Kinetic energy
It may all be in good fun, but the participants in Ventura’s 10th Annual Kinetic Sculpture Race are
By Marissa Landrigan 10/25/2007
Bob Thompson says when he tells people he spent 12 hours a day, seven days a week for the last six weeks getting his sculpture ready for a kinetic sculpture race, people usually don’t believe him.
“I’m retired,” he says, laughing. “So it’s a bit easier for me to find the time.”
Thompson also has the somewhat dubious honor of being the racer who will travel the farthest this week to reach Ventura’s Annual Kinetic Sculpture Race: Making the trip from Eugene, Ore., takes two days of driving each way.
The Ventura Kinetic Sculpture Race is not the first of its kind, but it has become known as one of the more challenging West Coast courses. The basic idea is to combine hobby engineering with art concepts and a triathlon-length course through sand, water, road and mud to see whose design comes out on top. The race is messy, creative and a whole lot of fun, both for the teams competing and the people who get to watch.
According to Thompson, who has raced in all four of the other West Coast courses this year, every race has a different personality. Some cross miles of road but have a lot of large hills to navigate; some last three days. The Ventura course is unique in that it covers so much water and sand, which makes for a complicated engineering approach. But the designers behind these machines have been working on perfecting the structure for years.
Dennis Nickerson, a local legend in the kinetic sculpture world who will not be participating in this year’s race, says it took him three years to get his machine to win. The first year, he was guessing completely, and that approach has stuck with him. “You figure out what doesn’t work, and then you change that,” he says. But whatever he has been fixing, it seems to have worked. Nickerson’s machine, which has gone through many metamorphoses over the years, has won the Ventura course five years in a row. Even though Nickerson didn’t have the time to prepare this year, his sculpture will still be making an appearance, captained by former teammate Hoss Melton, who will see if he can take the sixth title.
Thompson echoed the idea that trial-and-error engineering is the only approach to perfecting the sculptures, and that’s why he works such long hours. He, too, says it took him three years to get his machine even competitive, and several more before he started winning titles. After racing with the same machine and same basic structure for 19 years now, he’s still figuring things out. “You just keep fixing things until they don’t break anymore,” Thompson says, “and there’s always something that breaks!”
The winning formula seems to shift, too, depending on the course and the team in charge. Both Nickerson and Thompson have machines with many ribbons in their past, but their structures are strikingly different. Nickerson’s sculpture, which has carried names such as the Headhunter and the Homeless Piranha, has one giant back wheel and six small front tires. On the other hand, Thompson’s sculpture, this year dubbed the PATRIOT Act, has two 80-inch wheels in the front and steers from the back. Little wonder, then, that this year’s race has added a new feature: a Kinetic Art Show, with past machines and designs on display, to honor the creativity of design and theme that go into making each sculpture unique.
When it comes time to get ready for race day, the captains and riders are a mix of playful and serious. Since the machines undergo constant change, both on the structural and artistic level, the playfulness shines in the artistic concepts behind the sculptures: The captains usually try to get in a few practice runs, but between other hobbies, parenting, day jobs and real life, everyone shows up and rides hard on race day, according to Melton.
The key, Nickerson says, is not taking the race — or yourself — too seriously. “It’s just a very healthy, fun for the whole family day,” he says. And most of all, kinetic sculpture racing is about attracting new, creative minds to push the concepts even further. “I’m always glad to help others build,” Nickerson says, “just to get more people involved. Constant change is part of the fun.”
“Just when you think there’s no other way to do it,” Thompson says, “somebody else comes up with something new and blows everyone else away.”
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