Red Bull – Soap Box Race
Fast, fearless and funny
Nobody builds a soapbox car to win. They build it to be seen falling apart in the most spectacular way possible.
Red Bull asked us to bring that spirit back to London – a theme and a track that would get 18- to 30-year-olds talking, sharing, and turning up, without losing the event’s core joke: that this is a race nobody’s really trying to win.
We built an Urban Workshop world around it – the aesthetic of a garage where anyone’s mad idea gets a green light. The theme gave the humour somewhere to live: in the signage, the judging panel, the track itself.
At Alexandra Palace, we laid a 420-metre course and gave it a personality. The AA Water Jump. The Wedge. The Bone Rattler. The Kicker.
Four obstacles built to turn a straight run into a story – inventive teams rewarded, cautious ones punished, crashes guaranteed.
A judging panel sat trackside, scoring not just speed but creativity and showmanship – the things that actually travel on social.
Fifty-nine teams lined up. Thousands of fans lined the track. Abracadragster, the magic-themed soapbox from team The Hurry Houdinis, took first prize – not for being fastest, but for being the most fun to watch lose control.
More than 16,000 fans came to Alexandra Palace, a noticeable share of them exactly the 18- to 30-year-olds Red Bull needed in the crowd.
Fifty-nine teams raced. Four obstacles broke them.
One foam cannon covered them.
What travelled home afterwards wasn’t a stat – it was a story about a magician’s cart flying off a jump, ready to be told at the pub that night.
Silliness isn’t easy to engineer. Ours had a water jump, a wedge, a bone rattler, and a cannon full of foam.
