Creative Sports
Stevenson Projects' most recent foray into the honored sport of downhill coasting
began as an argument over how much the power of nostalgia clouds the memory.
One faction was telling everyone that coasting downhill in a tiny car that
weighs less than the driver was the best four-wheeled fun they'd ever had,
(even after a long career of driving some reasonably potent machines).
The other faction was shaking its collective head and saying that this opinion
was the result of looking back through decades of nostalgia filters, which
were giving the old downhill races of our youth a rosy glow they didn't
have in the actual action.
Since whatever side of an argument is first to shake its head and smile
patronisingly usually wins, we came away beaten, but unconvinced that we
were wrong. Those memories of downhill coasting, of abject terror, freezing
at the wheel, over coming freezing at the wheel, and various slow-motion
crashes and mishaps that brought with them a feeling of living at the edge
(while actually producing only a skinned elbow here and a sprained wrist
there) were still too vivid not to have been one of those near-life experiences
we cherish through the years.
Then came some downhill Luge-Board events on the Extreme Sports Channel.
It looked like just the same kind of fun, but without the steering wheel,
-and we were getting the old urge to Coast. And then those "Levis"
commercials, with a bunch of stalwart young bloods obviously having just
the right kind of afternoon, skidding down a hill around San Francisco in
all sorts of home made coaster-cars. It was too much to resist. We had to
see whether coasting downhill around treacherous dirt-covered switchbacks
was as much fun as we remembered it to be.
The idea of coasting downhill might just be four-wheeled sport at its best.
There's something of hard-wired fear (read "fun") about a hill,
when you're looking down it. Our primal hard-drive tells us there's danger
there, and that's what adds to the fun in skiing, tobogganing, bob-sledding,
-even surfing when you look down the face of a heavy.
Mix in with this, the lack of engines to fiddle with, the lack of cost,
the lack of rich geeks with more expensive engine gagetry to leave you in
the dust, and the extremely small weight of the coaster car that makes your
driving much more of an athletic event than it is in a hurtling two-ton
motor monster, -and you may just have a good bit of fun coming your way.
We had to find out if years of driving "real cars" would dim the
excitement of downhill coasting.
And the only way to find out was to build one. You just don't go down to
the local Coaster dealer or custom Coaster shop and order one up. Plus,
if you're a so-called adult (read "A-dolt"), people tend to look
at you weird after they find out you're building yourself a coaster-car.
And therein lies the real failure of western civilisation (but we'll get
into that later).
To keep the men in the little white suits at bay, we had to make it a top-secret
project. When poeple asked what we were building there, we'd tell them it
was some sort of new personal security device, or a new kind of computor
cabinet. And they'd nod approvingly and go away, satisfied that we weren't
just wasting our time.
Finally, as the car shaped up and was obviously what it was, we took to
keeping it under a tarp to avoid embarassing probes. But eventually we got
sloppy and a sudden visit from an engineer brought the watching world face
to face with the true meaning of the project. "It's a coaster-car for
grown-ups," I admitted. The viewer took it square in the face like
a custard pie. There was an awkward pause, and then the engineer said in
all solemnity, "You tell me when you're going to try that, ok? I want
to see if it's as much fun as I remember it to be." So maybe we weren't
on such a mad bit of research as we thought. A second opinion always dilutes
the madness.
We'd rigged the car up to replicate what we'd run as kids as much as possible,
-with the exception of a disk brake. Although this was obviously a concession
to brittler bones and calmer blood, we rigged it so you had to reach outside
the cockpit to apply the brakes so that everyone could see when we were
chickening out.
The brakes, as it turned out, were none too effective. They'd stop the wheel
ok, but on the dirt and grass we were sliding around, the wheel wouldn't
do much to stop the car. However, it did supply that nice feeling that,
if things went wrong, you wouldn't end up hitting terminal velocity at the
bottom of the hill.
Time to try out the theory and push off from the top. The old rumbling noise
of a coaster over a rough dirt track brought it all back in a second. The
impaired vision due to a combination of no springs and rough track made
it tough to see the action (a seat pad fixed this in later runs) and the
reassuring feeling that your hips had a lot to do with the actual sterring
reminded us of what a blast it is to careen in a car that weighs a lot less
then you do.
