Awesome.
I’ve also seen reclining chairs motorized and raced.
Actually, any one-of-a-kind vehicle would qualify for this thread, would it not? Or even vehicles of a kind so rare that they’ve never met their match.
Maybe some of those zany vehicles that only ever get used for parades?
Only because I didn’t think to exclude them in the OP. I’m looking for vehicles that could be raced but aren’t.
At any rate, the Bathysphere didn’t even have an operator on board. The closest thing to an operator was the guy running the winch on board the ship up above. If the people on board wanted to go up or down, they’d have to tell him over the phone line.
Crawler-transporters.
I can’t find anything that snow groomers were ever raced. I’m sure they have informally, but not too sure that the ski area owners want to risk their million dollar rides in this way.
Oooh, good one. They need to find an off-month when those aren’t being used and take them out for some action.
But they do race zambonis. Not that I had any doubts, but I googled and found the expected videos. For example:
Bulldozer racing
Dump trucks race, school busses, motorhomes, semis (cabs only) mini-bikes, segways, and as I mentioned before, recliners. Much of it is darned entertaining. Too bad it all adds to pollution.
Even combine harvesters have races. I knew they had combine demolition derbies. Those are common at state and county fairs, but a quick google found they have races too.
Has there ever been a race of ride-on lawnmowers? This must make for a boring race unless the mowers are geared up to the max.
I just knew it.People are that way. 
Yes, that’s why the thread. As best I can tell, if there’s a reasonably common vehicle used in transportation, there are people out there that will race them. Or even vehicles that aren’t really a form of transportation, such as bulldozers and combines. The exceptions are not common vehicles, such as bathyscaphes and snow groomers.
I once participated in a chair race. We were seated and scooting the chairs around a table.
What’s that? “Was this race in a bar?”, you ask? Wow, I’m impressed that you guessed that.
Hey, I participated in a chair race that didn’t take place in a bar. It was in my office, for charity, and the teams consisted of a person sitting in a wheeled office chair and a second person who pushed the chair across the course. The competition ended when someone got smashed into a wall and management decided that we’d done enough for charity.
I used to attend an annual event called the Lawn Mower Grand Prix where we raced riding mowers around a course lined with empty beer cans. We provided them by bringing and drinking beer. You would have a second added to your time for each beer can you crushed when it was your turn to do your laps. It was loads of fun until some idiot decided to use nitrous as fuel and made many of us nightmarishly sick. The owner of the locale declared funky fuels illegal and also that the next event would be the last because there were people showing up that he didn’t personally know (including nitrous guy). I get that. But I do miss the event.
There used to be a lot of them going up Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, some for cargo and some for people, prior to the Liberty, Fort Pitt, and Wabash tunnels being bored through to facilitate transportation. I’m sure some of the operators raced each other. And since the Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines still exist, I’m sure if the owners had the inclination they could set something up.
David Letterman used to have “elevator races” on his show - at least, the NBC version. Not sure if the CBS studio had elevators or not.
I remember an episode of Home Improvement where Tim showed his wife a racing mower that he said was from something like “the U.S. Lawnmower racing team.”
This reminded me of a racing sport that was founded in Silberg, Kirchhundem. Germany, which is just around the corner from me. It’s “Bobby Car Racing”, a Bobby Car being a famous German brand of walker cars for toddlers, the first vehicle of almost every German child since 1972.
Some enthusiasts formed a club, and established the first Bobby Car race event in the nineties, nicknamed “Silbergstone”, which for a while was even the (un)official World Championship. I attended one race about 25 years ago, and it was fun. Of course in the meantime, there are even motorized Bobby Cars.
http://www.minicartclub.de/racing.html
(German website)