After the park reached its 25,000-spectator capacity, more than 25,000 others arrived to be a part of the amateur action as more than 40 teams from across the state and the county competed for style and speed in homemade derby cars.

“There was definitely a lot of creativity that went into this,” said Mondo Torres, of Denver, who came out to watch the festivities.

The free event opened to the public at 10 a.m. and spectators strolled through Pit Row to check out the cars and teams that included everything from cross-dressing prom queens and giant mice to David Hasselhoff-loving engineers and the cast of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Read More

Link to Litter “Mega” zine article

Years ago, too much beer with friends inspired Clark Brace to enter his first Red Bull Soapbox Race. Years later, the buzz apparently hasn’t warn off because the 42-year-old Westminster resident hopped into a large duck on wheels and blasted down Trading Post Road at Red Rocks Park.

At the mercy of their engineering and ingenuity, Brace’s five-person team and the other 42 teams from around Colorado and nationwide competed Oct. 25 in the Red Bull Soapbox Race in Jefferson County. They screamed, squealed and slammed into hay barrels along a 1/3-mile downhill course lined with a park-record 25,000 spectators who hit the park’s capacity and cheered on elaborately constructed, human-powered race crafts. Teams were judged on speed, creativity and showmanship.

Resourcefulness and 13 rolls of yellow and orange duct tape was what held together Brace’s Tape Duck mobile. Brace, who has participated in Red Bull Soapbox races and Boulder Kinetics races in the past, decided he’d start with the material that usually ends up on his masterpieces in the end anyway.

Brace combined his mechanical engineering skills and kid-at-heart spirit to transform an aluminum frame, corrugated plastic and a steering wheel plucked from a kid’s scooter into a quaking duck-mobile fit with a bubble maker.

“It’s a chance to use our skills in a totally ridiculous way,” he said, adding that it also was a way to show his kids Rachel, 11, and Stephanie, 9, that “growing up isn’t all bad.”

Tape Duck crossed the finish line in 40-something seconds with only a clipped wing. Although the team didn’t place, it was a successful run by most accounts, considering many of the teams ate hay in epic-style crash and burns.

One such team was The Nosotros, a Thornton-based team of five young guys. They dressed up as Mexican wrestlers, including the wrestling champion from the movie Nacho Libre to polish off their giant foam sombrero race craft, which combined the team’s welding, mechanic and engineering professions and a huge dash of silliness.

“We were like, ‘Dude, what beats a giant sombrero?’” said team member Liam Gallagher, 18, of their idea that won them entry into the race, in which nearly 100 applicants vied.

Their planning and design began only four weeks prior to race time with the final touches being added the morning of to their “ethnically-diverse,” craft, which cost no more than a couple hundred dollars, far less than some team’s who threw thousands of dollars into their machines in hopes of winning a NASCAR experience at Texas Motor Speedway.

Although lauded for creativity, the top-heavy sombrero was carried off the course after a crash bent the wheels and deflated their hopes of victory.

In the end, a clever skit and the brains of, among others, a few industrial and architectural design students beat out all other hopefuls with a Ferris Bueller-themed ensemble.

Josh McGuckin, 30, of Broomfield who played Ferris, helped build a $1,400 red fiber glass Ferrari featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The car drove backwards and pleased the crowd and the judges with an impressive stunt that made it look like the car was racing sans driver.

Jeremiah Hueske, 29, a Denver resident who grew up in Westminster, said the opportunity was a chance to spend a lot of sleepless hours with good friends for a wild ride.

“It was an excuse to do something great,” he said.

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Once the dust had settled and the course had been cleared of errant soap box vehicle detritus, it was time to crown the winners along with the “People’s Choice” award. Racers were judged on speed, creativity and showmanship, so the fastest cart was not necessarily guaranteed the top prize. Judges included Red Bull athletes Heath Frisby and Zach Leach, Opie Gone Bad lead singer Jake Schroeder and former Bronco Billy Thompson. Third place honors went to Colorado Springs’ team More Cowbell, who used the power of Will Ferrell coupled with superior aerodynamics to complete the course. The Bonneville Record Holders out of Denver took second, channeling the famous Utah salt flats where many a land speed record has been set.

