What kind of car does it take to pull off a rally like Bullrun?

With all the talk of Season Three in the air, it's natural for us to get our hopes up and talk shop when it comes to cars. But what exactly is the right car? Should you go new, or old? Fast, or reliable? Easy to fix, or hope and pray? A large part of this depends on what kind of driver you are. Just like a mechanic, you want to use the right tool for the job, but sometimes certain tools will work better than others. The perfect car for one drive may not work for someone else.

Even in the original "Cannonball" races in the 70's, you had every kind of car imaginable, and they all picked them for one reason or another. Everything from stock (and rented) Cadillacs to full-on race cars, vans with 100+ gallons of fuel capacity, motorcycles, and almost everything in between. There was a purity to it, there were no excessive rules. It was a straight-up race in the purest sense. First one to the finish line wins, and it didn't matter what you did to get there.

The beauty of this form of racing is that there were no rules regarding how you get it done, just what the goal was. I believe this is a lost art in racing today: NASCAR and F1 have all but neutered creativity in car design. It is becoming more and more of a cookie-cutter series, which puts all of the onus on the driver beating dozens of other guys just like him, in cars just like his. To win a race nowdays (in organized racing) it is nearly 100% luck. You don't see technology breakthroughs dominating like they did in the 60's and 70's. Most of those things got banned because they were so unfair to the other teams. Instead of looking at the other teams and saying "you guys better come up with something if you want to win!" it was pushed under the rug, and closer competition made for better TV, so the cookie cutters ruled and here we are today.

And in this kind of atmosphere, we have Bullrun. In no other form of organized racing will you see such a wide variety of vehicles with one goal: to take the Bullrun crown. This is the race that asks the great question, "What if we had a race that was truly possible for anyone to win?" What if there were no classes, no rules, just 12 teams and a finish line?

Well, we can dream, anyway. Some say that Bullrun TV is exactly that: overly homogenized rules so that anyone can win. And it's hard to disagree with that. But I choose to see it as a tribute to the last "real" race of the 20th Century. And with that in mind, I've got my weapon of choice.

What do you think?