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Motorized Chariot Racing

When you hear the term "motorized, " your mind conjures up images of a motorcycle, or one of those motorcycles with pod-cars attached to the side that always had mustached men with scarves and old-timey flight goggles riding in them. When you hear "chariot racing, " your mind hearkens back to the glorious days of Ancient Rome, when men would stand on glorified horse-and-buggies and race opponents around a dirt track. When you hear "motorized chariot racing, " well, your mind gets kicked in the face.

Motorized chariot racing is what happens when you don your favorite Roman legionnaire costume, hop in your chariot (what, you don't already have one?), and race your friends around in a circle. But here's the catch, Ben Hur: you won't be staring into a horse's unsightly rear end the whole time. Nope - you'll be hooking your chariot up to a tiny, two wheeled, decked-out tractor-like contraption that can haul ass. As it turns out, there's actually a league dedicated to the exploration of this activity called the Roman-X Motorized Chariot Racing League. These guys take their Romanity very, very seriously. You can laugh all you want, but at the end of the day, they have a custom-made chariot hooked up to an armored lawnmower, and you don't. Given my natural curiosity for all things manly, I decided to contact the boys behind the chariots ourselves and see just what it was they were up to (probably world domination). Here's what I found out. Since its creation six years ago by chariot racers extraordinaire Terry Ewert and co., the Roman-X name has been patented, the "horses" have been modified and, after a temporary tabling, the franchise has actually been tapped by Sharp Productions for a Bert the Conqueror segment in which the show's star, the aptly named Bert, climbed into the chariot and gave the machine a gnarly test run.

It turns out that my discovery of motorized chariot racing couldn't have come at a better time - the episode of Bertshould premiers on the Travel Channel sometime in early July. If you aren't there watching every minute of it, I will find you. While you're waiting, though, you should head over to the Roman X site and check out their stuff. Pretty awesome stuff, right there.