And, for the first time in Red Bull history (a span which features 35 races in global locales from Finland to South Africa) Broomfield’s Team Save Ferris received top honors and the coveted People’s Choice award. Clad as the iconic characters from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Cameron Frye’s dad would be pissed if he knew what hi jinks the gang was getting up to in his Ferrari. But everyone else was totally cool with it. “We told Matt [Fisher, the driver] to go fast and he did,” the winners said after the medal ceremony. “We won this one for Cameron, who thinks he didn’t see anything good today.” While this was the team’s first ever soapbox event, approximately 600 man hours, several trial runs down Lookout Mountain and countless Ferris screenings appeared to be a winning strategy. Along with speedometer-themed trophies the team will receive a VIP NASCAR experience with Team Red Bull including flights and hotel expenses. FOX Sports Net filmed the entire event and will air the action in the upcoming weeks.

Link to MetroMix for accompanying Pictures

Two other links to MetroMix- check out the photo galleries and stories.
Scrubbing down the Red Bull Soapbox Race: Pictures and stories

“Behind the Bull” story and photos

Meep, meep: Red Ferrari a winner for Roadrunner racers
Oct 29, 2008

Team Save Ferris stands with their winning ride. From left, Josh McGuckin, Sandra Hueske, James Olson, Matt Fisher and Jeremiah Hueske.
Metro State students really do know a lot about living life in the fast lane.

For three industrial design students and a couple of their pals, a little childhood curiosity and loads of technical ingenuity led to victory in the 2008 Red Bull Soapbox Race last weekend at Red Rocks Park in Morrison.

The quintet, led by Metro State students Josh McGuckin, Matt Fisher and Jeremiah Hueske, decided in May that they wanted to conceptualize, build and race a vehicle in the amateur derby. On Aug. 5, they put in the first hours of what became a more than 600-hour journey to a first-place race finish and the People’s Choice Award in a custom-built, scaled-down version of the flaming red 1961 Ferrari 250GT California Spyder made famous in the 80s cult classic film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Team Save Ferris, which also included Sandra Hueske (Jeremiah’s wife) and friend James Olson, decided to dress up on race day and play the parts of various characters from the film.

“[We] had a lot of spectators coming through [in pit row], which was really fun,” says McGuckin. “… They’d kind of bunch up around our car.”

Fisher, a professional mountain biker, was chosen as the driver of the team’s prized craft. The team engineered the car to be driven backward to simulate the scene in the movie where the two truant teens are trying to run back the odometer on the sports car. The team completed the ruse by concealing Fisher, who would drive lying down, with a cover across the seating compartment to create the impression that no one was driving the car.

“He popped out of the tonneau cover at the very bottom [of the quarter-mile course] and everybody cheered,” says McGuckin. “They saw that he was the character of the parking garage attendant that joyrides the car in the movie. That was a good little surprise for people.”

The car, which McGuckin estimates cost the team about $1,400 to engineer (they also had a few in-kind donations), will be on display at the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver for the next year. It will also be displayed on campus during the annual industrial design student show next spring.

Forty-three teams entered the race, but McGuckin says that a Red Bull representative told them they were the first team ever both to win the race and to be selected as the favorite by race fans. McGuckin said the race announcer described the cars as ranging from “marvels of engineering to ‘hey, dude what do you want to do tomorrow.’”

Their success, McGuckin says, gives the team momentum as they begin prepping for a title defense in next year’s competition.

“We’ll surely be doing something again next year,” says McGuckin. “This is such a fun experience.”

The team’s Web site is at http://www.teamsaveferris.com/.

For an extensive gallery of photos, including concept renderings, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshmcguckin/sets/72157605975075439/.

For more information about the race, visit http://www.redbullsoapboxusa.com/.

We’re the red Ferrari at the start of the video

We are at 3:52 in this video