This Maserati explains everything.

Never mind the Auto Show, I’ll take the Gumball 3000 instead...

Not 24 hours ago I was standing in the warm wash of a Lamborghini’s exhaust, thinking: I can’t believe this is happening. It’s finally here. After many years of waiting, the Gumball Rally has come to Toronto.

I started watching videos of the Gumball back in 2001, thanks to a certain Jackass episode. Something about “the spirit of pure raging” that this annual rally embodied stuck in my head. It left me with an inexplicable fondness for covering large sections of country at speed— supercar or no. (Um, no.)

I have always loved to drive— probably because I grew up on summer-long road trips all over the continent. But after watching all the footage available from the Gumball that year, I started driving for extended periods of time, going across the country just because I could. Often alone, sometimes accompanied, I spanked every province accessible by road… driving up to 1200 kilometers daily, stopping only to eat, sleep, gas up… and of course take photos.

Okay, sometimes not stopping. Photo on my camera by Spott the Loonie. I was holding the wheel at the time.

I started calling these annual journeys the Rumball 7000 because they typically lasted for about 7000 miles (Toronto to Vancouver and back again, with a few side trips)— or until I got bored with living on the road and came home. No rum was actually involved. Like a pilot tracks his flight hours, I tracked my life kilometers and tacked these trips onto the running total. (510,000 kilometers to date and climbing.) I got a serious kick from looking at a map of the world and knowing that I could drive all the way across a continent in a handful of days if so inclined.

Along the way I became a TransCanadian, took about ten thousand photos, taught myself every trick in the world to stay alert, even developed a heightened sense for police presence on the road ahead. (The proof of that is in the driving record, for in five trips I only recieved one speeding ticket, an RCMP pull in Saskatchewan. My co-driver was a giant squirrel at the time. “He’s not hiding any nuts, honest officer.” Long story; fun night.) Most of all I learned that nothing cleans the accumulated crud of city life out of the brain like large sections of Canada served at speed.

Somewhere in Saskatchewan the travelling trance sets in...

But this country is huge. Every trip left me lots of time to think about how great it would be if the Gumball rally were to hit Canada, somehow, someday… So when I heard that there were Canadian legs on the 2010 route, I was ecstatic. Using only the internet I assembled enough information to get a clear picture of what was going on: wheres, whens, whos, and of course what they were driving. Although details from actual official sources were scarce, I knew more than enough about how the rally rolls after years of absorbing Gumball vids. It wasn’t hard to figure things out.

First off, you need some prestige lodgings. That means five star hotels only, and there’s not many of those in TO. These digs are mostly clustered near Yonge and Bloor. Rich neighbourhoods? Same again. (We’s mostly po, the new-worlders: there aren’t many party-worthy mansions or old-money castles around here, and all our royals are imported.) Cross reference these two basic needs and add required access to secure parking garages, posh clubs and closeable roads, and you come up with Yorkville as the most obvious location for the Gumball to land in this city. Random tweets and ferrari club forum scuttlebutt quickly confirm it.

Betsy, a silver Lamborghini Gallardo belonging to Sheikh Amro Kayal, spends a night on the streets of Yorkville.

…All of which leads me back to this particular evening, where the exhaust of a Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 Superveloce is beating at my pantlegs while pro skiier Jon Olsson revs the engine and the crowd around me cheers. Six hundred and seventy horses have us collectively fizzing at the brain stem.

In the midst of this scene, I have a moment of enlightenment. I’ve been all over this continent— from deepest concrete-jungle megacity to untouched wilderness, and through every kind of dirty industry inbetween. So I’ve smelt a lot of things in my life... even whale breath. I’ll take the backwash from a finely tuned supercar any day.

Cooling the engine... a peek at the still-ticking heart of a Mercedes McLaren SLR. Top that, car show.

I’ve overheard a number of people this evening describing the event to clueless locals as a “car show”. I have to object. This is much better than any car show, because these cars aren’t just for show, sitting on pretty pedestals, taken out for a monthly show-and-shine or Sunday drive. These are bug streaked, dust covered, ticking-engine mass horsepower road bombs… all pretensions of celebrity and stardom aside, these are mind boggling works of engineering, and they're out in the real world doing pretty much what they were designed to do: cover ground and turn heads.

Turn head. TURN HEAD.