First corner, and the old adrenalin-crazed feeling was back. I could do
ANYTHING in this car. 
Well, at least you got
that feeling. Then quick down a turn I hadn't planned on taking earlier,
but which in the new, crazed light of things suddenly seemed like a good
idea, and then it was over, leaving us with a profound thankfulness for
being alive on such a great little planet as this.
Later, pushing the car back up (each driver has to do his own uphill pushing.
It helps build hyperventilation which prevents reluctance to get in the
cockpit. Once you're in the cockpit, you're ok and anxious to go) I found
I was having to back and fill to get the car around that turn that suddenly
looked so fun to try on the way down. This was puzzling. How could the car
make the bend going downhill, and not be able to turn it going uphill. I
tried again. Nope, it couldn't make the radius.
Then we looked at the tracks of my downhill run and saw that the rear wheel
tracks didn't follow the front. A little twitch of the hips at the right
moment had sent the rear skidding outwards so the car was re-pointed in
a direction to be able to make the turn. The adrenalin-crazed mind is a
wonderful thing to watch, even if it's your own.
On the next runs we added another new twist- video-taping. Immediately after
a run the driver would hurry over to watch the instant replay on the monitor.
It multiplied the fun and settled a lot of shouted arguments (especially
when a front wheel had somehow come loose on one run) and it was all down
on tape.
The verdict, once the votes were in? Downhill coasting is definitely a true,
unique sport that stands on its own, no matter what sort of iron you happen
to be driving in "real life." The thrill of the hill, the lightness
of the machine, the instant steering, the unhampered visual imput, the good
excercise, the complete lack of any possiblity of anybody taking this enterprise
seriously, -makes it a sport in the truest sense.
Another great sporting truth was brought home by the quiet riot that is
downhill-coasting: -since the steering was so frighteningly quick, since
the race course was so frighteningly tight, and since there was so little
padding, springs, course smoothing or any other of the modern comforts no
one would dream of going racing without today, we were able to generate
a lot of peril-borne excitement at a very low actual top speed, (and a very
low actual risk). Maximum sensual input/per mile an hour, in other words.
It's a new approach (or is it an old one?) to getting kicks without getting
killed. A lot of the fun is spinning out, crashing into bushes, and generally
getting dusted up, and we could do this, and have fun without calling out
the paramedics. When we bundle ourselves up in so many layers of padding,
cages, bars, and nets that we have to go two hundred miles an hour just
to wake up, we end up in trouble when the slightest detail of one of the
safety systems fouls up. And things foul up.
As if to prove our point one of the drivers flailing down the course disappeared
behind a row of protective aloe cactuses. Suddenly we heard the rumble of
the car stop abruptly and the top of one of the aloes suddenly waved back
and forth like a banner. The man had missed his corner, but "break-neck
speed" on this tight course was actually so slow that a head-on into
the bushes meant nothing more than an embarrassing grouping of the crowd
around the car to marvel at the impact absorbtion of the aloe plant (aloe
also cures cuts, so there's that extra safety device).
True, there's not much glory in downhill coasting, -nothing to bring the
babes a-running, or the self-image hounds out from under their rocks. But
, give it enough tv play, and the ego-chasers will probably show up with
a more expensive way to make sure they're taken seriously.
Like most research, in answering one question, we'd only raised others.
The foremost of which was, "why did we feel we had to hide our experiment
away from the "real" , "adult" world? Why does a world
that feels that sitting in a smoke-filled room eating packaged foods and
watching aberrated, obscenely paid freaks bobble a ball around on a vacuum
tube is somehow a grown-up thing to do, while trying new fesh-air ways to
suck a little adrenalin is cause for psychotherapy? Well, let them be 'sane",
we say. See what fun it brings them!
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The
Godfrey-Daniels CycleKarts
Worthy successors to the Hulot downhill
racer just above. Our new CycleKarts
are even more fun! Take a look at the
latest model, the Mini-Magnette!
