By Alex Roy (September 2006)
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play – Nietzsche
Welcome to the inaugural column of Team Polizei’s Gumball column. I was honored to receive Max and Julie’s invitation to write a recurring column for the all-new Gumball 3000 website.
Although I’m sorry to see the venerable Nick Wylyss retire from Gumball HQ to pursue his dream of being a pilot, it’s great to know that the lovely Emma Chittenden has taken his place. She has big shoes to fill, as Max and Julie have dramatically increased the Gumball’s scale and complexity, both for the staff and participants.
Everyone who’s ever participated in the Gumball 3000, whether as a driver, co-pilot, passenger, journalist, staffer or bystander, experiences something utterly unique and almost impossible to explain in its magnitude.
In 2004 Max said “Don’t believe anything you hear or read about Gumball,” and this grows more true each year. Each of us, whether from a car streaking under an Austrian dawn, or in front of a flickering television in Australia, or from a brisk London or hot Bangkok street corner, sees only a sliver of the grand, electrifying totality of the Gumball 3000.
And yet these slivers, however well described online, in print, on film and TV, remain only flashes of light within a haze – stories upon stories, stories within stories, the sum of our knowledge never approaching what, each year, becomes a mountain we can never scale to the summit, a road whose end moves further away, an intellectual checkpoint beyond any car, or driver.
The Gumball 3000 remains shrouded in a mythology dating back to Brock Yates’ original Cannonball Run from the 1970’s. There were 5 Cannonball Runs – fully illegal non-stop races from New York to Los Angeles – held between 1971 and 1979. The Cannonball’s successor, the U.S. Express, ran four times from 1980 to 1983, after which the torch of underground endurance driving events nearly died out.
It was from these embers that Max picked up the torch, pulling the spirit of the Cannonball and Express onto the legal side of the fence, offering everyone and anyone who had ever dreamt of open roads and adventure the opportunity to meet like-minded souls for what is, for most, a once-in-a-lifetime journey into the unknown.
I was once both excited and anxious about Gumball. The final moments before the 2003 Gumball flag drop in San Francisco were among the most terrifying of my life, but the ensuing minutes, convoying across the Bay Bridge bracketed by comically fantastic cars I’d never before seen in person, piloted by bizarre characters who seemed so veteran as to intimidate even me, were among the most exhilarating of my life. While some of these drivers disappeared into the mist of Gumball history, most would return to build upon the wonderful community of Gumball veterans, and, most importantly, several would become lifelong friends. Two – the legendary 2002 Gumball Spirit Trophy Winner Nicholas Frankl and 5-time Gumball veteran Michael Ross – would later become Team Polizei co-pilots.
Such friendships are priceless, and such friendships are forged only through shared experiences (and often, hurdles) from which loyalty and wonder spring. Such friendships are rare. Such friendships are common on the Gumball.
The moment the Gumball flag drops is not, as believed by the more ignorant, a leap off a cliff – it is a jump up and across a divide between the fearful and the open-minded. We all know the Gumball isn’t a race, it’s a rally. But the Gumball is more – it’s a prism through which the participants discover themselves. One can drive, or rally, or sleep, or party. One can also break down and give up, or one can break down, suffer sleeplessly through repairs and catch up. Some, like myself, treat it like professional motorsport (albeit with some gentlemanly good fun as well), and some are delighted merely to finish. But, and this is often overlooked, everyone who crosses the finish line safely has their honor. The Gumball is about each participant meeting their unique expectations, whether for the car, the event, or for themselves – this is a challenge rarely understood by anyone, even by those with the luck and privilege of finishing. Even after four Gumballs I still ponder these questions, and I still enjoy debating other Gumballers and fans on even the most obscure minutiae of Gumball history, yet even now, as I approach the completion of my rally memoir, there remain lessons unknown to me.
One thing remains true, and this has been clear to me since the beginning.
The Gumball 3000 is what you make of it.
I can’t wait for the 2007 Gumball, nor for 2008 – Gumball’s 10th Anniversary.
