View Photos Yes, the CLINT DAVIS

From the February 2015 issue of Car and Driver

“Don’t forget your nut belt; you’re gonna to need it.”

Wait . . . what? Oh, right. I hurriedly fish around the seat bottom for what was previously known to me as an anti-submarine belt, latch it, and cinch it as tight as my arm muscles will allow. I am holding up the show. This is the last event of the season for the world’s loudest and roughest off-road buggies, the aptly named rock-bouncer racers. And my driver, one Peter Ruttan, who casually made the comment through his helmet, is ready for his timed run up a steep hill made up mostly of jagged, irregular, three-foot-tall saw teeth of almost translucent novaculite stone.

I’m strapped into a bright-red cage that looks like a cross between a bicycle helmet and the skeleton of a stegosaurus. I’m sitting immediately behind a 2002 Chevy LS6 V-8 that’s been bored and stroked to 383 cubic inches and pumps out about 600 horsepower, the open header for which I briefly and quite accidentally stuck the toe of my right sneaker into as I clambered up into the cage.

View Photos Sissy writer takes a ride in Hillbilly Deluxe. CLINT DAVIS

What happens next is 16 seconds of supernova violence. How savage was the ride? Well, I couldn’t tell if we hit a tree or not. The whole ride feels like hitting a tree. Turns out we did, but naturally we kept on going. And judging by the smudges of red paint on my once-pristine-white Arai helmet, I’ve made contact on three different sides of the race buggy’s roll cage. Five seconds into the run, I cannot see. My senses are jangled by the vibrations from the rigidly mounted engine, the spastic pogoing of the horizon, and the beastly staccato snorts blasting out the open header positioned a couple of inches from my right foot. I remember thinking, “I feel like an embryo.” But I have no idea now what that might mean. Then, suddenly, everything is quiet and curiously still. The next thing I know, I’m high-fiving Ruttan’s wife, who’s standing trailside. It only occurs to me sometime later that I didn’t do anything to justify ­giving or receiving a high-five. But Ruttan did. His run was the quickest of the 21 competitors who tried it that soggy Saturday morning at the Hot Springs ORV Park.

I’ve come to Arkansas for the fifth and final event of the 2014 Southern Rock ­Racing Series. The competition consists of timed runs up two nasty, tree-lined, rock-strewn hills in wild-looking, purpose-built, tube-frame, four-wheel-drive contraptions. The driver with the lowest cumulative time for both hills wins. This is only the third season of rock-bouncer racing for the organization, which has been a glorious, money-losing operation for the three guys who run it. They all have day jobs. Still, a $10,000 prize is on offer for the driver who wins the championship. That’s not exactly NASCAR money, especially as the newer, competitive 600-plus-hp rigs (they are always “rigs” or “buggies” and never “cars”) cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 to build.

View Photos Bottom: The making of a race course and of a hangover. CLINT DAVIS

This is backwoods competition. Trails are cut for the race the day before the event, with the organizers and volunteers doing the heavy lifting and chain-sawing down of inconveniently located trees. And the series doesn’t visit a location north of Kentucky or west of Arkansas, so it is, as the name implies, a Southern thing, with roots among the hell-raisers of Tennessee. Participants are reminded at the drivers’ meeting on the morning of the event that no drinking of alcohol is allowed until after they’ve finished their last run of the day. This is a restatement of a written regulation in the 2014 rulebook, which is actually more like a rule page, and though this warning is at the bottom of the page, it’s marked with three asterisks. The event evidences the world’s highest concentration of people, competitors and spectators, wearing T-shirts on which are pasted rude pledges of allegiance to a certain lifestyle (“I ♥ Guns & Titties”). It is also true that the rig I rode in is named Hillbilly Deluxe. Yes, like monster trucks, rock bouncers often are christened with names that are sometimes thematic and sometimes just happily crude, such as X-Rated, Phat N Rowdy, Showtime, Plowboy, and FatGirl.

