Motorsports with a difference
186 videos • 7,955 views • by Britclip A look at some of Britain’s alternative motoring heritage is rather like stumbling into the garage of a particularly eccentric uncle: noisy, smoky, slightly dangerous, and enormously good fun. Other countries take motoring terribly seriously. Germany gives you precision engineering. Italy gives you sleek, roaring Ferraris. America gives you muscle cars and endless open roads. Britain, by contrast, gives you… lawnmower racing. Yes, lawnmower racing. Entire fields of perfectly respectable people, many of whom probably have proper jobs and mortgages, gather to strip the blades off their mowers, stick on a crash helmet, and hurl themselves around muddy tracks at speeds that feel alarmingly quick when you’re sitting three inches off the ground. The sport was invented in the 1970s by a group of pub drinkers (of course it was), and has since become gloriously official, complete with national championships. Lewis Hamilton started in karts. Here, you start on a Flymo. Then there’s banger racing – demolition derby with a cup of tea. Dozens of cars that look as though they’ve been fished out of a canal are sent hurtling around an oval track until they disintegrate into steaming heaps. The object is less to win and more to keep moving, preferably while cheerfully ramming your neighbour into the barriers. In Britain, we look at a rusting Ford Cortina and think: “I know – let’s hit that at 40 mph until it resembles a wardrobe.” Car jumping takes things to an even more surreal level. Imagine, if you will, taking a 30-year-old saloon, pointing it at a line of caravans, and then launching it skyward with all the grace of a brick being thrown off a bridge. The car seldom survives, but the crowd, roaring approval while nursing pints of bitter, couldn’t be happier. It is Evel Knievel without the glamour or the health insurance. And these are just the motoring events. Britain has an endless appetite for eccentricity on wheels. We race mobility scooters. We once staged a contest to see how far you could drive a car in reverse. We have soapbox derbies where children and grown men alike climb into homemade contraptions that look as though they’ve been assembled from prams and garden gates, and then let gravity sort out the rest. It is all gloriously bonkers, deeply unsafe, and uniquely British. In any other nation, such events would be banned outright. Here, they’re considered a proud part of the heritage – as traditional as a pint in the pub or a drizzle-soaked picnic. Britain doesn’t just have a motoring history of Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin. It has a parallel, proudly alternative motoring heritage – where the vehicles are older, rustier, and airborne far more often than the designers ever intended.