Soap Opera

Soap Box Racing is back in the consciousness of the British public with the big advertising campaign on early evening peak time viewing for a big event in the summer at Alexandra Palace in London.

Of course, the depiction of typical competitors is extreme which is totally acceptable in the spirit of the thing but nevertheless implies a lot of people will expend a tremendous amount of money, know-how and physical effort in their bid for the main prize. That is not what I call Soap Box ethics.

The definition of a Soap Box is just as it says on the box and its component parts should be sourced and scavenged from your Father's tool shed, Mother's gas cupboard and from ditches, hedgerows, ten foots and street side rubbish skips accordingly. I am not devoid of ambition or a competitive edge but I was drawn in to the whole high-tech approach to building a Soap Box Street Racer some years ago and it was a disastrous experience.

This was not because the resulting vehicle did not perform well or crashed out on the first suggestion of a bend, fell apart as nuts and bolts loosened at the first passage over bumpy ground or was too heavy and collapsed it's chassis. No, it was worse than all of these nightmare scenarios of a proud and diligent research and development programme.

Our blueprint for a machine faster than a runaway pram (less child passenger), more aerodynamic than a wheelie bin blown over in the wind and lighter than a motorbike and sidecar got no further than the bickering stage over who would be in charge of the project, what our individual roles and responsibilities would be, who would contribute money and time, where we would actually build the thing and what it would, eventually, be named.

I should have foreseen the big drama of assembling the team in response to an invitation to participate at a forthcoming Soap Box Derby. In retrospect we were not a natural grouping and in the real world we would not have even acknowledged each other across a street or in a supermarket aisle even if negotiation of those places involved having to clamber over each other.

The two oldest lads were a bit geeky and you know the type, spoke their own mutual language which the rest of us could not fathom or comprehend. They had very firm and insistent ideas on matters of design, precision engineering, the science and technology of moving an object.

The rest of us thought we were just going to build a box on pram wheels with a go-fast stripe down the side. My own perception for the creation was something you would expect to see Starsky and Hutch in if they came across hard times.

The first meeting came around soon. We all felt it important to start and maintain some momentum and enthusiasm for what would be likely to eat into our valuable free time on evenings and at weekends. The local Scout Troop allowed us to use the Hut as headquarters, laboratory, workshop and as it was old and creaky, a potential wind tunnel.

Ideas were thrown back and forth or dismissed cruelly with a haughty laugh. The two oldest who were especially telepathetic in each other's company dictated proceedings and us minions were left bemused and stunned by their visions for the build project.

The chassis was to be in lightweight metal angle brackets, cross braced and tensioned with aluminium fittings. Although only a one-seater it was evidently going to be quite large. I glanced at the hut doors and mentally calculated that we would probably have to cut away the side of the building to extract the machine or take off the roof. It was a bit like, I recalled, the hilarious story of a man who built a plane in his bedroom- wings and all and had to demolish the house to get it out.

The bodywork was to be in brushed stainless steel which, I admit, was a few years ahead of the DeLorean Corporation but our project leaders could easily have read about such innovative things in their science magazines.

The rest of the design was a bit vague and would have to be worked out as we progressed.

Later after the meeting our sub group met outside the chippy and, after putting aside our differences and actually introducing ourselves by name, expressed our concerns at the direction in which the project was going- ironically for a Soap Box- downhill and fast.

Subsequent meetings got us bogged down in procedure and administration. It took a couple of full evening sessions to decide the wording for an obvious begging letter to local companies asking for donations of, well, everything from metalwork to spray paint and from brackets to wheels. We did live in a small but busy town, in the days before the Hypermarkets killed off the sole traders and so everything we would need was at our fingertips. Unfortunately, the proprietors and principals of the business community had their own fingertips tightly gripped on their stock and would not relinquish anything that ate into their profits.

After about the third week we had managed to persuade a few shopkeepers to donate items in return for a promise of a sponsors logo on the bodywork of the vehicle when completed. I was good at mental calculations and paraphrasing Chief Brodie in Jaws was convinced that "we're gonna need a bigger body" to fulfil our graphic based promises.

The perceptions of the chassis as light and strong had to be shelved because no-one would contribute the materials. I do not blame them because aluminium was expensive. We had to compromise with lengths of galvanised metal which had previously formed shelf racking in the workshop of the Austin-Morris Franchised garage and petrol station in the High Street. These were light but also weak and disturbingly flexible even when braced and doubled up.

Hopes for the bodywork were also thwarted by the state of the local economy and we adopted a very Plan B, or C or D and settled for cutting up and riveting together pieces of large tin cans formerly containing cooking oil , intended to be thrown out but then gracefully given by a restaurant owner. The patchwork appearance did not engender confidence in stability or aerodynamics. For a few weeks my parents were convinced that I was moonlighting in a commercial kitchen from the distinctive odour of animal fats that had permeated my skin.

A big crisis arose when it was time to work out how to attach the free running axles and wheels. The ideal connector did not, as far as we could perceive, actually exist in the commercial world. We skipped the issue hoping that Unipart or Siemens and other global engineering concerns were close to full production of such an item.

There were plenty of other dilemnas and conundrums to be overcome.

Suffice to say and by almost mutual acceptance apart from the two geeky lads who actually cried at the failure to launch we gave up. One of the Dads was on hand to whisk away the wreckage to the local scrap merchant and we did, amazingly have a hand out of monies as a result and feasted on chips and scraps, very briefly.

I did keep a look out for the race event later on in the year. I would like to report that the winner was a Soap Box on wheels with a go-fast stripe but the overwhelming victor was in the form of a sleek, shiny aluminium body which fair zipped down the hillside course.

As small compensation, for my bad experience, the winning team looked like they were ready to kill each other behind the smiles and waves to the small crowd as they lifted the hideous trophy.