If you think this sounds like the most redneck thing you’ve ever heard of, well, you’re only partly correct. Hillbilly Deluxe is owned and driven not by a hillbilly, but by a man from Big Rapids, Michigan, who owns a successful commercial-tire business and re-tread facility. The owner/driver roster is, in fact, chock-full of successful small-business owners. One guy runs a Chattanooga, Tennessee–based custom-countertop business. Another owns a heating/cooling and sewer operation near Kansas City. (“If you’re cold or hot or you’ve got to shit, I’m your man.”)

Anatomy of a Rock Bouncer

Few rules govern the mechanical specifications of a rock bouncer. Other than proper racing harnesses, a roll cage deemed stout enough by organizers, two fire extinguishers, and tires at least 39 inches in diameter, it’s entirely up to the participants to create their own adventure. Still, the more recent bouncers share much in common. Hillbilly Deluxe is a good example of just such a rig.

CLINT DAVIS

1. Engine: A 2002 Chevrolet LS6 V-8 bored and stroked to 383 cubic inches, topped with FAST fuel injection and a 102-mm throttle body. Approximate horsepower: 600. Some variety of Chevy mill is the engine of choice for the overwhelming majority of rock bouncers. But a few run Ford engines just to be different.

2. Wheels and tires: Raceline bead-lock aluminum wheels with 43-inch Interco Super Swamper TSL/SX “stickies.”

3. Chassis: A 2012 Jimmy Smith Motorsports tube frame. Curb weight is just above 4000 pounds.

4. Suspension: GM 10.5-inch (14-bolt) full-floating front and rear axles, each located by four links; BigShocks.com coil-overs.

5. Transfer case: A stout gear-driven Atlas unit with a 3.0:1 low range.

6. Transmission: GM TH400 three-speed automatic with an aftermarket valve body providing a reverse shift pattern and full manual control.

View Photos CLINT DAVIS

While an individual event can draw as many as 2500 spectators during the five-race calendar (paying $25 for a race-day ticket), rock bouncing’s biggest audience is on YouTube. In fact, if YouTube can be credited with creating anything other than an unnatural fascination with pet cats, it’s fair to say it created the sport of rock bouncing. We discovered it exactly this way, when a friend and aficionado of absurdity sent us a link to “TIM CAMERON 2011 SHOWTIME COMPILATION,” with a note describing driver Cameron as “the redneck Jesus.” The video has racked up more than 7 million views in two years. And it’s easy to see why: It’s seven minutes of full-throttle, dust-and-rock-throwing chaos split into roughly 10-second chunks of concentrated knobby-tired mayhem. It is extreme and dangerous-looking, and some of the ascents are nigh on unbelievable. Rock bouncing is, then, the perfect motorsport for video clips. It’s also exactly what my childhood self hoped off-roading would be. There’s no slow, technical creeping. If rock crawling is math class, then rock bouncing is recess.

It was that video, and others like it, shot by Cameron’s friend Cole Shirley and posted under the name MadRam11, that drew competitors and organizers into the dirty fray. If you watch it, you’ll notice that throughout this video, the compact, fair-haired Cameron wears no helmet or fire suit. This was not racing in any sense; it was a demonstration—a bit of rowdy showboating for friends or crowds. That’s the rootstock of rock bouncing. It has evolved from these unruly origins into the gentlemanly pursuit you see depicted here.

View Photos Left: Rock-bouncing pioneer and YouTube star, Tim Cameron. Right: A rock shower and its bloodletting. CLINT DAVIS

It is the nature of this particular form of vehicular violence—because what else can you call a jacked-up buggy with a 600-hp V-8 and 43-inch Super Swamper tires ramming straight into a rock ledge—that the more extreme the buggy-flipping, engine-popping antics, the better as far as the fans are concerned. It’s what is known in the prevailing parlance of the group as “acting a fool.”

Turns out my impressions of the ride up the hill were those of a sissy. When I later watched the run on video, I saw that my ride was easily the smoothest and quickest of the bunch. A few years of circle-track racing has instilled in Ruttan a racer’s mind-set. He worked tirelessly with his coil-over supplier, and he was hooked up while several other buggies looked like rhinoceroses in their death throes, or amphetamine-addled jack rabbits bounding wildly up the hill. This netted Ruttan impressed nods and polite applause from the waterlogged fans who stood trailside behind bright-yellow tape strung between trees. The hoots and whoops and fist-pumps, though, were reserved for the showmen who took a more aggressive approach, sometimes ending up on their lids.

