Competition Description

6 Teams – 3 Contrasts – 1 Race

I love a good contrast - both as a designer and as a Carolinian. 3 Carolina contrasts stand out to me the most:

 

 

1. Smoky Mountains vs. ocean towns,
   
2. Big Tobacco vs. City Banking, and,
   
3. Bootleg racing vs. modern NASCAR

 

The Carolinas is an area of America defined by tremendous change. I will walk you through these three contrasts, teams, if you will - that help define my home.  Choose a team and with it, enter the Carolina race.

The challenge is to design a Carolina road-ready race vehicle that embodies the soul of one of these teams (note the six logos to the right).  Choose either the Smoky Mountains, ocean towns, Big Tobacco, City Banking, Bootleg Racing, or modern NASCAR as your team and your inspiration.  Trucks, wagons, sedans, and coupes are all fair game as long as they play for a single team and meet the engineering requirements and guidelines.

 

Naturally, as I am an active member of Local Motor’s Community, I also welcome your queries on the topic throughout the process, and any clarification you may desire to help inform the way you sculpt your designs for this competition. Let me begin with the basics:

 

 

About Me (Designova - David Weiss):

 

Not a native Tarheel, I have called North Carolina home for over a decade now, and have come to really love it here. I finished high school here, living just South of Chapel Hill, home to the first State University in our country, University of North Carolina. After graduating as a homeschooler, I was initially looking to go to the best car design school I could find, considering ACCD, RCA, CCS, and the like. However, a friend recommended I look into the options available here in NC, and after some research and meetings, I discovered North Carolina’s State’s School of Design to be one of the top ranked in the country, with a very promising Industrial Design program. I studied there under a stellar faculty with my vision for transportation design, while building my skill set in other areas as well. After graduating I completed internships in a wide range of industries and have settled into varied freelance work for now. This occupation allows me to travel through the area, understanding it better and better. Now let's get on to the races, I know these could inspire many brilliant designs:

Contrast 1: Smoky Mountains vs. ocean towns

 

North Carolina has well over 100,000 miles of open road, a high number for a state this size.  Driving west, you find the amazing Great Smokey Mountains. These have invariably twisting and winding roads, mapped out like a spilled plate of spaghetti. You will find none of the rigid regularity of Midwestern street layouts here. One of the most popular destinations for the driver’s driver is the "Tail of the Dragon”, a spectacular stretch of highway 129 on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee in the Great Smokey Mountains containing 318 curves in 11 miles. It is an adrenaline fueled drive, to say the least, and the scenery can be breathtaking.

 

Living in the middle of North Carolina, it is almost the same distance for me to get from the Smokeys to the Atlantic. We have some of the best untouched coast I’ve ever seen, with great communities like Surf City on the outer banks (OBX), whose motto is “Big enough to be competitive, but small enough to be happy!” Similarly Southern Carolina's coast features its own unique character.  British settlers from Barbados originally founded the original Carolina Colony.  This coastal tropical influence is apparent in places like Charlston, South Carolina.  Even the South Carolina state flag features a tropical Palmetto tree and a Crescent Moon, harkening back to tropical heritage. Many films, such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the Patriot, and Forrest Gump were actually filmed here because of this amazing coastal topography.

Contrast 2: Big Tobacco vs. City Banking

 

The agricultural industry of the Carolina’s has a history deep-rooted in tobacco.  Even while demand and government subsidy for tobacco decreases, this industry has an overall economic impact of over $7 billion dollars, and accounts for over 255,000 jobs in North Carolina alone.  While agriculture and tobacco in particular may be considered part of the “old economy”, there is no arguing that it is still vital.  This area of the country is synonymous with Big Tobacco.

 

As agricultural is on the down slope, banking is on the rise.  Second only to New York, Charlotte, North Carolina is THE huge banking center in the United States.  At least 24 banks are headquartered in this region, and the combined assets of all banks in Charlotte account for over $2 TRILLION dollars.  Wherever you live in the world, if you are doing business in dollars, your money will travel through North Carolina. As a result, this business has turned the city of Charlotte into a bustling hive of as many suit wearing young professionals as it has farmers.

Contrast 3: Bootleg racing vs. NASCAR

 

While Carolinians traditionally enjoy college sports and nature activities, this is not exclusively where these states stake their claim.  Carolinians are purveyors of stock car racing, specifically, NASCAR, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Perhaps they should have called it North And South Carolina Auto Racing since NASCAR is perhaps the most famous export of this area today. The roots of this sport began during 1930s prohibition era; “bootleggers” would drive small, fast cars in order to evade the police as they transported illegal booze.  When prohibition was repealed in 1933, these bootleggers had already become addicted to racing.  To maintain their racing high, and to keep more of the profit from sale of the liquor, they would still race to avoid tax collectors.

 

Soon racing became more of a mainstay in rural Carolinian culture.  Wilkes County, North Carolina was a popular place to race modified street vehicles.  After NASCAR was founded in Daytona in 1948, these rural racers from the Carolinas gained access to a more structured outlet for racing, and they gained more access to racing pride and profit.  NASCAR races built popularity slowly and focused on Southern regions along the Eastern seaboard of the United States.  Some of the best bootleg drivers got into the NASCAR game, and won.  Junior Johnson is one of the most well known bootleg drivers, and he is still in the NASCAR game.  It wasn’t until the 1990’s that racing really became “cool”, and expansion took of.   This is where we begin to notice a contrast between “Old" NASCAR and “New NASCAR”. 

 

As racing gained popularity so did sponsorship.  Big Tobacco such as Marlboro and Winston have been sponsoring NASCAR since the 1970s, mainly because the audience suited the product so well, and also because cigarette commercials were no longer permitted on TV in the United States.  As the audience base grew, so did sponsorship.

 

A popular complaint among NASCAR enthusiasts is that the races are more about sponsorship than racing and more about money than cars.  As NASCAR racing expanded, the series began competing at new tracks and left some of the old tracks - the tracks that put the bootleggers on the map - behind.  For these reasons, some people will tell you that NASCAR just isn’t the same as it used to be. 
Changes in NASCAR cars have also been a point of contention.  The well intentioned “Car of Tomorrow” program began after Dale Earnhardt was killed in the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.  The purpose of this program was to develop a safer NASCAR racer, which was to be more competitive and cheaper for the teams to maintain.  This new breed of racecar is now the NASCAR standard, but the body styling has not been altogether well received.  Tony Stewart called the Car of Tomorrow a “flying brick” because of its boxy styling.

 

Even though some of the changes in recent NASCAR history have arguably had a negative impact, there is still a lot of hope among fans.  Carolinians in particular have praised drivers as heroes continuously.  Greats like Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt were born in North Carolina, and Carolinians proudly celebrate these hometown heroes by wearing the numbers 43 and 3 on shirts, hats, cars and even tattooed limbs.  Though there is a drastic contrast between the NASCAR of today and the bootleggers of 70 years ago, the pride fans feel when a hometown hero makes a big score remains the same. 

 

These are our our six teams of inspiration pitted against one another. Your challenge as a participant in this competition is again to design a Carolina road-ready race vehicle that embodies the soul of one of these teams (feel free to use the race logos embedded to the right and also available for download).

 

Smoky Mountains

 

Ocean towns

Big Tobacco

 

City Banking

Bootleg racing

 

Modern NASCAR

 

Though not a native to the Carolinas, I do hope to remain a Tarheel for some time yet, as I have fallen for the kind of variety and contrasts available to someone calling the “Old North State” home, and I hope I have given you a glimpse of what that means.  Now pick your team and let's design. Who knows? Maybe this competition will even excite an entirely new race series that will last another 70 years.