Sometimes it seems to me like the early days of motorsports were more interesting because people hadn’t figured out the best ways t do everything yet so there was a lot of creativity and innovation going into race car/truck/whatever design. And sure, there’s still some of that going on today, but the vehicles feel a lot more samey now with the main differences being tiny technical things. So how about a new motorsport that would require new car designs that we haven’t perfected yet?
My proposal is handbrake drag racing. It starts out like regular drag racing, but at the end of the drag strip you must do a handbrake turn and then go back the way you came. Winner is, of course, whoever returns to where they started first or the quickest. I figure this is different enough from regular drag racing that you’d need a whole new type of race car for it. You couldn’t just use a conventional drag racer, since that’d probably flip over if you tried to do a handbrake turn, so it’d require a lot of thought put into getting the right balance of being able to safely do the turn at the end while also being fast in a straight line, and I think that design challenge could yield some really interesting vehicles.
Perhaps a time trial setup on something like an abandoned runway would be the safest setting for this since you’d have plenty of space to spin out without hitting anything if you failed to control the handbrake turn well enough. And if you were racing against someone rather than just against the clock, I imagine the lanes should probably be pretty far apart just to be safe.
Any thoughts?
