Red Bull Air Races! My goodness.
A friend of mine just put me on to this, had never seen it before. It’s kind of a like, Nascar 10x and in three dimensions, and more…beauty to it. And danger, my goodness. So I had no idea Red Bull actually has an action sports “think-tank” where they actually dream up new sports. Ha? It makes such perfect sense though, just watching this sport feels like drinking 2-3 Red Bulls. No joke. Writing anything trying to describe this sport doesn’t really make sense - its best to watch it. But briefly, its small, extremely agile/fast, and apparently very simple prop-powered planes through a course with pylons known as air gates that are super small either completely horizontal, or at a perfect 90 degree angle known as “knife-edge”. They seriously have about 3-4 meters on the side of each wine between these pylons and they’re doing 250mph. If that wasn’t enough, the races usually take place over open bodies of water, rivers, air-fields, or natural wonders…and usually about 25-50 feet off the ground. Seriously, just nuts to watch! I dig the kind of international feel of the sport and while super fast cars on a closed track can be (kind of) interesting - everyone, and I mean everyone’s imagination is captured by airplanes and flight. This is confirmed by the 800,000+ people in attendance at the Barcelona race. Cha-ching for Red Bull. Video games, merchandise, licensing, movies, syndication to networks, etc, etc, etc. And, cool that Hulu has them to watch for free.