Yes, You Can Race Bump-N-Run and Still Love Classic Cars

The race started with a familiar routine: Earplugs before climbing into the car, helmet before belts, and gloves last. Right as I was reaching for the ignition a cheery face popped in front of me, where the windshield should have been, and asked, “Are ya nervous?”

It was a fair question. I didn’t have an answer—it’s hard to be nervous about something you’ve never done before. My trusty steed, a 1986 Chevrolet Caprice which had been rescued from sitting ten years in a field, was more prepared for battle than I.

The roar of the small-block through the upturned headers drowned out any emotion after that, which was probably a good thing. I idled away from the U-Haul trailer and towards the dirt oval and grandstands behind the Northwestern Michigan Fair, where I would soon be in my first car crash. Well, that’s being a bit grand, but when the green flag dropped, it would be a full-contact affair. This was no normal race I was joining—this was my first bump-n-run.

For those uninitiated, as I was, bump-n-run is the sibling of the demolition derby—the bane of the classic-car community, the bar-fighting cousin of dirt-track racing. Typically taking place on fairgrounds and other non-motorsports venues, it’s full-contact racing that remains palatable because race organizers can water down these short tracks to minimize traction and thus keep big hits in check.

Having tried my hand at the more gentlemanly versions of racing in recent years, the concept has captivated me for a while. I’ve crewed for and assisted my friend Tim Wahl for various bump-n-run events, and we have been talking about building a car together for two or three years, but I’ve always failed to take the real leap and start the project. In the middle of a weekday afternoon this summer, Tim sent me a text: He had a second car that could be ready for the upcoming local show. “You can drive it if you want. Happy to talk about it.”

Couldn’t say yes fast enough.

The build that Tim and I had previously tossed around was a simple “small car” entry, a unibody front-wheel-drive car with minimal prep. In bump-n-run, “small car” is the entry point. These cars typically run clockwise around the small dirt ovals, meaning that any contact would likely happen to the vehicle’s passenger side.

From there some drivers decide to step up to “big car.” These are the rear-drive, small-block-powered cars of 40 and 50 years ago, though they rarely look much like they did when they left the factory, for a lot of reasons. The big cars get to turn left and have the extra thrill of potential hits to the driver’s door.

Tim had offered for me to drive his big car, the aptly named “Captain Crunch,” once an ’86 Caprice. It’s exciting racing to watch, and the opportunity to get in a big car was too good to pass up. It was even worth the two solid weeks of “are you sure about this?” from my loving wife.

So on one of those clear blue, 75-degree summer Fridays that make the winters in northern Michigan remotely tolerable, I cut out of work early. I tossed a cooler and an aged-out motocross helmet into my big red Express van and stopped a few miles into the drive to Tim’s to pick up a U-Haul trailer.

Loading the car up onto its galvanized death bed was also the time to talk with Tim about the final preparation. For my steed, that involved a quick carburetor “rebuild” to fix a flooding issue that likely originated at an aging needle and seat. We waited to test-fire the very tired 350 until we were at the track, because Tim had only two requests for me when I accepted the offer to drive:

1. Bring your own side-post battery.
2. Please don’t hit me with my own car—or, at least, not that bad.

As great as Tim’s offer was, I was not prepared to swipe my credit card for a battery that I would only need for one night. I had decided to drive my van, which would serve as the tow rig, and pull the battery from the van to put in Captain Crunch. After the evening of racing was done, I would put the battery back in the van and drive it home. What could go wrong?

Tim’s second request was easy to agree with, mainly because I had no idea how difficult—or easy—it would be to stay out of the sheetmetal of the car he was driving, a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass adorned with a Chevelle Laguna front end, all painted bright yellow and branded the “Crash Cab.” It is his dedicated bump-n-run car, whereas Captain Crunch is actually his demolition derby car that was thrown together from spare parts. It had shocked us all by surviving two demo derbies, and I was driving it because he thought he’d get a laugh out of seeing his own car on track for once.

At the driver’s meeting, the promoter laid out the schedule for the evening, along with some strong suggestions about getting out of the cars and shaking hands at the end of the night. “There are kids around and you’re setting an example for them,” he said. The smaller, front-wheel-drive-based classes would start the evening and the big cars would follow. There would be a short break, then the feature races. While the small car classes were deep with entrants, there were just a handful of us in Big Car, so our heat was given a $50 purse and everyone was told they would go on to the feature race at the end of the night. This guaranteed Tim and I two races, which was a nice bonus.

