Mad Max Meets Burning Man

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This is beyond wild. Burning Man is no match for this spectacle. Hammertown. Wowzers!

212 mile Race of the Kings - King of the Hammers. Grueling - 75% of the entrants don't finish the race. Some of these purpose-built vehicles reach the $500k range.

It's been going since 2008 and, like much of this sort of thing, started small and out of nowhere. It's grown - 80,000 attended this year.

Anarchy in the California desert. "Even the Grandmas here here make Burning Man look like a bunch of Grandmas".

Did I mention anarchy?




Larry Webster at Hagerty Media highlighted the event in his most recent missive.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/never-sto ... d568259d8a

Races happen nearly every day, with different classes of vehicles running a tortuous course of about 100 miles that encompasses wide-open sections and boulder-strewn climbs known as “Hammers.”

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Thanks to the digital archive excellence of the Wayback Machine, someone found the June 2015 Road & Track article by Max Prince that Larry Webster lamenting not having. (He is now happy thanks to the reader who posted the complete R&T piece.)

That article has more gems and good pics from back then, stuff like:

"There is a burned-out Polaris, and people are scavenging parts off it. There is a goat tethered to a trailer, and he's eating a cardboard box. There are no showers. There is no sleep. Welcome to the redneck Thunderdome."

"...there are two concrete rules: (1) All vehicles must be capable of transmitting power to four wheels with a functioning low range, and (2) all vehicles must carry enough water, food, and medications for its occupants to survive unassisted for 24 hours. That's pretty much it...This is legit unlimited-class wheeling."

"The racing line is a sequence of scattered wooden survey markers. Straying more than 50 feet to either side results in disqualification, except where the race borders an active military base. Straying there is a federal crime."

Good read. (The link to the R&T article is being pulled from the Wayback Machine archives so it may take 20 -30 seconds for everything to load, including the pics!)

http://web.archive.org/web/201506260003 ... om-a-stone