On their trolleys

July 11, 2009
What drives grown men to take boyhood dreams and hone them to lightning speed? Geoff Collett talks with a trio at the forefront of Nelson's trolley racing scene. --------------------
For an insight into the creative, inventive instincts of the people of Nelson, the annual trolley derby is probably the place to go these days. As the hordes head to Collingwood St one day a year each March, to watch a bewildering array of home-built gravity-powered trolleys flying down the steep stretch of road, a picture emerges that is often impressive, occasionally amusing, sometimes alarming. And then there's that handful where it becomes something else again.
You could call them the trolley kings - a small group of men, mostly middle- aged, who take this most time- honoured of boyhood enthusiasms and reinvent it as something almost outlandish in its intensity.
"It's not rocket science, " insists one of this group, Sam Laidlaw - although, actually, it kind of is. After all, as Laidlaw himself observes, one of his great on-track rivals, Tim Bayley, built a miniature wind tunnel to analyse the aerodynamics of his various trolley designs. "It looked like something from Nasa."
These are guys who set out to re- invent the wheel; who, beneath the larking about that the trolley derby might appear to be to an outsider, fling a startling amount of brainpower, toil and cash into finding ever faster ways of duelling with gravity.
Laidlaw is a sort of godfather figure in Nelson's trolley set, as the creator of some of the fastest and most admired vehicles that tear down Collingwood St for a few exhilarating seconds once a year. He is self-taught in his inventing and designing skills - no engineering background, just a penchant for "working in the shed over many years, making things".
"A lot of times, people don't think of how to make something go really fast. They're more interested in how it looks, " Laidlaw explains. "I've always been interested in aerodynamics, I've built model aircraft since I was a kid, so I'm always looking for that . . . trying to understand what makes things go quicker."
A good-natured, jovial character, Laidlaw has freely shared his skills and experience with other trolley enthusiasts down the years, but never quite enough to erode his tight grip on the top honours in the derby. This year's racing was all but washed out by heavy rain, so the 2008 results are still the ones to beat, and Laidlaw- designed trolleys took all the top honours then.
Greg Shaw, in the vicious-looking Everyman machine, claimed the Monarch of the Hill speed prize (clocked at 69kmh down the 350-metre Collingwood St strip). Three Laidlaw designs - the Blue Bullet (piloted by Lincoln McKenzie), Everyman and Laidlaw's own Silver Ghost - took the top three placings in the hotly contested open racing section, the Rockets.
One guy who has got Laidlaw's measure - sometimes - is Bayley. That he is currently out of the honours has only hardened his resolve to claim back some of his pride.
Like Laidlaw, Bayley comes across as an affable, laid-back sort - unless, perhaps, you're one of his most diehard rivals, like the ever- pugnacious Shaw, who bridles at the mere mention of Bayley's name ("He cost me that f.....g race last time, " Shaw mutters).
Bayley admits that he can become a bit obsessed about his interests.
With a civil engineering background and an obvious perfectionist streak, he's restless in his determination to master this trolley business. While he has more than proved his mettle, including a couple of Monarch of the Hill titles, he's tasted defeat and near- disaster (he's had some of the more spectacular wipeouts in years past), and responds to such setbacks with redoubled determination.
The current result is his Redrak Racer III, which has yet to be put through its paces in head-to-head racing, but sent out a pretty powerful signal of what might lie ahead when a bunch of trolley enthusiasts gathered on Marsden Valley Rd in April for a time-trial event, as a consolation for March's abandoned race meeting.
Marsden Valley, Bayley and Laidlaw point out, is an entirely different course from Collingwood St - a long, gradual slope rather than a short, steep one. While top speeds down Collingwood St are usually around 70kmh, Bayley and Redrak III were timed on Marsden Valley Rd at 90.9kmh.
"That's very fast. Very fast, " Bayley says. "Especially when you're getting near the end, on the finish line and you're just holding on for grim death."
The sensation of speed is even more extreme when the lightweight construction of the trolleys is taken into account, and the fact that the drivers are only sitting centimetres above the road.
"It's pretty sort of claustrophobic and, yeah, full-on, " Bayley says. "Concentration is particularly acute to keep yourself on the road."