Between swings of the 10-pound sledgehammer, I clarified some race strategy with Tim. “Is this a thing where you hit other cars intentionally or just don’t put effort into not hitting them?” With each blow, the hammer packed the already unrecognizable metal of Captain Crunch up just a little tighter, making a little more room to ensure that as the car further deformed it would not cut the tires—preventative maintenance, of sorts.

Seeing how resourceful most of the crews were in keeping their cars running all night was impressive. I’ve done my fair share of roadside fixes to get home, but patching together a derby car to get through a night of racing was a whole different level of “repair.” So many solutions looked and felt so very wrong to my classically trained brain, but whenever I talked with the people doing the work, I realized the methods and techniques were honed over years. They could easily call out the how and why of the process—for example, the radiator hoses. (Keeping coolant circulating in the engine is not nearly as critical as I initially thought but it’s still something everyone is trying to do.) The lower host was wrapped in duct tape, and the upper one was a universal, “one size fits all” piece, not the model-specific one you would expect to see. It looked like the team had grabbed whatever parts were on hand, but they had carefully chosen the combination of tape and hoses so that they would not fail as the front end twisted and distorted.

My plan was simple: Keep Tim’s car alive. I idled out onto the short oval track, shaped by a concrete jersey-barrier spine punctuated on each end by tires pulled from much larger machinery than ours. Tim and I were next to each other as we rolled out of the pits, and by chance, we were fender-to-fender on the front row of the rolling start. The starter was a gruff man in a bright pink shirt, like all the crew running the race. He held us for a moment and got everyone lined up the way he wanted before hitting the hood of the Crash Cab and sending us out to slow-roll a lap in anticipation of the green flag.

I was sitting on the outside of Tim, and even in my ignorance I could tell this track position was not ideal. While calling this slow roll a sighting lap would be generous, I used it as such. A decent sized hole had developed in “turn 4” that I mentally noted to try and avoid for fear of breaking a bead off the rear tire. A plan began to form in my head. I kept my eyes locked on the starter’s pink shirt and “flag” in his hand—a short stick with a piece of green cloth stapled to it. His arm flinched, and I floored the throttle.

Even my extremely loose plan vaporized in the cacophony of open-header V-8s and the heart-stopping crunch and scrape of everyone muscling their way through the first turns. Unable to switch my brain off and ignore the creaking and groaning of nearby cars as they got brutally re-formed, I turned in for the left-hand corner, leaving room for Tim to make the corner on the inside. The white Ford who started the row behind me had other ideas. The driver shoved the massive nose of his battleship right between us, effectively punting me into a spin and pushing Tim into a tighter arc than he planned. My arms flailed, my brain reeled, and my eyes shot away from the track and straight out the window. The sound and fury were so novel that it was all I could do to not be a spectator in the action. While my helmet-mounted GoPro didn’t pick it up, I recall yelling at myself, “Get your sh*t together, you’re driving.”

I did not, in fact, get my poop in a group. My arms continued to make hasty and ill-timed yanks of the steering wheel, while my feet stomped at the pedals as if there were a fire ant colony exploding from the firewall. My body bounced around, restrained only by the factory lap belt in the blue couch that was the original power seat. Luckily, Tim had wedged and ratchet-strapped a couch cushion between my ribs and the massive chunks of steel that braced the driver’s door.

The race was sensory overload. After hitting every single one of the four cars on track, getting spun, spinning, somehow killing the engine, restarting the engine, AND pushing one of the tractor tires for a tour of the back straight, the checkered flag finally waved. Relief washed over me. While the heat race was scheduled for eight laps, I’m reasonably certain they called the race early out of pity for me.

It had all happened so fast that it seemed like everything I did was a reaction. I was almost never doing something—turning, throttling, or braking—in anything other than a desperate attempt to make a save. Never once did I feel like I was in control of the situation. I cannot recall any other experience in which I felt so out of control.

Yet here I was standing, totally fine, with a group of friends, laughing about the race. Only then did the switch flip that I was trying too hard. The car was bent up seven different ways, the track was tiny, and the best way to try and turn the thing was with the throttle. The heat race replayed in my mind as we all talked and by the time the second drivers meeting was called, I felt confident that my plan wouldn’t fall apart with the first hit.

