The 2012 Power Racing Series is upon us and here’s the first official look at our upcoming race schedule. It is very exciting to announce another race to the calendar this year at none other than the birthplace of Power Racing itself: Chicago! It all started on a boringly hot August in 2009 with a dirt lot and a bit of Moxie but four seasons later we are returning with a much bigger operation. Not only will we be making a triumphant return, but we will feature the series first ever night race! That’s right! Get ready to haul some extra batteries because you’ll need to keep the track lit ahead of you and race into the late evening!

• June 23-24 Kansas City @ Union Station
• First round of the series takes a trip to KC’s gorgeous Union Station. Expect the track to be tight, slow corners followed by mid-length straits. The cars with the best handling will show great promise here.
• July 28-29 Detroit @ The Henry Ford Museum
• Our Landmark race returns yet again! The Detroit circuit is a bumpy high speed affair that will challenge driver skill more than anything else. The track usually features long sweeping corners that necessitate finesse and driver rhythm.
• August 4-5 Chicago @ Downtown Evanston

• ·This will be the stage of the climatic finale of the series! It will mark the first time the series has raced in Chicago since 2009 and marks the first featured night race in PPPRS history! Make sure to be prepared for low light settings and pack extra juice for onboard light kits. Expect the track to be the fastest yet with coupled with incredibly tight turns.

This year the points system will reward the BEST 2 weekend points. That means we take your sum of your points from each weekend and tally them towards the championship. If you go to all 3 events you’ll be able to throw away your worst weekend. So if you say, blow an engine in one race weekend you won’t be out of the championship, pending you attend the other two. It also allows for some of the smaller teams to compete for the championship without having to go to more than two events. If a team is in title contention they must attend the Chicago race to receive any potential prizes (it would be awkward to have a title winner not be present for their trophy presentation)

The final copy of the new and improved 2012 rules will be posted shortly. Check the mailing list to see the first drafts as they are released.

For the first time ever, Pumping Station: One hosted a Summit to discuss new rules and talk shop for the 2012 PPPRS season. Four hackerspacs showed up with representatives from i3 Detroit, LVL1, Milwaukee Makerspace and Sector 67. The teams shared ideas to improve the series, discussed new prizes and new angles to develop the series from. Click the break below to see a full list of the new concepts discussed:

New Moxie Rewards

New Races, including a Relay and Reverse Battle Royale




A Clarification of the $500 buyout rule




White List of battery technologies used




Safety Guideline Packet for New/Old Teams




Updated Moxie System to reward more points for more epic maneuvers




New Trophies including an official Moxie Cup




Changing Constructor’s Title to Panel Judgment “Best of Show”






Many of the teams involved were very vocal about improving safety and simultaneously improving team creativity. Many of the challenges proposed were technical in nature, forcing the cars to do more with the same limitations as last season. This would allow teams to drive focus away from “gaining that extra second” on the track to preparing the car to take bumps, jumps and various obstacles. Teams were dedicated to maintain some race events, but also emphasized that they desired to build cars that did other kinds of racing, including a relay race, which rewarded team’s pit stop efforts.


Many of the new rules proposed were directly inspired by the 24 Hours of LeMons series. The series also races $500 cars (real ones though, not our tiny monstrosities) and shares a very similar goal in regards to how teams behave and how crowds react. The PPPRS is dedicated to make competitive motor sports fun, without removing the incentive to succeed and work hard towards goals. LeMons series has achieved this by dispercing the types of goals a team can achieve. One such award, The Index of Effluency is prized amongst LeMon teams.  The IoE is an award given by judges who determine a prize for a team that produces a car that is both usable in a race and impossibly difficult to complete laps. Such past examples include a BMW M-powered 1963 Thunderbird or a Mid-Engined Karmann Ghia.  PPPRS intends to be inspire the next generation of rules around these concepts in order to promote both a fair racing environment and one that people don’t practically kill themselves to win over.


Competition is a curious thing in PPPRS. The balance between a “racing series” and a “carnival circus” is a fine line. We can all parade our cars in public and have a good time, but it should be noted that teams also, at the same time, be rewarded for building an awesome car. PPPRS intends to achieve this, mostly because teams want it, partially because we don’t want to afford the legal when it comes to injuries from increased speed-wars that hackerspaces would inevitably wage if we kept the Formula the exact same as last season.


If you wish to contribute to the PPPRS rules for 2012 please join or PPPRS Google group. Discussions will be held through the winter until a final draft that is relatively satisfying is posted. Then teams can complain and build and practically catch on fire as they attempt to top each other in Moxie. It is the best we can hope for.

Don’t forget! If you don’t feel like debating rules, we’ll see you in May anyway, just be prepared to race a race determined by a group of people other than yourself! In short, don’t be picky: have a good time. 

If there’s a word for near perfection in Power Racing, it begins with an S. Sector 67, the upstart hackerspace from Madison Wisconsin set out to show the world what they were capable of. In less than 10 months since their grand opening, they can now call themselves champions. The team worked for an astonishing 3 days to create the frame of the machine, and only a couple weeks to assemble the components together. These were not easy times though, as the team faced numerous technical challenges, and faced quite a few late evenings preparing their car for the season. With confidence they pulled up to Maker Faire, and immediately silenced anyone who doubted the capability of a new team amongst veterans.

With 5 victories this season, the most of any other team in PPPRS history, the team rose from the bottom to the absolute highest of highs. Despite a few hiccups this season, including the battery debacle that proved to be a red-herring by Maker Faire Detroit, the team rose above all challenges and challengers and can now proudly display the Tesla Cup to anyone who asks them what the hell the Tesla Cup is (for those of you not aware, that’s our title trophy. Just like the Stanley Cup, with embedded LEDs)


The machine that Sector completed was nothing short of a masterpiece of cheap engineering and clever but legal rule bending. The car scraped and scavenged for high quality (yet ancient) motors and the frame was built from an aluminum art easel of all things. The on-board dash with GPS, speedo, live pit-transmitted telemetry and warning lights ablaze was all within the hacker spirit of “why the hell not?” The level of technical wizardry in the machine was impressive and had actually saved the team from potential motor burnouts.  Few machines like that have existed before, but it is certain that many more will be created. Hackerspaces from across the Midwest should be excited by next season, as there will be more contenders with crazy ideas. We hope that Sector 67 will return with even crazier ideas.


So now what? Well the Tesla Cup is carefully in their hands, a new slew of rules and regulations will be introduced in 2012 to challenge the challengers. The series, as it has every year, must evolve to keep hackerspaces intrigued and will now focus heavily on both mechanical and strategic contests. Another angle will be an emphasis of new moxie-bent concepts that will turn the speed race down a few notches (to keep things safe) and embrace other outlets for spaces to express themselves with. Let it be no mistake; engineers will have an interesting time adapting to some of the new races, and will still enjoy building machines that are both fast and creative. After all, part of the fun of PPPRS is witnessing this evolution and watching teams adapt to it. Speeds will still have an impact, but it will no longer be THE needed goal. Cars will be expected to do more with less, race a larger variety of types of races and designers will be faced to create innovative solutions to even more hell-bent problems.