New motorsport: the RAINBOW Challenge

It stands for “Road And Interstate Navigators’ Battle Of Wits” and it’s a combination road rally and trivia contest. Each team has a driver, navigator, and moderator. The moderator rides with one of the opposing teams. Before the event, each team must come up with 50 unique trivia questions (or fewer with more teams, but there should be at least 100 questions total) that can be as easy or as hard as they like. The moderators from each team then meet separately and share their questions with each other to ensure that their answers are correct. They then randomly order all of the questions and print them out (with answers) for every car. The moderators then join the team they will be riding with and get in the back seat. Now, the goal is to get as far from the starting point as possible. Every two minutes, the moderator will read a question. If the driver and navigator answer wrong, they get one strike. After 3-5 strikes, depending on what was decided beforehand, the moderator will immediately check the GPS coordinates and end the run for that car. The other catch is that, for every five seconds spent going 5+ over the speed limit, the team loses one mile from their total distance in the end. If a team manages to get every question right, their run ends after the two minute window for the last question, and they get a bonus 10 miles to their score. The teams are NOT allowed to study their own questions beforehand, so if they forget an answer, that’s too bad. Since the teams will likely be spread very far apart in the end, the contest can be followed with a race back to the start, giving the losing team an advantage and a better shot at redemption. Once they’ve regrouped, the losers (of the main event, not the race) buy the winners a round of drinks, or dinner, or a tank of gas, or whatever. The in-between teams just don’t get anything, unless a money pool was put together at the beginning.

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