For a second, imagine you don’t live here. Deep in the southeastern part of Portland, there’s a dormant volcano. Around this volcano, there’s a massive forested public park (191 acres), with hiking trails, several reservoirs, a dog park, and a disc golf course. Every summer Portlanders huddle around the concrete walkway in the middle of the park and watch gravity-powered homemade cars hurtle down the track, from the top of the volcano to the bottom. Some cars are built for speed—sleek and low to the ground. Far more are built for artistic expression, to get the crowd hooting and hollering.
Now, you, a person who doesn’t live here, hearing about this for the first time? You probably think it’s a little much. And you’re right. Portland is never beating those charges. It’s a place where a lot of adults are doing energetic, weird, youthful shit.
This is what attracted David Paulsen—the director of the Portland Adult Soap Box Derby, which ran its 26th annual race this past weekend—to the city in the first place.
“I was a ward of the state of Idaho,” Paulsen says, “living in group homes and foster care. On my 17th birthday, I ran away to Portland. I was living in a provisional housing program off Hawthorne that unfortunately just closed due to federal funding cuts. In 2000, I wandered by, saw my first derby, and fell in love with it. It was the Portland I was looking for. Spray-painted, booger-welded frames… crazy, fun people being creative and having a fantastic time… I’ve been around ever since.”
If you’ve never had the pleasure of attending, here’s how the Adult Soapbox Derby works: At the top of Mt. Tabor, near the playground, there’s a large pit area where drivers loll about, putting finishing touches on their vehicles, and talking to passers-by about their creations. If you made your car look like Lightning McQueen—like Max Strand and the Benchmade Knife Company team—you let kids sit in the driver’s seat and get some pictures.
“It took us a couple months to build,” Strand says about their racer. “Spray foam covers an existing frame, and then spray paint over that. Last year, we used the same frame and ran as the Wonder Bread Car from Talladega Nights.”
At around 10 am, the drivers attend a safety talk from Aaron Foster, another member of the derby board. Then, three at a time, the cars line up at the starting line. Foster, strapped with a megaphone, yells “GRAVITY, START YOUR ENGINES!” Then, three at a time, these cars race down the hill, and after crossing the finish line, get towed back to the top by a friendly truck, sit in the pit for a while, and wait for their number to be called two more times.
For a period between rounds, people can walk up and down the track—but when it’s time to get going, a clutch of megaphone-sporting volunteers rush everyone off so the next cars can start. Some of these vehicles—the smaller, sleeker ones that are lower to the ground—really start to haul ass as they get halfway down the hill. Other carts don’t go as fast, but they content themselves by looking cool, weird, funny, whatever. One car, the fan favorite this year, was a gigantic slice of cheese, populated by drivers dressed as mice. Some of these jokers amuse themselves by blasting startling quantities of water into the crowd.
“We call our entry ‘The Fastest Car’,” says John Dixon, an engineer at Daimler Truck running in his ninth race, “because we took two days to build it. It’s not the fastest on the course, but it’s the fastest built. We normally kill ourselves all summer building [our car], but this one? We were on the waitlist until the last minute, so we just threw it together.”
Despite “throwing together” their vehicle, it was clearly built with lots of engineering knowledge.
“We used a wood chassis to give it a flexible suspension,” Dixon points out. “Our steering design is really well outfitted for this course. Normal wheels this size have much smaller spindles, but on this course they can’t take the load, so you’ll see them fall over when they start going really fast. Instead, we got heavy duty spindles and rebuilt them with custom rims.”
As you can probably imagine, not all soapbox racers are created equal.
Richard Beard and Joe Davis have built a representation of a Mercedes G-Wagon that they call “The Wooden G.” They spent the last two months, “but mainly, the last two weeks,” building the car—their first ever entry. Their first run was marred by a slipped axle.
“It was kind of hitting the brakes a little bit,” Beard says. “That was the first time we went down a long enough hill to know something’s wrong. We had no plans and no measurements… we just went for it, and somehow it just worked out.”
Casey Wagoner, the driver of the “Muscle Kween”—a “pink Cadillac inspired by gay charisma and strength”—had a rough start.
“Round one, we had a flat tire and didn’t realize it,” Wagoner notes. “So we got pulled across the finish line by a bicycle. But my Kween looked stunning in the back, so I don’t care. She looked good.”
“I just love the Postal Service, so I wanted to build something that looked like a postal truck,” says Tony Abraham, who modeled their team’s car after the USPS’ iconic Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle). “[It was constructed with] a lot of 3D printed parts, really thin plywood, and a little bent sheet metal. The bumper is 3D printed, along with the mirrors, and rivets. Last year we were a TriMet bus, which was a big hit. This year we cut the bus off, and stuck a postal truck on top.”
Michael Centeno, sporting a big fake-fur hat and a necklace with a bunch of spray foam cigarette butts around his neck, was elated.
“It’s incredible! All this artwork, all these beautiful people, all these races, it’s a lot of fun!”
His team’s car, “The Croc Pot,” depicts a crocodile busting out of an outhouse in Aurora, Oregon. It’s based on a true story.
“See, someone bought a crocodile as an exotic pet and their parents didn’t want to let them keep it, so they tossed it in the outhouse,” Centeno recalls. “It grew up, eating whatever it could find, and one day, it got too big and busted out. Age-old revenge story.”
Centeno and his team work at Aurora Mills Architectural Salvage, and constructed their car out of materials from the shop.
“We put it together with a bunch of foam, chicken wire, reclaimed wood, [as well as] reclaimed materials like a horn, baluster, and old school chairs.”
“I’m just a girl with a dream of making a corndog go fast,” says Alex Paget, seen here sitting in the backseat of her car, a tribute to one of Oregon’s most famous inventions. “I grew up in the Portland area, and my dad has always wanted to do this. He retired last year, so we started building it.”
“The event was phenomenal. It was the biggest derby we’ve ever had as far as attendance goes,” says Paulsen, who ballparked the attendance at more than 10,000. “Nobody was injured, a couple of minor crashes… a good time was had by all.”
Paulsen was frank when asked about the biggest challenges of putting on this event: finding money and volunteers.
“I try to make it clear I don’t run the derby: 300 volunteers run the derby. We just do the steering, the permitting, the fundraising, the organizing. Then, every year Portland shows up. The volunteers, the local businesses… they support us and make this possible.
“On the surface, it seems like it would be an impossible pitch. You tell a city you’re gonna run an artsy kind of X Games that’s going to be free to attend, and completely run by volunteers—I don’t think you’d find many people who’d invest in that. And yet, every year hundreds of people invest their time and energy, local businesses invest their beer and their wine, and our other partners who are helping with merch and posters, they give in-kind donations. And somehow we just keep managing to put it together. It’s pretty amazing.”
