Of Boxcars and Broken Drill-Bits
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Attention, Go! Team Row Ding taking off at the Red Bull Soap Box Race[/caption]
“Custom forged, with fibre glass, you say?”
“Yeah… it was a lot of work, but we’re really happy with how it looks”
I looked again at the majestic craft before me, all aerodynamic ripples and smooth chassis, before pivoting to survey our own contraption, sitting one bay over in the pit lane. Our cardboard oars still needed to be painted, and one of the carpet tiles we were using to imitate body-work had fallen off. I asked myself again what the hell we were doing here.
One of the amazing aspects of On Purpose is how well thought through everything is. Tom, with his McKinsey background and Swiss efficiency is a master of making the most of very little, of the surgical application of effort to maximise output. So exactly why the hell we were entered into a soap box race, with folly coming out its ears was a complete mystery to me when Kate asked me to get involved.
Having just moved down to London from Derby, I was looking to get stuck into as much stuff as possible and jumped at the opportunity to join the team.
In the early days, the good old early days, momentum was everywhere. Our chief engineer, Duncan put together some drawings that nobody understood, but looked impressively complicated. We quickly got our hands on the BMXs we needed (big thanks to Bike Works and Free Cycle). And we found a workspace in London Hackspace that more than suited our needs.
In the good old early days, drowning in momentum, we thought we would get the whole cart built, refined and road tested with three days of work. Ha!
Pin-pointing the exact moment that momentum left us for dead is not difficult. It is when our first tool came into contact with our first piece of metal. Surely this was meant to be a walk in the park; a bunch of office workers dabbling with manual labour, reconnecting with the joy of tangible, physical outputs? There wasn’t meant to be any dirt, or pain. There weren’t meant to be any uncomfortable realisations in the domain of DIY capability, or a complete lack thereof. Eight hours, a broken drill and many safety near-misses later, we had cut up one piece of metal and drilled three holes, so crooked they were totally unusable.
The next six weeks are a blur of drilling, dust, and shoddy workmanship. They are most definitely not a blur of free time, weekends and easy-going reverie.
So, the day before the race, standing in the pit lane beside our £80 contraption, talking shop with the professional engineers and their custom-moulded fibre-glass-land-rocket, there was a definite sense of paranoia.
All of that dissipated very quickly as the weekend got going. Enjoying dinner with the team on Saturday night, sharing war stories with the other competitors, and the interest and horror from the general public at our plan to send a man down the course backward melded into an experience enjoyable enough to make the hard work of the previous two months totally worth it.
And the run itself? We may not have won; Martin and Lee may have post-traumatic stress, but to be singled out on TV as the highlight of the weekend was a result we couldn’t have imagined beforehand.
There is a lot to be said for doing something without any agenda other than it being a bit mad, a bit of a risk and potentially a bit fun. Even in the earnest world of social enterprise, where the challenge is to build big, beautiful businesses with little resource, there is wisdom in building small, death-trap-box-cars with less resource. Because reconnecting with things our daily routine doesn’t bring us into contact with is refreshing; because learning new things is enjoyable; and because doing exciting things, with good people should never be underestimated.
