There used to be an annual 24-hour pedal car race held in England, perhaps there still is. The three years that I participated, it was held on a dismal wind-blown aerodrome in Bristol. I don't remember the exact time of year, but it was cold. A team was six drivers, two mechanics and as many assorted helpers as could be persuaded to turn up with the promised glamour of a pit pass. Actually, "pit" was rather a good description: The race organizers provided a bare scaffolding structure on which each team would put whatever shelter they had. One year we pitched a tent, but mostly I remember the farm canvas tarpaulins that gave our effort a somewhat agricultural air (I found the smell quite pleasant). One of my treasured memories of these times is Friend Andy sitting on a folding chair in the not-so-small hours of the morning. The wind was whistling through our pit. We'd given up pedaling until it stopped raining, and he was wearing layers of coats, hats, scarves, gloves and any other rags that were lying around. He looked as miserable as anybody I've ever seen. To add poignancy to the image, he had a hurricane lamp burning under his chair, in the vain hope that it would warm him up. Ah, great memories!
And then there was the year that Friend B thought he was a goner. Once again, the weather was thoroughly miserable and we'd suspended pedaling at dead of night until things became marginally acceptable. I had gone to great effort to clear out the front of my car by moving large amounts of "stuff" into the back, and was just trying to get to sleep when I heard the urgent request for everybody available to go to the main tent, which was showing signs of taking to the air. Like many others I responded, and spent the next lifetime or so wallowing in mud and hanging onto a rope while the wind whipped horizontal rain through the darkness. (Oh, Joy!) While I was considering what it would be like, flying over the Bristol Channel in the dark holding onto a tent, I noticed friend B next to me. Then he was gone. Later, much later, I trudged back to my car, and found him comfortably asleep in the space that I had so laboriously cleared.
Well, what can you do? I pulled things around until there was enough room and slid into the back. Drat! My bootlaces were a solid ball of mud, and I really, really, wanted to get those boots off. So I reached over Friend B for the knife that lived in the glove compartment. As I picked it up, two bright little eyes appeared in the darkness, focused intently on the gleaming blade hovering a few inches above his throat. It looked, to me, as if a life was passing before those eyes.
It wasn't just the pit that had an agricultural air about it. The team's guiding light was a farmer, and he built a couple of the cars, which had a solid no-nonsense air to them. The first year we had to keep welding a wheel back on, until somebody realized that by moving the seat we would have a perfectly acceptable three-wheeler. The judges didn't like that, and said that there had to be four wheels on the car. So we tied it on with baling twine and allowed it to rotate gently in the breeze. The next one had the wheels attached firmly, but the steering design had been a little hurried so the steering was both extremely sensitive and (to our great surprise) backwards. We had drivers from other teams lined up at our pit waiting to try our car and see if they could get all the way round without going off the track (about a third of them managed it at the first try).
We never won, but we always finished and always had fun (in retrospect, at least).