I know there are a few other fans of the show out there who watched the first run episode last night.
Last night was the dune buggy from the RX-7 convertible episode and we had a first of sorts. I will get back to that.
The design itself was quite lame-- A big tire in the back? That doesn’t look stock at all. Also the nitrous was a neat idea- but there was no way they could get any of that power down, so the design portion was a complete failure in my book.
The build stage was fun as usual. The super-intense bug-eyed ex-football player turned office nerd was an unintentional riot-- even Jesse was making fun of his intensity in the end.
The Jinx bit was funny, and the Freebie audio clip always makes me smile, even though 2/3’s of the car’s parts were Freebies at this point. The black and white security cam of the thieves was amusing as well.
So they test the car at the beach at night and it works-- its a bit slow, but the build was done to the stupid design. That should be a win by rules of the show (and past episodes’ practices). But this time it’s not (as this show appears to be rigged to fail from the start).
So having been tested successfully before the cops shut them down, I was surprised when the moronic faux hipster announcers said that the real test would be next day. Against custom built racing machines. What? The stupid RX-7 with one Big tire had no chance against the purpose built desert race machines and they knew it (hell Jesse has built them before). While would they do this? It was all a set-up, that’s why.
The actual race was very rushed, and started without the stupid announcers for half of the race. The RX-7 lost handily, as anyone with half a brain knew it would. Still they built the car and it worked prior to midnight, and it ran the next day. Jesse had lost the snowmobile race by a huge margin and it was still a success. The boat would have lost by a huge margin had not they fabricated a bunch of bogus “style points”. The contest is a joke.
Not this time. After rushing the race, the reason for the set-up became clear. The mini-gun truck. How convenient that it happened to be loaded and available at the perfect location to shoot off a powered mini-gun. So they get to blast the car with the gun, which was cool.
But it was completely bogus to say the car failed. It went against every other episode and the rules. The Mini should have been crushed then too. Boooooooooooooooooogus! You want to play with the mini-gun-- fine, but don’t rig the contest and lie to us to do it.
I guess the producers realized how pointless the end of show “contests” were and wanted to spice it up, but this is even worse. Here is a hint- can the stupid contests, fire the Big Shwag and Frankie Whitesides and just let the team go play with their toy after it is built. The midnight test runs are much more fun anyway.
overall: design 3/10 (they dropped the ball, including Jesse), build 8/10 (good group, interesting build issues), result 0/10 (lying to us to play with a mini-gun is not “keeping it real” Jesse, you should be ashamed). Final score: 11/30 or a 37%.
They might be overqualified though.