Teams

Team Husky

Garage Headquarters: Berkeley, CA

Driver: Niket Desai

Mechanics: Kenji Kurita, Daniel Mangels, Matthew Pies

Nuts and Bolts:

Through the long and frigid night, Niket Desai, Kenji Kurita, Daniel Mangels, and Matthew Pies gather around a fire built from scraps of wood they’d found on their journey over the ice-bound tundra. Wistfully, they reminisce about happier days in the sunshine of Berkeley: the scholarly exhilaration of studies in medicine, computer science, and engineering; cozy weekends at Delta Chi, spent in stimulating congress with the cream of the University of California’s female population. What strange, primal urge drove them on this Arctic quest? Wiping the frost from their beards, they pull their parkas closer until…a cruel breath of wind blows the fire out. They feel blindly for matches. “Do you have any left?” “No.” “How about you?” “Anybody?” One option remains – to hitch up the dogs and take the fastest route back to civilization, in a desperate attempt to beat the cold, cheat death, and win the right to live once again not as instinctive animals, but as men. With a surge of adrenaline, they set off. They’ve never felt so alive.

With a backstory that San Francisco’s own Jack London could have written (if, you know, he’d just lightened up a little), the men of Team Husky will race their soapbox sled down Dolores Street on October 18, evoking the nineteenth-century heroes who traversed the bleak Arctic landscape to transport medical supplies. “This is pretty much life or death for us, too,” jokes Niket, the team’s captain. “We’re investing our entire college savings into this project!”