Shaw says it can be scary. "When I got the Monarch of the Hill that time, it was just short of 70kmh, and you've got no real safety equipment [in his case, his main protection is a black cycle helmet painted with a skull and crossbones], you're just surrounded by plywood and steel.
"Anyone that says that they're not just a little bit scared doing it is lying."
But don't mistake such honesty for a lack of bravado. There's plenty of adrenalin in those cramped little cockpits, and Shaw explains his absence from April's time trials as being "scared the trolley would be too fast".
Shaw's abrasive approach to competition has made him the man for Bayley to beat, and vice versa. Shaw is not so caught up in the technical aspects of trolley design and building, but when it comes to race day - well, suffice to say, as Laidlaw does, it's no accident that there's a vicious-looking shark face on the front of the Everyman trolley. "It sort of goes with Greg."
Shaw relishes psyching out his opponents, and plays the aggrieved party when he recalls last year's racing - which, by his account, saw him hemmed in and battered by both Bayley and Laidlaw, while the eventual winner, McKenzie, shot through on the inside.
When the aggressive appearance of the Everyman trolley is noted, he responds: "Yeah, well it's going to be more aggressive next year." He quickly changes the subject when pressed for details, but offers his own observation: "You don't go in to lose, do you? None of us are in there to lose."
His enthusiasm for the event is reflected in the snazzy collection of trophies he paid to have created for future derby winners - no doubt with every expectation that he's going to be able to hold on to at least one of them when they're next awarded.
One of the weirder dynamics of the city's trolley scene is that it exists essentially only for that one day, when it brings together dozens of competitors and thousands of spectators, draws out cut-throat rivalry and some entirely irrational acts of daring, and then evaporates for another year.
Even the serious competitors may not see or speak to each other for another 12 months, Bayley says.
"There's not even an after-match function - there's a prizegiving and everyone goes home, and that's it." Or that's it as far as any kind of esprit de corps goes. But for at least a few months of the year that lies ahead, minds will be mulling and musing, grudges will fester, and new designs will be quietly and secretly developed and made real.
"By December, there are rumours of new trolleys and things coming out, people working in their garages, " Bayley says.
"There's always an element of intrigue. Sam always comes over here to see what's going on - he says, 'Oh no, I'm not doing anything, no, nothing', and you know he's lying."
Laidlaw has let his guard down this year - slightly, anyway. He lets it slip that he's working on his ultimate trolley - a "real screamer . . . it's going to be probably the biggest effort I'll do". He's building it for a "contact" who keeps him in the bicycle parts that typically provide the mechanical basis of the fastest trolleys.
Laidlaw tends to work with reasonably basic materials for the trolley body - he favours thin, marine-grade plywood, principally for cost and ease of handling. He has a good eye for streamlined shapes and goes for minimal frills - no suspension, complicated steering or fancy braking systems - and focuses on getting the details right.
"It's the finer details that make the difference . . . just making sure everything's right, everything's spot on, tight.
"Anything that moves, if your trolley twists and turns, all that energy will be dissipated through that moving part of the machine. It's got to be very rigid so the energy then transfers to going forward."
Wheels, Laidlaw says, are "75 per cent of what makes it go really well".
Bayley echoes much of Laidlaw's philosophy, although his execution is slightly different - particularly in the body design of Redrak III, which he worked up after failing to make the top three last year. Over the years, he's experimented with many finer details of design, even building his wind tunnel out of cardboard and styrofoam, with a car fan and a digital scale to test the resistance of various scale models of his designs.
He has modelled this design on a cedar-strip canoe, with a skeleton built from strips of redwood which should have gone into a wine rack (Bayley's day job is designing and building wine cellars - redwood is his favoured timber). Over the skeleton, he's created a Lycra shell - lycra's elastic qualities allow it to be stretched drum-tight over the frame, then coated with an epoxy, which both bonds it to the wood and hardens it.
The back end (with one rear wheel) is based on a mountainbike. The two front wheels were imported from a recumbent bike maker in Australia, along with the steering system. The whole thing is enclosed under a perspex lid, to create an entirely smooth, streamlined shell. When he won the recent time trial, it was with an open cockpit.
