Saw a post last night that featured a race car powered by an outboard motor engine, not the first time time thats been done, or maybe it was. Anyway I got thinking...lateral thinking.....why not motor mowers? Probably stepping out on a limb here as I'm interpreting motorSPORT in the widest possible way. 250F to ZTR....sublime to the ridiculous. The ZTR is not some Corvette powered super mower.... stands for Zero Turn Radius....a handy feature on a ride-on. Modifications to 'racing' mowers are limited, removal of the cutting device, speed is relative, BUT it brings a smile to your face. When was the last time you saw spectators SMILING at motoracing? They are all standing, or sitting there, looking like stunned mullets thinking of the next hot-dog and chips!!!!! Anyway we went a step further at Lincoln College. I worked as a farm trainee on the Lincoln farms in 1959 and we would have clandestine 'race meetings' with the tractors we were assigned to drive. The College farms had about 18 tractors for the various jobs that we did on the mixed cropping unit. At the end of the days work a group of us that had been working adjacent paddocks would get together for an impromptu 1/4 mile drag down the farm track, before heading for the yard. Ferguson, Ford, Allis Chalmers and Massey Harris models all took part, but the King was always the Massey-Harris....this was before the Massey Ferguson. The tractor in question was the early 50's Massey Harris 101 which had ,unusually, a 6 cylinder Chrysler based car engine fitted as standard. We discovered that if we attached a length of baling twine from the governor arm to the steering wheel, we could over ride it's job of controlling engine revs from about 2500 to about 3500! All that was needed was a good tug on the string...trying to hold the string AND steer at the same time was a bit like the proverbial one armed paper hanger, and we had a few mishaps that had to be explained to the farm manager...Tom Taylor. Tom used to cruise round all day in his MK2 Consul ute checking up on us trainees...good job. The tractor fleet, all petrol engined, provided a source of fuel for the student cars. We could never siphon off too much, as fuel use was recorded but we got away with a gallon or two!!!! [you didn't read that] These days at the National Fieldays in Hamilton they have what is called the tractor pull where custom built machines with supercharged 1000hp engines, sometime 2, compete for trophys. There are usually some spectacular blow-ups but all this may have been started by a group of farm trainees doing 1/4 mile sprints on old Fergies all those years ago!