Teams

DON'T DROP THE SOAP (BOX)

Garage Headquarters: St. Louis, MO

Driver: Ajay Bhatia

Mechanics: Matt Budde, Damien Fair, Andrew Prantner, Victor Villalobos

Nuts and Bolts:

Collectively, the five members of Team Don't Drop the Soap (Box) have more than 125 years of schooling. They speak languages including Spanish, German, Hindi, French, Ethiopian (Amharic, to be exact), Korean, Turkish, and even "Presidential" (an all-but-incomprehensible Texan dialect). They spend most of their time in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. They're well educated and damn smart; but, as the name of their entry indicates, they're not above having some good, clean fun.

Evidently, these brainiacs took the Red Bull Soapbox slogan of "The only race where fast is good, outrageous is even better" to heart. For the contest at Forest Park, the team is preparing what can only be described as a prison shower on wheels, and they're asking spectators to come dressed as policemen, jailers, and inmates to "support" the theme. As if that's not enough costumed mayhem, the teammates have another dress-up opportunity in the offing: "We organize a semi-annual pub crawl in the Central West End with large attendance and awesome themes," says the group's captain, Matt Budde. The next CWE Pub Crawl is scheduled to take place on November 3 – less than a week after the Red Bull Soapbox event.