Have you ever priced a brand new farm tractor? The costs range from impressive to stratospheric! A typical small-farm tractor that can handle bush-hogging, hay-bailing and moderate tilling will set you back about a hundred thousand dollars before you get crazy with options! So, if we were to tell you that we had a competition, a race, that if you won would pay for a brand new tractor, would you be interested? That’s the tagline for what we know as “flying tractor racing”. What we are able to pull from the Russian translation indicates that this competition happens annually at the Bison Track Show near the city of Rostov-on-Don in western Russia, and has been going on since 2002. The goal of the races is to promote agriculture and to “increase the prestige of rural labor”. The only thing we see being promoted besides a riot of a time is the amount of patients lining up for a spinal adjustment post-race.

The tractors are powered by sub-5 liter engines and are raced in pairs around a course that is filled with obstacles, jumps, mud pits, and occasionally fire hazards. Don’t ask, we don’t even pretend to understand half of it, we just know that anytime someone is going to launch a farm tractor into the air, they have our full and undivided attention. Check this out…though, you might want to get an ibuprofen ready for the sympathy backache you are about to get.