A Most Unserious Race
The Gumball 3000 is more media spectacle than athletic competition, with celebrities and wannabes with more money than sense touring the country in expensive toys better suited as side-show attractions than in professional sport. That being said, I can only imagine the thrill, the rush these contestants and their die-hard followers must get from the event.
The rally is – I won’t say grueling – three thousand mile international road race where winning is merely a coincidence; being there is the prize.
First founded in 1999 by English entrepreneur Maximillion Cooper, The event is reminiscent of the ‘80s movie ‘Cannonball Run’, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow; the prize is the attention, the true motivation is anyone’s guess. It draws the attention of many of the ‘beautiful people’; what we used to call the jet set – in my mind’s eye I can see a marvelously tanned George Hamilton, his gleaming smile and his silken scarf whipping in the wind over the back of his Bugatti.
Mostly run in Europe, the race has run all over the world, including a visit to North Korea in 2008. This year, the thirteenth annual Gumball 3000 was held May 25th to the 31st on the North American continent, primarily coast-to-coast through the United States, with a brief jaunt near the beginning into Canada to Toronto. The maximum 120-driver field took the green flag in Times Square at noon, and the checkered flag on Hollywood Boulevard seven days later. To all but a few who won was not important. For most what mattered was to say that you were there, either as a participant or a witness, to what is arguably the most glamorous, glitzy automobile rally on earth. And oh, by the way, the winners were Charles and Kira Morgan, in their 2012 Morgan Threewheeler. As far as I can tell, neither George Hamilton, Burt Reynolds, nor the late, great comedic talent Dom DeLuise attended.
