The Choptop Challenge Is The Sketchiest Fun You Can Have On Four Wheels

Throughout most of history the most important things humanity has accomplished boils down to a really enthusiastic guy asking some of his friends to come along for the ride. To paraphrase the memetic internet trend, it's important that you agree to do dumb stuff when your friends ask you to. My buddy Kevin has been asking me to come out for the Choptop Challenge for a handful of years now, and this year I finally agreed to do it. I love road trips, I love doing sketchy stuff, and I love hanging out with cool folks who also love road trips and doing sketchy stuff. Not really knowing what to expect, I hit the road for the start of the event in Chicago. 

The rule sheet is pretty simple, but it's complex enough that I won't detail everything. What you need to know is that the event starts in Chicago and ends in New Orleans. You have four days to get there. Teams earn points by completing challenges along the way. Every major city and a lot of minor cities in the eastern half of the U.S. is ascribed a point value, more points are earned for going to cities farther off the direct route between the start and finish. Oh, and you aren't allowed to have a roof or windshield on your car at any point. None of this is a race, and posted speeds are encouraged. Got it? Good.

Kevin's ride of choice, and my ride by default, is this 2003 Porsche Cayenne S with maybe the least effective roll cage I've ever seen. The rules of the challenge require helmets, and doing this many miles without a windshield would be totally unbearable anyway. The car has a dashboard full of warning lights, the B-pillars shimmy when you slam the doors, the transmission leaks, and the exhaust is about to fall off. It gets horrible fuel mileage, but at least the heated seats work well enough to blister your ass. It's late March and the weather is in the 40s. Let's hit it. 

Kevin didn't have time to get the car prepared until the night before the event, so we got a little bit of a late start. The kickoff of the challenge was at 8 a.m., but we didn't get to leave Chicago for a few hours because we had to backtrack to Kevin's place to pick up his supplies and gear. Chicago challenges were only worth 50 points, so while every other team chose to pick up those points we beat a retreat toward Detroit, a 150 point city. We set our sights on ending the night in Columbus, Ohio. 

Unfortunately, about an hour into the actual drive, just across the border into Indiana (it's always Indiana), the driver drops a nuke on the groupchat. "It's over, we're f**cked." The car is stumbling at highway speeds, completely turning off at one point. We coasted to the side of the highway put it in park, started back up, and drove to the nearest exit. Already downtrodden and defeated, we were trying to come up with a solution. Maybe it's a spark issue? Maybe it's fuel, but the gauge says it has plenty. Let's fill it up anyway. Huh, it's running fine again? Okay, let's go. 

We think we narrowed it down to the lift pump in the horseshoe-shaped tank not allowing the last quarter or so of the tank to get near the pickup. So long as we don't let it get below a quarter tank, it seems to be okay. That limits our range, but otherwise fine. By the time we get back to it and figured out, half the places in Detroit that we need to hit up will have closed, so we decide to audible and go straight to Toledo, skipping the motor city altogether. 

If you complete all of the challenges in a given city, you get a 500 point bonus, and I knew we could still clear Toledo and Cleveland on day one in a mad dash attempt to catch up on lost time, and if we drove until 2 a.m. we could get to Columbus and get an early start on challenges the next morning. Full points for Toledo, including grabbing a grip of dogs at Tony Packo's. Back in Cleveland, my home city, I knew the route like the back of my hand. I got us 300 bonus points for taking a very cold plunge in Lake Erie around 10 p.m., and we made an offering of mini-bottles of Malört to the Guardians of Transportation.

I had to wait a month from the end of the challenge to write about it. This is square in the middle of Type 3 Fun on the fun scale. This event was absolutely grueling, dangerous, difficult, and at times infuriating. But given a bit of time, I am definitely looking back on it fondly, and thinking about all the great times we had together, both among my teammates, and in opposition to the other teams. Everyone on this event had a pretty good attitude, and we all got along pretty well, giving some good-natured ribbing and social media squabbles. I'm definitely thinking about what we can do better next year, and how it would be more fun. 

We started our day in a good place mentally. We'd cleared two major points cities on day one, slept in a decent hotel for a few hours, and got up with plenty of day left to clear Columbus and Cincinnati before getting the hammer down to make it to the mid-way point of the rally, a bowling alley in Tullahoma, Tennessee. If we didn't make it to the alley by 6 p.m., we would be forced to forfeit all points earned up to that point. No problem, we got this in the bag. 

