It's on: Bernal Hill soapbox derby drowns out Red Bull hangover
The real thing!
By Deborah Giattina
Hey, it was oppressive seeing all those Red Bull banners waving from electric poles and street lights around the Mission Dolores corridors. Soon after Red Bull umbrellas started popping up at cafes with outdoor seating. Great. An energy drink is taking over the Mission.
The banners were announcing the Oct 18 Red Bull Soap Box Derby held off of Dolores Park, where an estimated 60,000 attendees gathered to watch the race rolling down Dolores between 21st and 18th Streets on huge “Big Brother is Watching You” screens erected around the park.
You had to show up early to find a spot where you could actually see the soapbox cars cruise down the track using the power of nothing more than your own two eyes. No doubt, the vehicles were creative but not exactly built for speed.
Worst of all, I feared the corporate-sponsored spectacle, held in four cities across the lower 48 this year, might have co-opted the annual derby held by the San Francisco Illegal Soapbox Society, whose members have been swerving down Bernal Hill since 1993. Rest assured, it’s still happening, as evidenced by Telstar Logistics’s recent post on the Sunday after Halloween, as per usual.
I talked to one of SFISS’s original members, Ceppie Maes, to find out what he thought of all this. Says Ceppie, who has been into the underground “gravity racing” scene since the mid-80s, “It’s cool that someone popularized it, but I think it’s kind of a mockery of it.”
Far be it from Ceppie or me to tell 60,000 Bay Areans not to have a good time in hipster-infested Dolores Park. Red Bull took care of that by posting this white monolith of rules --including no pets allowed, by gosh!
If you decide to trek up Bernal Hill to witness old-school SF bike messengers reach speeds of 40 miles per hour and find out who gets bragging rights to this year’s win, you won’t have to fend off any “wing girls” trying to force-feed you an un-nourishing combo of caffeine, sugar, and synthetic bull bile while doing so. Instead, this is what you’re in for:
2007 SFISS vid -- tres cool!
Like the Red Bull event, all vehicles are homemade (no pre-fab), but on the hill your showboating skills won’t get you across the finish line first. Oh, and note that it’s mandatory all vehicles incorporate a beer cozy. I suppose said cozy could just as easily hold other types of refreshments, but beer is so much better.
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