Students Ben Winters and Tyler Shockley drove 110 miles per hour on Interstate 35 Saturday – and were rewarded with a Spring Break beach house in South Padre.
Winters and Shockley, University College freshmen, were the winners of the Red Bull Land Rush, a 101-mile race from Arkansas City, Kan. to Guthrie, Okla. Forty teams of four – consisting of students from Oklahoma colleges -- were provided with GPS navigation devices and given rudimentary directions to nine checkpoints along the route. Teams were required to complete a challenge at each of the checkpoints. After the challenge was completed, the teams were given a clue, which guided them to the next stop.
Shockley and Winters teamed up with two OSU students, Cody Lum and Cody Wann. Their team – A Team…Divided -- completed the race in one hour and 47 minutes.
“Our driving quote was ‘Win or go to jail,’” Shockley said. “The Red Bull people weren’t even set up when we got to the finish line.”
Shockley said his team kept its lead for the entire race.
“We’re all really athletic so we just killed the challenges,” he said. “Our navigator, Ben [Winters], did a really good job. We didn’t make any wrong turns or anything like that.”
But A Team…Divided’s relatively smooth race was not a common factor. Complications befell many of the other teams, causing some to quit before crossing the finish line.
Kenton Panas, University College freshman and a member of He’s Gonna Do One!!, a team of four OU students, said his team only made it through three checkpoints before running into car trouble.
“We were going down a side street in a neighborhood and I think I was going 50 [miles per hour.] I hit a bump and bottomed out and [cracked my transmission],” he said. “I had to get my car towed. It’s still in Ponca City.”
His car may be in bad shape, but Panas said the Land Rush was still a good time.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “I saw one competitor pass another going like 90 on the shoulder. It was like some of the most intense driving I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Winters said legality and safety were clearly not the issue during the Land Rush.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t care about the legal rules,” he said. “One car got totaled in Stillwater. [But] we tried to keep it pretty safe.”
The challenges that teams completed along the route varied. From pitching tents to extricating a Red Bull can from the middle of a block of ice, teams did not know what to expect at the next stop.
The most memorable challenge for Jonathan George, human relations senior and member of Sandy Sacks, a team of four OU students, occurred at a stop at Eskimo Joe’s in Stillwater.
“We had to sing the Oklahoma song to a table that was dining at the restaurant,” he said. “If they gave us approval of the quality of our singing then we got our next clue.”
For Winters, the final checkpoint was the one stuck in his mind. The challenge was simple: get to the finish line.
“The [second place team] was right behind us,” he said. “We bailed out [and] it was pretty much a footrace for the final two or three hundred feet.”
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lolboroks 3 years, 2 months ago
Well at least our OU students are keeping up the tried and true Oklahoman tradition...cheating.
sloofoot 3 years, 3 months ago
Them there boys is from Poteau and them Poteau boys got spunk dagnabbit!