Until we didn't. About five challenges into the eight-challenge Columbus list disaster struck. As I was getting back in the passenger's seat from eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the Krema Nut peanut butter headquarters, Kevin said over the intercom "Huh, I guess the four-wheel drive decided to work again, that's cool." Then, about two miles later when we were getting ready to merge onto the highway for a quick jump to the next exit, the car decided it didn't want to shift out of four-low. Boom, we're back to screwed. 

In our rush to get out of Chicago, we didn't really pack much for tools, but Kevin and Matt both had multi-function pocket knives, so we set about dismantling the center console and hacking apart the four-wheel drive controller to see if we could fix the issue. With me scouring ancient forum posts and Facebook groups for a solution and Kevin cutting 23-year-old German plastic and scraping circuit boards, Matt set off to walk a mile to the next challenge, because we could use those points if we were going to get back on the road, after all. 

Because we didn't have the appropriate Porsche fastener tools, this hacking and prying and sawing method took quite a while longer than it should have. After a couple of hours we started getting nervous, and a couple failed attempts at a fix had us discouraged. The third time, it turns out, was the charm. Once four-wheel drive disconnected and we disabled the switch altogether, we were as back as anyone ever has been back. We picked up where we started and set off to finish Columbus. 

While waiting for my $20 five-pound burger to be cooked at Thurman's, Matt ran across the street to grab a 100-burger Crave Crate from White Castle (each worth 300 points), and I went to the Gentleman's to make room for the meat. While on the throne I set about some strategizing for Cincinnati. That was when I realized we'd done the timezone math wrong, and we were actually already 15 minutes late to the bowling alley by Google Maps. Uh oh. 

Once the burger was paid for, we made a mad dash to get to Tennessee from central Ohio. Over the course of nine hours and four fuel stops, we had to make up enough time over Google's estimate to get there without losing our points. We simply didn't have time to finish Columbus or anything in Cincinnati, and had to give up all those points. Kevin put the hammer down and we made it with just 10 minutes to spare before 6 p.m. I won't elucidate exactly how we did it, but there's a reason I didn't take any video evidence of that part. 

I can't explain exactly how I did it, but I felt God in that bowling alley on that random Wednesday night. Teams were split up at random to forge a few extra friendships at the lanes, and my lane definitely had the gift of gab. We quickly realized that we were going to run out of time on our lane, and had to start hurling balls as fast as possible to catch up to the time limit. In the rush of getting people down the lane, I stopped thinking and started letting my midwestern bowling training take over. I've been bowling since I was 7, and have participated in a number of leagues, but I'm mediocre at best. That night in a flurry of rolling balls I tossed five straight strikes followed immediately by a pair of spares. The alley was electric with cheers from every team, and we ended up winning an extra 500 bonus points as my rolls won us the game. It's been a month and I'm still riding that high. 

Once the bowling was over, we were released back out into the wild and immediately started working on plans to claw back some more points. Just north of Atlanta, Georgia we hit up a Buc-ees to spam a few bonus points. Miscellaneous challenges can be done anywhere along the route, and aren't city specific. That night, in addition to accidentally losing my phone when it slid off the dash in the Buc-ee's parking lot, we managed to complete the following challenges. Get swagged out at Buc-ee's (200 points), use your choptop to open a bottle (100 points), croptop challenge (200 points), make fun of a Cybertruck (300 points), fill up with premium (200 points), and eat a taco with your helmet on (100 points). We also enjoyed eating the Dollar General hot dogs we'd been cooking on our engine's headers all day (300 points). 

Atlanta, Georgia is a wildly different place in the middle of the night. We managed to hit about five challenges in the city between 2 and 4 a.m., and it's wild to see the place with no traffic. What a beautiful city it is. Oh well, no time, gotta get moving. 

We finally stopped at about 5 a.m. to grab a wink or two before getting back at it. We hauled ass and managed to knock out Macon, Tallahassee, and Pensacola that day. We may have been threatened with jailtime by a parking lot cop on a four-wheeler in Pensacola, but he eventually let us go with a warning to "get off my island or else". It was tight, but we managed the rest of the city without issues. And getting pulled over netted us 100 bonus points.

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

I just glossed over about 600 miles of driving, but I'll be honest, it was kind of a blur. We considered driving all the way to Savannah, Georgia for its lucrative 200-points-per-challenge but we were starting to feel the effects of three days on the road in the wind and thought better of it. Sunburned, rain soaked, sleep-deprived, hot, cold, and rattled, we drove through it all. 

