Drunk Germans, Car-jousting

Traditional jousting always looked pretty fun; a simple premise that carried with it strong chances of slaughter. These days though, jousting usually takes place around villages in north Germany and is mostly shorn of any real danger. Instead of lancing foreign dignitaries, today's riders lope along on horseback while aiming to collect a ring fastened to a gate with a magnet. Thankfully, the German youth are bringing the gallant disregard for safety back to jousting.

In Schleswig-Holstein, a deserted wasteland between Hamburg and the Danish border, jousting is having its renaissance. Where their grandfathers relied on horses, the kids there now wave their lances from the windows of super-charged stock cars in a massive, unregulated, drunken festival of danger, speed and mud.

Martin, 23, is one of the 20 organizers, but when I ask him about regulations and safety, he furrows his brow, as if he’s heard this question too many times. "There would be too many conditions to fulfill," he says. "Besides the mandatory presence of a fire engine at each event, every driver would have to be at least 18 years old, possess a valid driver’s license and not drink. And if you met all of that, there wouldn’t be anything left of car jousting, really". He’s right; if you can’t watch a pissed-up kid who can’t drive speeding around with a weapon sticking out of his flaming car, what’s the fucking point?

Today’s contestants have unloaded dozens of old cars on a barren cornfield in the middle of a dark wood. These cars were rotting away on a north German junkyard just weeks ago, but now, thanks to several weeks of toil beneath their bonnets, they’re spazzy Batmobiles with horsepowers pushing 250. “You need to be able to really go full throttle”, says a 34-year-old jousting regular, who’s spent the last 15 years remodelling bangers, “or it’s just not sick enough.”

As the biggest car jousting event in all of Northern Friesland(!) prepares to start, the mood is a strange mix of eager anticipation and alcoholic stupor. Local kids and farmers hang out at the bar. Mums with their kids, electricians and construction workers in their uniforms, young girls, grandpa, grandma; they’re all there drinking whiskey and coke, screwdrivers, tea punch and more than anything else: Sternmarke – a cheap cognac knockoff, which the local youths refer to as the “Champagne of the North”.

During lunch the drivers park their cars on the edge of the wood, eat BBQ and drink. Some drivers stop at the “pitstop”, others go straight for the drive-in option – not even bothering to leave their cars as they’re handed booze through their car windows. I take the chance to ask a guy called Knut if these events mark a symbolic preservation of a tradition their forefathers enjoyed. He smiles, "Not really". He did used to ride in the traditional horsey version himself, but “the horses don’t really do it for me. I need the buzz.” A petrol head who started car jousting with a bunch of friends in the early 90s, he’s now in his mid-30s, and happy that young kids from the surrounding villages have taken over these events.

About 60 cars align in three parallel rows. Metallica blares from the speakers. The passengers lean out of the windows, reaching into iron quivers welded to the outside of the cars and pulling out their lances. There’s a whole family inside a baby blue Opel Kadett: dad behind the wheel, mum on the passenger seat, kids in the back. Cars slither around, revolving around themselves, kicking up mud that rains down on everyone like meaty hailstones. The combination of horsepower and “champagne” doesn’t lend itself to precision driving, and in a very slurry way, things are completely out of control.

Who ended up winning? Who’s going home with the cup? Nobody knows – and nobody seems to care. Everything quiets down when it’s over, except of course, for the rows of speakers blasting Motörhead: “You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me.” The pleasure is to joust.