The Gumball 3000 rally: Yet another reason to hate the rich

Depraved rock stars and party-hearty Playmates in overpowered Toadmobiles are our betters, and as they careen across America we must bow before their power.

By Cintra Wilson

Apr 27, 2002 | "Between Thurday April 25 - Tuesday April 30th 2002 the Gumball 3000 Rally will take part [sic] across the USA. ... From supermodel to rock star, racing driver to simple car enthusiast, the rally is a test of 3000 miles across the world's greatest Continent, [sic] punctuated by the wildest parties each evening!" -- From the Gumball3000.com Web site

I always enjoy hearing tales of the Middle Ages, those glorious centuries when the upper classes had so little regard for the humanity of the peasants and townspeople that groups of elegant, spirited aristocrats would don dark clothing and masks, saddle up their prized Arabian stallions in the middle of the night and ride through town with polo-type mallets, merrily clubbing the brains out of any poor, luckless buggers who happened to be in their way. "Har har har!" they must have cried, swilling aged brandy from jeweled casks as they toweled the blood from their gloves with the flaxen hair of petrified local virgins.

Ah, to be a powerful aristocrat, suffering no consequences for any actions, no matter how vile! Feeling no remorse or pangs of conscience whatsoever! Exercising the full extent of one's birthright to be an untouchable menace! What is money, after all, if one can't heartily enjoy buggering and impinging upon the rights of one's inferiors?

Such brazen flexings of financial muscle are rare nowadays, but there still remains one glorious event in which the very rich get to treat the rest of mankind like cabbages or skeet. This year, America is the lucky host of the 4th annual cash-ejaculating orgy known as the Gumball 3000 Rally. Since 1999, zillionaire scofflaws have been terrorizing cities across Europe and Russia in a weeklong burn down the roadways in the finest and fastest cars money can buy, speeding outrageously, fucking everything, spinning donuts, laying patches, binge-drinking top-shelf liqueurs, soiling the sheets of venerable Chateaux, crashing frequently and buying their way out of trouble every mile along the way with the haughty devil-may-care insouciance that can only be assumed by gilded dirtbags who regard a flaming Ferrari in a ditch as an amusing tax write-off.

"Har har har! Brigitta? Get my mechanic on the phone and tell him to have the Lamborghini ready for me in Munich. Here's another emerald thong-brooch for your trouble. Do pour us another round of gimlets from the titanium emergency bar. I say, what a hoot!"

The Gumball 3000 began in 1999 when young British entrepreneur Maximillian Cooper, inspired by the Burt Reynolds vehicle "Cannonball Run," conceived of an elite six-day car race across Europe as a "private party for 50 of his closest friends." According to the Gumball3000.com Web site, his "private party" just happened to achieve "immediate notoriety and a somewhat 'cool' status," presumably because Cooper leaked to the press that Naomi Campbell would be among the original participants. She wasn't, but it didn't matter -- the belligerent rich and their supercars were enough to attract a gaggle of other demi-celebrities, and a whole host of ultrarich bankers, nightclub owners, entrepreneurs, music moguls, minor sports stars and other car enthusiasts willing to cough up the 6,000-pound ($8,700) entry fee, drive 600 miles each day, then stay up all night drinking and do it again every day for six days.

Cooper, who appears on the Web site wearing tinted sunglasses and a red racing jacket, posing self-consciously Steve McQueen-esquely in front of a pair of Ferraris, told the London Times in 2000: "Gumball is about the mix of people we get -- you know, rock stars, racing drivers, models -- it's about the rock 'n' roll attitude."

Gumball's already obnoxious social cachet is only swelling now that it has been adopted by ultracool Johnny "Jackass" Knoxville, who devoted a whole MTV special to last year's race from London to Russia and back again, documenting horrible hangovers, contiguous pan-European vomiting and high-speed wrecks expensive enough to finance years of food for entire starving villages of large-eyed children surrounded by flies.

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