Of course tree huggers and nanny-staters will object to this rally and the very existence of these types of vehicles. “A bunch of rich kids,” I heard repeatedly. “D-bags in fine automobiles.” (But, it being Yorkville, there were no hippies or ecomentalists around to actually protest.) Meanwhile— ignoring the fully apprised involvement of provincial, state and local police all along the rally route— the media hopefully rabbited about threats to public safety. In the process most missed the point.

The public enjoyment of a fine vehicle goes up exponentially when it’s revving in the street in front of them. People want to see these cars in action… Hell, we want to see fine cars, period. While we might not have the deep-seated and competitive car culture of Europe, Ontario is a hotbed for car love of all kinds, and home to a large share of North America’s automotive history. Ontarians on the whole really do love cars… obsessively. Racing, tuning, imports, exotics, vintage, collectors... you name it, there’s a local club for it, a regular shine or cruise or display. The biggest of these is of course the Canadian International Auto Show, which runs each February. More than a quarter million people (myself included) visited this show in 2009. It's largely new-car-industry focused, expensive, overcrowded, and exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to drive to the middle of nowhere at top speed.

Another McLaren SLR. (There were three in the rally this year, which is two more than Toronto has  seen before.)

Yes, I love cars. I just don’t love how people treat other people’s cars.

For example? Every year at CIAS I see a variety of clueless chickies blithely planting their chunky bubble butts on the hoods and bumpers of unlucky men’s automobiles while posing for shots. I wince, thinking of the scratches that will ensue, and wonder why the hell the owners are not there to backhand them off the hood. Ask for permission, dammit.

There's nothing wrong with admiring a stranger's vehicle, or taking photos. But people want to pose with them. Touch them. Sit in them. Pet them. Lick them. And do unnatural things to their exhaust pipes.

“Something goes wrong in people’s heads when they see cars… mine included.”  -Jon Olsson

 Crowds gather to pet a Bentley lavished with strips of croc skin. This was one of my favorite cars, a textural and visual treat. In addition to the leathery slices the Bentley had a map pattern with polaroids of the team from each of the Gumball's road stops taped to the outside of the car. You could literally walk around it and follow their adventures.

This then is the essential truth of supercars, and the reason why the really nice cars at auto shows are roped off and distant: people get absolutely retarded around them. For example, when Team 05 arrived in Yorkville last night in their $1.9M Bugatti Veyron, they were swarmed and quickly got stuck. An escort of six bike cops was necessary to push back the crowd just so they could roll down the street.

One pass like that and they were off again, buzzing the city streets. For obvious reasons, the Veyron and several other similarily precious vehicles were not left out overnight. Rather they redirected to a secret underground parking garage in the area— “exact whereabouts unknown”. Until the next morning, when it turned out to be a different hotel.)

Veyron, comin through!

Online or IRL, even a casual observer of the Gumball scene would quickly observe that it attracts a fairly high percentage of wannabees and wankers… myself included, probably. (Except that all I wanted were some nice shots of amazing cars, which I happily got.) Clueless internet users aside... there is something disturbing about the single-minded relentlessness of hundreds of slack-jawed teenage males, all in the same place, all bent on shooting video of supercars with assorted cel phones and point-and-shoot cameras. (I'm not talking about the casual photographers here either... I mean the guys who stalk vehicles like paparazzi, ignoring police warnings to get back or clear the street— instead getting as close as possible and filming every single thing almost compulsively.)

I saw a lot of that in the uncontrolled chaos of the Gumball Toronto street scene. What I didn’t see— which a lot of people seemed to expect— was Gumball drivers being douchebags. Between the night of arrival and morning of departure, I encountered around fifty of them. Every one I came across was polite, tolerant of crowds, patient with questions, happy to show off their vehicles and answer questions from the throng of onlookers. They were good with the press… even the fake press, taking the time to do video shout outs and answer questions for the youtube peanut gallery. Those who didn’t feel up to this chore ignored the crowds, unloaded their bags and headed for the hotel, and— being Canadians— we left them alone.

Sure, some guys were tired and clearly running short on sleep. And one guy was swearing his head off when he got back to his car in the morning and dicovered one of his license plates had been stolen. (Wouldn’t you? Do you know how hard it is to get a car over the border, missing plates? What kind of an ass move is that?)

