![]() That’s not exactly NASCAR money, especially as the newer, competitive 600-plus-hp rigs (they are always “rigs” or “buggies” and never “cars”) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 to build.īottom: The making of a race course and of a hangover. Still, a $10,000 prize is on offer for the driver who wins the championship. This is only the third season of rock-bouncer racing for the organization, which has been a glorious, money-losing operation for the three guys who run it. The driver with the lowest cumulative time for both hills wins. The competition consists of timed runs up two nasty, tree-lined, rock-strewn hills in wild-looking, purpose-built, tube-frame, four-wheel-drive contraptions. I’ve come to Arkansas for the fifth and final event of the 2014 Southern Rock Racing Series. His run was the quickest of the 21 competitors who tried it that soggy Saturday morning at the Hot Springs ORV Park. It only occurs to me sometime later that I didn’t do anything to justify giving or receiving a high-five. The next thing I know, I’m high-fiving Ruttan’s wife, who’s standing trailside. Then, suddenly, everything is quiet and curiously still. I remember thinking, “I feel like an embryo.” But I have no idea now what that might mean. My senses are jangled by the vibrations from the rigidly mounted engine, the spastic pogoing of the horizon, and the beastly staccato snorts blasting out the open header positioned a couple of inches from my right foot. And judging by the smudges of red paint on my once-pristine-white Arai helmet, I’ve made contact on three different sides of the race buggy’s roll cage. Turns out we did, but naturally we kept on going. The whole ride feels like hitting a tree. ![]() How savage was the ride? Well, I couldn’t tell if we hit a tree or not. What happens next is 16 seconds of supernova violence. Sissy writer takes a ride in Hillbilly Deluxe. I’m sitting immediately behind a 2002 Chevy LS6 V-8 that’s been bored and stroked to 383 cubic inches and pumps out about 600 horsepower, the open header for which I briefly and quite accidentally stuck the toe of my right sneaker into as I clambered up into the cage. I’m strapped into a bright-red cage that looks like a cross between a bicycle helmet and the skeleton of a stegosaurus. And my driver, one Peter Ruttan, who casually made the comment through his helmet, is ready for his timed run up a steep hill made up mostly of jagged, irregular, three-foot-tall saw teeth of almost translucent novaculite stone. This is the last event of the season for the world’s loudest and roughest off-road buggies, the aptly named rock-bouncer racers. I hurriedly fish around the seat bottom for what was previously known to me as an anti-submarine belt, latch it, and cinch it as tight as my arm muscles will allow. “Don’t forget your nut belt you’re gonna to need it.” From the February 2015 issue of Car and Driver
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