where I live, but I love Snowcross – I can push a sled pretty hard (or at least I did in my braver, younger, dumber days) but I ride like a pup compared to these maniacs.
http://media.mlive.com/travel_impact/photo/10439289-large.jpg
Tractor pulling. I particularly like the turbodiesels but the multi-engine / turbine / Allison ones are interesting in their bonkers-ness.
I don’t know if I’d say I’m a fan necessarily, but the whole idea of a motocross version of motorcycle sidecar racing is fascinating.
I just discovered Sidecarcross last week. When Last Call was that Van Veen motorcycle I went looking for other Dutch-made motorcycles and found some sidecarcross frame manufacturers.
I love that there’s no convention for which side the car is mounted to. That has to make track layout a real fine science.
If there was actual science involved in that lunacy, that would make it all the more intriguing.
I wondered if anyone had thought to invent a motorsport combined with a second, unrelated, skill.
Apparently so.
http://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/348/race-shoot-repeat-the-drives-automotive-biathlon
Meh, the shooting needs to be done while belted in the car.
As a solo event, or team sport?
http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/7/73/Blt-win97-5.jpg/600px-Blt-win97-5.jpg
Either.
Combine demolition derby, made even better when combined (so to speak) with grain truck races.
http://www.ohgizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/combine_demo_derby.jpg
https://ssl.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000nYJRYQ_lnQk/s/650/650/angier-1106-truck-race-6505.jpg
Honorable mention: Barbie Jeep racing
Heavy truck racing. Fantastic and ridiculous at the same time.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lnHWL-J-3KE/maxresdefault.jpg
I just started that series in Forza 7 last night. Stupid fun. Or: stupid, fun. Both apply.
Sure to popular with more than just a select few on here.
Citroën 2CV racing, and particularly 24 hr 2CV racing.
How many laps did the winner complete, 4 or 5?
Oh they’re not that slow, it may have been as many as 8 or 9.
No, I’m joking, Snetterton is not that big, whether the 300 or the 200 layout. Last year, the winner completed 566 Laps despite the race being stopped for 5 and a half hours due to Fog. They get quite large fields of entry, and there is free camping, (since it’s in Britain, in things called tents, not the more effete American affectation of mobile homes.)
https://msvstatic.com/cache/catalog/SN-18-2CV/Home-Page/What's-Racing/62213.jpg
https://msvstatic.com/cache/catalog/SN-18-2CV/Home-Page/Camping-Information/13041.jpg?v=636456528351300000
…and, in fairness: Thursday is market day, so the town square in Snetterton is really congested.
(If I could only get in a clean lap outside of school term-time and avoiding the queue for the Post Office; I think I’d set a lap record…)
Looks like grand fun, apart from the homeless impersonation festival in the lower photograph. I’m no warmer on RV’s though as I see them as made for suckers that can’t price out how many hotel rooms they will have to forego before the thing becomes economic. When your wife and kids whine for the eight hour return trip, you end up springing for a hotel anyway; lose/lose proposition those things. Unless you’re actually homeless and kind of ok with the lifestyle.
A little shout out from down here in New Zealand, where the jet-boat was invented in 1954 by Sir William Hamilton, (he was knighted for doing so). And jet boat manouvering and racing were invented.
The boats here aren’t fibreglass coffins, they’re welded aluminium or stainless steel, because some races take place in our many stone and gravel based rivers and fibreglass would abrade away too quickly. We also hold the races in more ordinary stadiums, not much water is needed to flood a temporary course. The power to weight of these creations is insane.
Truck trials, possibly the most relaxing form of motorsport to watch, it’s like regular trials, where people try to thread cars through a course marked out by a series very narrow gates, only with huge off road trucks.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Tatra_813_truck_trial_voitsberg_2010.jpg/1200px-Tatra_813_truck_trial_voitsberg_2010.jpg
For hilarity, off road motorycle hillclimb, the sight of some lad giving it a bit to much welly trying to get up the hill, having is motorycle fly up from underneath him then that dawning nanosecond of realization as he looks up in the air and needs to run away back down the hill out of it’s inevitable gravity aided return just doesn’t get old. This probably makes me a bad person.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Motorcycle_hill_climb%2C_Sweden_2009.jpg/900px-Motorcycle_hill_climb%2C_Sweden_2009.jpg
P.S. Jeff — what a great ‘Hooniverse asks…’; the comment stream has so many contributions worth watching in full.