Car Jousting: It's Not Just For Glue-Huffing Holsteiners Anymore
From the April 2013 Issue of Car and Driver
Listen I am an idiot.
It’s important that you remember this simple fact going forward. It’s important that you keep it in mind when I say the following: You know what I think is a very, very good idea?
Car jousting. It is exactly what it sounds like: people jousting with cars instead of horses. People holding pointy lances, leaning out the sides of automobiles, and driving at various objects and each other as fast as they can. I think that’s a brilliant idea because I am an idiot. And to be clear, I am not making it up. Car jousting is real.
As with many staggeringly stupid tales, this begins with a couple of bored teenagers. It is just after harvest season, sometime in the mid-1980s in Schleswig-Holstein, a state on Germany’s northern border. With the crops brought in, local teens found themselves with a bit of idle time, a bunch of vast, empty, muddy fields, some broken farm equipment, and a couple of beaters. The next step was so obvious, it was practically inevitable: Get hammered, slap some of the farm equipment on the cars, and race about in the muddy fields while swinging pointy objects around. It was like running with scissors. Only faster. And drunker.
Hey, video games hadn’t exactly caught on yet. Gotta do something to pass the time.
What started with a few teenagers hilariously failing to understand Darwinism soon morphed into something more. Passers-by saw the severely inebriated, dangerously reckless young men bouncing through uneven fields in jury-rigged Mad Max car-monsters, and naturally thought: “That looks like a very, very good idea.”
Because they were, like me, idiots.
Now car-jousting is an annual event held across much of northern Germany. They call it Autoringstechen, and though it has grown throughout the years, it’s still a somewhat underground affair (the largest event seems to bring only around 60 cars). That’s because it is massively, understandably illegal—even if, in practice, it doesn’t seem all that dangerous. The action is controlled by a Hausmeister, or caretaker, who keeps jousters from doing anything “unsafe,” which is, of course, used here as a purely relative term. Yes, these are smoking scrapheaps haphazardly fused with tractors, barreling through dirt while a drunken farmhand stands on the roof with a six-foot lance and tries to spear a two-inch ring, but according to the participants, there have been no major injuries in its 30-year run.
But those are Germans: Even at their most reckless, they are still a relatively level-headed, reasonable people. The same cannot be said of their American, Australian, and even English counterparts, who saw this absurd practice and thought, “Psh, you call that reckless? I can be waaay dumber than that.” And they were right.
Hit up YouTube right now and plug in “car jousting”—you’ll find Brits in Mini Coopers charging at one another in a half-full parking lot, swinging wrapping paper tubes as they pass. You’ll find men on mini-bikes clutching poles tipped with boxing gloves. From an unnamed county fair, you’ll find a clip of four men on ATVs: one driver and one lancer per vehicle. They hit so hard their PVC-pipe lances shatter on impact. You’ll find Americans in sedans racing down suburban streets, squaring off against armored opponents . . . on bicycles.
Do you know how I found out about car jousting? I imagined the dumbest thing I could, looked it up, and I kept digging until I found somebody doing it right. That is the depth and breadth of human stupidity: There is no new idiocy under the sun, there is only old idiocy with a shiny coat of paint slapped on it.
And thank God, too, because it is the idiots who drag human progress forward. It is the idiots who have driven every great technological leap—tripping, bumbling, and pratfalling toward Utopia. Idiots gave us the car as we know it today in the first place. Oh sure, the actual work was done by grim-faced technicians in clean white coats, but pure engineering can only take you so far. When all the valves are checked and the variables factored, you’re still going to hand over the keys to an idiot, who is going to bolt a bright-green spoiler on your master’s thesis and crash it into a wall.
And we’re all going to learn something from it, because progress is a two-step process consisting of “failure” and “solution.” That’s why I’m happy to be an idiot—because while the solution phase is just a bunch of boring numbers in a computer, the failure phase is a glorious, drunken German mounting the bastard offspring of an Opel and a monster truck, careening through a muddy wheat field, just trying to get his Cognac-addled eyes to focus long enough to put his iron lance through a tiny metal ring at 50 mph.
Robert Brockway lives in car-hating Portland, Oregon, and is a senior editor and columnist for Cracked.com. He wishes to thank E.F. Kaeding for his assistance with this piece.
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