Musings on Racing Ponies

Hello everyone,

First of all, thanks for reading ECRL: The Wonderhawks so far. I've been wanting to do a racing based story for some time as I'm not only a motor racing nut but I was also a semi-professional Kart racer as well in the past. As a hobbyist writer now, who started writing super hero stories based on my City of Heroes character, I can safely say this is so far the longest story I've written, but this is just the beginning; There's eleven more races to go, after all.

The Wonderhawks concept has been very interesting and fun to work on from the get go when I dropped my original plan of a continuation of the Red Hawks. There's so many potential influences I could take and plenty of my own experience to lean on, but after some consideration I based Cloud Racing on Motorbike Racing. While not identical, I found explaining flying in terms of Motorbike racing to make the most sense with leaning, throwing the rear out to slide as well as crashes being equatable to 'low side' (bike slides out from under the rider) and 'high side' (bike throws rider off) and certainly made more sense then trying to explain how under steer (front tyres lose grip and car can't turn) and over steer (rear tyres lose grip and car spins) could ever equate to a supersonic winged mammal.

While the racing itself is Motorbike based, the characters have been inspired by a range of people from all Motorsport. Rossi should be easy to guess as should Jordan, Wolke shouldn't be too hard but then there are more obscure characters like Nicki Hest and you can have a round of applause if you can guess who he's based on. That's not to say everyone in the story is based on a Motorsports personality, Riggwelter came from a beer called Riggwelter (which means a sheep stuck on it's back but because it's fleece is so thick it can't roll back over on it's own) and Ratchett and Spanner should be fairly obvious if you've seen or read anything Tintin related.

As for the future, I have the championship fully plotted out with a few significant moments, some of which are already written, but I really want to do this one some justice and work on being able to link events together better (something that's killed a few stories I've written mid-way through), so the next update likely won't be until after Christmas.

Again, thanks for reading!