 Photographers await the arrival of a Ferrari F430 Scuderia 16M bianco.

 So... almost a decade of waiting. Which then culminates in moments like these:

-Waiting around three hours for the Gumballers to roll in— then not having my camera ready when Xzibit burns down the street, parks and heads straight for the hotel.

-Although none of the Jackass crew was on this year’s run, there was plenty of mischief about. (A limo crew full of rampant luchadores. Xzibit’s car got caution taped by terror clowns overnight.)

-Getting stopped to do an audio interview for soundbites to a lady from 680News on Friday morning. Nice lady but asked way too many leading questions. It seemed they wanted a sound bite from someone hysterical about the speeding aspect— perhaps in case of incident. She didn’t even know the difference between a race and a rally. I had to straighten that out and fill her in on Gumball history. (Pretty bad when a carhag with a camera is better informed than a member of the mainstream media. This and the other local coverage of the rally opened my eyes further to how the media tries to make themselves look good by being “public safety watchdogs”.)

-Chatting with an Aston Martin dealer from the UK the following morning. He just happened to be visiting Toronto and discovered the rally was in town quite randomly. (It's impossible to get so close to the vehicles in Pall Mall, so his timing couldn't have been better.)

-Estevan Oriol pausing at the curb so that I could get a shot. I knew he was a photographer! Check out some of his work here: www.estevanoriol.com

-Getting the thumbs up from Maximillion en depart.

Clever decalling on a number of vehicles.

This cloud might have a carbon graphite lining, but there were still a few downsides to the event.

Spend a little time researching the whos and whens of the Gumball online and you’ll quickly notice that they’re short on information. There’s a need for secrecy in the planning stages, sure… but secrecy aside, there are some massive and visible gaps in communication in the organization. In trying to piece together what was going on with the rally, it quickly became clear to me that what the Gumball 3000 needs most is a dedicated media person to manage their PR, web and press releases, and social media. For a registered brand name, they aren’t communicating with mainstream media well, or leveraging the massive fan base.

For example? The media made a big deal of the roadside impoundments, but in reality this was the least of the factors affecting who— and what—  made it to TO. What was not mentioned in the scarce official promo material was that some drivers did the European leg only, and some joined just for the North American portion of the tour.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t in it for the celebrities, then— as most of the advertised celebs completely failed to appear. The Hoff wasn’t on the rally this year at all… unless he managed to clone himself and twitter from other events, that is. The A-team van carrying the Hawk and several other skaters did not appear in Toronto. Nor did some of the most hotly anticipated vehicles: the Ferrari Enzo and SLR Sterling Moss, for example, stayed on the London side of the ocean.

A bit sad there, personally: I was dying to see that chrome Ferrari Italia 458. It didn’t materialize… but the part where I got to take pics of the Veyron made up for it. In the end— although there were a lot of chunks and gaps— the whole thing made me quite ridiculously happy.

"You gotta live life, you know. You can't just stay in your own environment where you feel comfortable all the time, you gotta go out of your boundaries and check out some new shit."

-Estevan Oriol (Interviewed in NYC, 5/7/2010 - http://vimeo.com/11808009 )

The full set of images which accompanies this article can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypersapiens/sets/72157623890658323/

Postscript

I don’t publish much here— too preoccupied by shiny objects and ADHD, for the most part. I’m starting to sense some themes in these posts, however.

I think this year my mission will be to find good alternatives to the beaten paths. Fine (and preferably free) alternatives to over-crowded, over-run, popular events— with a focus on the transient things in life that I enjoy the most.

This year for example I eschewed the Canadian International Auto Show (with its mega-crowds and auto-industry shills and $20 admission) in favor of waiting for the Gumball Rally to hit town.

I intend to round out the car show portion of this project with a few more free vintage and exotic car shows (see calendar), then then kick it airborne in September by attending the Brantford Charity Air Show in lieu of the Canadian International Air Show at the hellishly packed CNE.

At the same time I want to highlight some of the finer things in life… or the ephemerial things, anyways. Thus: supercars, sakura, colorful costumes, street art and the like.

Diesel and circuses. Petrol and cherries. Jet fuel and tolulene. Yeah.

Food... $7
Parking... $15
Getting pulled from the crowd to take pictures of the Bugatti Veyron arriving by a team member because his camera battery died... PRICELESS

Until next time, Gumball!