After the meeting, a couple of the racers stopped to talk to Tim, and I took the opportunity to try and glean some more info about my competition and get a better picture of what I was taking part in. I was curious: Is this whole pursuit driven by the wanton destruction of cars, like many other enthusiasts have told me over the years?

Turns out the answer is not just no, but a no far earlier than I could have ever guessed. The good old days that the drivers talked about actually were old. The supply of cheap cars had gotten used up even as far back as the 1990s, and with no $50 cars to scrounge, both organizers and participants started evolving the sport to keep the cars together longer. They had no choice; if they didn’t, the whole sport would dry up.

According to the 10 racers I chatted with, back then you might get two or three years out of a well built car, even if you did multiple events a year. Oldtimers said it was rare for cars to be used up in just one night. Everyone wanted to stretch their money regardless of what number was in the corner of the bill. You’d end up with steering and axle issues after a handful of runs, sure, but with some big chunks of wood, a come-along, and a flatbed trailer, these dirt-floor mechanics would create a frame rack and straighten a car back out so that they could race it again.

These days are no different. If anything, it’s even more impressive what these cars can survive. Once a person has invested in a good “setup”—engine, shifter, steel for the roll cage, perhaps a rear axle—they need little more than a decent set of frame rails and suspension to create a worthy bump-n-run car. Smart crews carry over that initial set of bolt-in parts between chassis as much as possible. Even the steel used to brace the chassis and protect the driver is cut out and reused. This thriftiness means the longer drivers participate, the harder their money works for them. Most of the gear they buy lives years, much like it does in other forms of motorsport. They want to keep the cars going as long as possible.

Even Tim’s relatively under-built Crash Cab is running strong five years on. The rules of bump-n-run have evolved, and cars are no longer written off casually. On any given weekend in Michigan, says Tim, there are three to four shows with 60 to 80 cars at each event. Most of those cars get loaded up onto open trailers at the end of the night and spend one night in the driveway at home before driving to another event the next day. Entry fees are very reasonable compared to other forms of motorsport. Running costs are similarly reasonable; I could almost cover the night’s cost with couch change.

The other thing that keeps the cars and people running multiple races and events a weekend is the unspoken agreement about the level of contact that is tolerated. The cars might be braced and consumption expected, but when the green flag drops, drivers still have respect for each other. Just before our small group chat broke up to do final preparations for the feature race, I was warned by two other drivers that one of the entrants was a contact-heavy driver and that I should at least be prepared for contact—if I could keep my situational awareness high enough to know when the white Ford was near me.

Armed with a tiny amount of experience and advice from a few veterans of the derby, I idled Captain Crunch out to lead the first lap of the feature race. Did things go better? Not really, if we are being honest, but I kept the front end of my red chariot headed in the correct direction this time, each hit bringing the hood line higher as the frame began to fold at the firewall.

My second race was far less chaotic, and that slightly disconcerting feeling of the first race was gone, leading me to just go out and enjoy throwing a giant chunk of iron around a circle track, free from the consequences that typically come with race-track contact. No longer scared, I embraced the fun, along with crunching steel and floating valves. If I am going to crash—and before that night, I had never done so—bump-n-run is how I want to do it.

After driving Cap’n Crunch onto the trailer, I helped Tim direct the heavy equipment that loaded the Crash Cab onto its bed; a broken axle had parked him in the middle of the front straight. We both cracked cold cans as I grabbed the tools to pull my battery and begin my trip home. Once there, I took some preventative ibuprofen before bed just in case, but I woke up in pretty good shape considering the bouncing I had sustained during those two races. By the time I shuffled the car and trailer back to Tim’s driveway, he already had the Crash Cab nearly fixed. He was sliding the new axle in right as I was backing in the trailer.

All motorsport consumes cars, and I had actively been avoiding bump-n-run-type events because it felt as though it was the most wasteful of the wasteful. Instead, I found the most resourceful racers. The racers who intentionally bent sheetmetal seemed to have the most respect for the consequences that came with roughing up 4000-pound land yachts. Only once I was out in the middle of the chaos could I see the clear picture—not a group of mad men, but of entertainers and colorful characters who enjoy the experience of putting the throttle down and letting the gloves come off.

Bump-n-run might not be for everyone, but for those who embrace it, there is a world of fun to explore while sliding sideways, scrubbing the paint off the car on your right, steering for the apex, and bracing for the car on your left to slide in for the hit. There is literally nothing like it.