Here it is, for all the marbles. The last day ends at 6 p.m. on a side street just down the way from Rue Bourbon in New Orleans. We started our day in Mobile, Alabama and completed a few challenges before getting out of town. Along the way we decided our best course of action was to close out Biloxi, Mississippi to get a few hundred extra points before jumping up to Baton Rouge and coming back down to 'Nawlins. 

Just as we finished up Biloxi and got on the road, the Challenge Discord channel lit up with a one-hour double-points bonus. Knowing that we'd have to max this out to get a good score, we doubled down on two of the highest points challenges, take your choptop through a carwash and get soaked (500 points) and get a Choptop Challenge tattoo (1000 points). It was down to the wire, but we made it happen. I got soaked at a car wash while Matt got his tat, divide and conquer. 

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

We got to the finish a little early and we split up for three separate last-minute challenges to close out strong. When the clock struck 6 p.m. we were all standing at the finish with seven of the nine cars that started the challenge. Two different teams had breakdowns that saw them swap for a different chop top either before the start or mid-event. It's really a community effort, and we all knew we were competing against the points sheet, not against each other. That was kind of the most fun part about it, that we didn't really create any animosity over the competition. I'm a very competitive person, and I definitely wanted to win, but even I knew that just playing the game was a form of winning. 

At the end of the rally we found out pretty quickly that really nothing we could have done would have won us the game. One part of the rulebook involved a challenge coin. One team was picked at random at the start to get a coin worth 1,000 points to the team that had it at the finish line. At any point along the rally the team with the coin could challenge another team to any kind of competition they wanted for an agreed-upon number of points. With minutes to go in the challenge, knowing they wouldn't win, the team in fourth (Team Vantastic in a massive Econoline) was in possession of the coin and challenged the team in fifth place (Beater Circus in a slammed BMW E36) to a winner-takes-them-all game of rock-paper-scissors. Vantastic won the challenge and all of Beater Circus' points to finish a couple thousand points clear of second place. It was a creative interpretation of the rules, and required Vantastic to hide the challenge coin for four days, but that's kind of indicative of how Choptop can go. Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say. 

Of all the teams on the Challenge, we traversed more states, drove more miles, ate more jerky, and ate more pizza than anyone else, each earning us more bonus points and at least a week of daily Pepto Bismol. In the end it was all for naught, as we definitely couldn't have done enough challenges to make up a double-or-nothin' challenge. Maybe if we hadn't broken down twice. Maybe if we'd found either of the hidden points idols, or been the first team to reach the Gulf of Mexico. There's no point in trying to figure out how we could have won now, that metaphorical race is run. So it goes. Despite it all, I wouldn't trade it for anything. 

On Sunday, after one of the most vigorous nights of celebratory Malört drinking in which I've ever participated, I ambled out of the hotel room for a hangover reducing bowl of potato slop from the Waffle House down the block. My phone was as dead as my brain felt, and in the post-event come down, I was as content as maybe I ever have been. This is what life is about, man. We lived to tell the tale, and boy was it a tale to tell. No amount of doomscrolling, TV watching, or bitching about the world will give you this feeling. Get out and drive, y'all.

Bradley Brownell/Jalopnik

Once we'd packed up and got back on the road north back to Chicago, it really set in that I'm definitely going to be a repeat Choptop offender. I need this level of reverie in my life. I need this kind of people in my life. This is real old-school car fun, and for the most part we're not hurting anyone. The number of thumbs ups, Instagram tags, horn honks from truckers, and baffled looks alone made it all worth it. In these ridiculously difficult times, it pays off to participate in a social experiment like this. These are my people, and I need to be out there with them. Apparently at its height this rally had something like 30 teams participating, and I hope it'll recover to those numbers someday soon. 

If you want to see what it's like to complete some of these challenges, one of the members of team Odd2See, running a cut roof Honda Odyssey, documented most of it on camera and recently posted the compilation to YouTube. I am featured a couple times on film in glorious full-color.

Over the course of five days in this roofless pile of crap we travelled thousands of miles, ate mounds of beef jerky, slider burgers, and pizza, bowled the best game of my life, completed dozens of ridiculous challenges, slept about twelve total hours, and had the best worst time of our lives. Going into this event the three members of Post Malört Racing, myself, Kevin, and Matt, had never done anything together as a group, and in the crumbling aftermath of our Choptop Challenge effort, I'd gladly call them both good friends. That's what type three fun is all about.