"The only thing I probably would change if I was feeling rich would be to buy a new wheel for the back - put maybe a carbon fibre disc wheel on it, " to overcome the drag caused by a spoked wheel. "You could spend two or three grand just on a wheel. And about the only other thing I could do would be to put ceramic bearings in it, " to further reduce the weight.
Despite how it may seem, these three who sit with a select few others at the pinnacle of trolley racing in Nelson haven't really forgotten what it's supposed to be about.
They're all keenly involved in encouraging others, especially youngsters, to turn their hand to trolley design and building - a competition has been organised to get local children along.
"I think it's a great thing for the kids to see what they can actually achieve with a little bit of time and effort, " Shaw says.
"The Rockets is a real mature section . . . but the thing is, it's also the fastest section. So I think it gives people something to aspire to."
But there's more than that.
"I think it's a hell of a lot of fun."



LAIDBACK AND BUILT FOR SPEED

There are those who get their kicks from using gravity to power their racing vehicles, and those who like to rely on human power - human-powered vehicles, logically enough, or HPVs.
Nelson got a demonstration of what's possible when bicycle engineering is combined with a strong pair of legs at Queen's Birthday Weekend, when the city hosted a Kiwi HPV event at Trafalgar Park, where a New Zealand record for the distance travelled under human power over an hour was set - 52.664 kilometres.
Nelson HPV enthusiast and the local coordinator for the Kiwi HPV organisation, James McLeod, says any mode of transport that relies solely on human power, other than a traditional diamond-framed bicycle, qualifies as an HPV - even, he says, rollerblades.
As it is, the field is dominated by recumbent bikes or trikes - the sort that are becoming an increasingly common, if still slightly offbeat, sight on Nelson roads. The rider sits back in a low-slung saddle - not far above road level - with the steering mechanism at their side, and legs and pedals out in front.
If they look ungainly, McLeod promises that they outdo conventional bikes in all sorts of ways, including comfort, speed and endurance.
While their acceleration isn't the greatest, and they're no good for sprinting - the rider can't stand up on the pedals, for one thing - once they build up speed, they can maintain it with far less effort than a conventional bike.
They're faster than any track bike over an hour, McLeod points out - the recent record set at Trafalgar Park was about 2.5km further than the best distance recorded by a track cyclist riding for 60 minutes.
Internationally, the numbers are even more impressive: the world record on an HPV for an hour's riding is a shade over 71km, compared with just under 56.4km on an upright bike. The top speed ever recorded on an HPV, over a short distance as part of a longer ride, is a mind-boggling 130kmh.
McLeod is certain that one day they'll crack 160kmh, whereas "with conventional diamond-framed bikes, they've basically reached the pinnacle of their development", other than "fiddling around with ultra-exotic materials", which most people cannot afford.
The trick to making a standard recumbent bike into a speed machine is encasing it in an aerodynamic shell, which makes slicing through any headwind effortless.
But beyond that, McLeod talks of the appeal of constantly tweaking and refining a recumbent machine to improve its efficiency.
He builds his own bikes. After becoming interested in recumbent cycling about six years ago, he discovered that the machines were too expensive to buy. Given that his father and grandfather were bike mechanics, and confident of his own skills, he set to work.
He's on to his fourth machine now, a three-wheeler with a marine ply frame, and has made his own shell with the help of a boatbuilder relative, ready to burn up the racetrack.
There are some clear parallels with the trolley scene - McLeod has previously entered one of his bikes in the trolley derby (with the pedals disabled), just as trolley enthusiast Tim Bayley entered his trolley Redrak III in the HPV challenge, with a "linear pedalling system" fitted. The custom- made mechanism uses expensive bearings that allow the drive mechanism to turn in only one direction, and works by the driver pushing the pedals backward and forward rather than in a circle.
Bayley admits it was hard work for the trolley's driver, who couldn't walk after an hour of pumping away at the linear pedals.
Turning an HPV into a GPV - gravity-powered vehicle - should be rather more straightforward. McLeod says that when he and a mate entered the derby, they recorded the day's second-fastest time - as well as pulling off one of the most spectacular crashes ever. GEOFF COLLETT