View Photos CLINT DAVIS

And while there was plenty of drama, none was quite as predictable as that provided by Dale Larsen. Says one of the organizers, Clyde Bynum: “The only time I’m scared is when it’s Dale’s turn to go. I’m literally standing at the top of the hill with my hands shaking.” The man has a following, some of them wearing “Dale, Yeah!” T-shirts. So when I meet Dale I’m shocked to find not a drunken barbarian but a reserved man, slim of build and exceptionally modest. He calls his rig, a blue-and-white-checkerboard monster with a Toyota FJ grille slapped on the front, a “piece of shit.” And he walks me around pointing out all of the bits and pieces he’s cobbled together: a driveshaft from an old school bus, seats from a minivan, a transfer case from a half-ton Chevy truck, and bunches of brake calipers from snowmobiles. Oh, and there’s the nasty-sounding 598-cubic-inch V-8 he pulled out of 24-foot Baja boat. “I make shit work,” says Larsen. “I ain’t gonna win, but I’m part of the group.”

And he does not disappoint the crowd: On the second hill, he woods the throttle about 30 feet from the sheer, six-foot-tall, stair-stepped rock ledge. His front wheels now atop the ledge, he floors it again trying to bound the rear end up and over, but the beast slides left and slips into a crevice, which flips the rig on its side. Thus begins a slow-motion barrel roll back down the ledge. The buggy’s momentum runs out just as it’s balancing its full weight on the right-side tires’ sidewalls, the left side dangling uselessly in the air. A stab of throttle and some judicious steering slam it back on all fours. Without a pause, Dale turns the thing around and lines up with a different section of the ledge and floors it, again smashing the front into the rock wall. As the snout of his rig rears up, his front wheels are pointed in opposite directions. He’s snapped a heim joint on the tie rod, and when he comes down on the top of the ledge, the rig veers sharply left and for a moment, while his engine is still blaring, it seems he will surely plow a wide path through the now-ecstatic crowd. But he comes to rest against the orange tape that defines the course and shuts the lump down. Dale is the last competitor of the day, and it seems a rock-bouncing competition couldn’t end on a more appropriate note. There are no injuries on this day, other than to the vehicles and the few spectators who’ve had their noses or elbows bloodied by flying rocks.

View Photos The drivers, with champion Shawn Tolson (center). CLINT DAVIS

After the races, the crowd ambles over to Showtime, an impossibly steep hill named for Cameron’s old buggy, to watch the crazier, or at least more determined, drivers try to mount it. This is a so-called bounty hill, close to the origins of rock bouncing in that it’s basically a bunch of people standing at the bottom of a hill wondering if anyone has the gumption and engine to get to the top. Bynum is quick to point out that it’s not part of the sanctioned event. He seems to want to keep an arm’s length from the proceedings. Still, Southern Rock Racing’s volunteer announcer is there, and he’s working the crowd to get money for the driver who can get farthest up the hill. Eventually he gathers $1002 to entice drivers. Three go for it. Nobody makes it to the top. The final driver, Brandon Dillon, takes his 502-cubic-inch, 740-hp Ford V-8–powered buggy farthest but snags a tree backing down the hill and completes two barrel rolls before coming to a rest beside a small tree at the bottom. Surely, he’s sustained more than $1000 worth of damage. The crowd is also treated to an impromptu bout of mud wrestling between two dudes.

At the casual season-ending ceremony in the pavilion that evening, Shawn Tolson, of Phat N Rowdy fame, is announced as the day’s winner. He nipped Ruttan by a tenth of a second for the cumulative time of both hills. The win vaulted Tolson over Cameron for the season championship by a measly four points (440 to 436). Tolson takes the stage, dances briefly to his own rendition of “All About That Bass,” professes his love for the other competitors, and notes that they should have beer up on the stage. To describe the proceedings as convivial would be an understatement. Driver Clint Evans is camped out next to me at a picnic table taking swigs of rum-and-Coke directly from a Captain Morgan bottle. I sit sipping a can of Natty Light. It tastes better than it has any right to.

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