When hoonage gets hairy, you’d better have a Warn Winch or a Ramsey Winch on hand

By: David S. Brooks


Me and the boys live down here in Wausau, Florida. Never heard of Wausau? It’s a drowsy little town of 400, famously known throughout the Panhandle as the Possum Capital of the World. As you may have guessed, living in an area whose claim to fame is its level of varmint infestation means that there’s not much to do. We’ve got a couple of arcade games down at the laundromat, but even Galaga loses its charm after two decades. So we have to be a little inventive in order to kill our time. For a while, we wanted to start up our own Jackass troupe, but that fell apart after Dwayne lost a couple of digits in a stunt we called “Midnight Alligator Cowboy.” That was a hard blow to our morale, and a bunch of the guys wanted to slink back to the laundromat where they felt safe and comfortable around the dull glow of Millipede. But that was before we discovered hooning.

One night, Jesse was surfing around on the internet trying to find some articles about the new Camaro. He stumbled across this hilarious blog called Jalopnik, which has a ton of video posts of hoons. If you’re not familiar with that term, a hoon is an amateur automotive daredevil driven to test the limits of his vehicle. A proper hoon is skilled in the arts of dirt-road donuts, windshield surfing, and, most importantly, jumping. After watching a ton of movies, the boys and I knew that we had found our true calling.

The first step on the road to hoonage fame and fortune was to get a car. Our means were limited, so we went down to Dale’s junk yard and drove home in a limping 1989 Merkur Scorpio. Aside from the missing passenger-side door, busted-out taillights, and a rust spot on the roof that looked like that smear on Gorbachev’s head, the engine ran strong enough for our needs. The only extra prep work we had to do was fill up the radiator a bit, smash out the glass to protect against cuts, and paint a big ZoSo logo onto the hood because Zeppelin rules.

Now, there are plenty of hoon-related videos floating around out there in the internet soup, so we wanted to pull a huge stunt that would really make a splash—something that would make us go down in the annals of hoon history. After racking our brains, we came up with something completely original: a 15-foot jump over a stretch of swamp…in reverse! It took a couple of days to build up the dirt ramp, but we all knew it was worth the work.

When the big hooning day arrived, we showed up with what we figured was all the equipment we’d need: some batting-cage helmets for the driver and passengers, a couple rolls of duct tape for any Merkur maintenance, and a cooler of liquid courage. Not wanting to blow our proverbial load too quickly, we started off filming with a couple of donuts and plowing into some newspaper stands that we found on the swamp bank. Once we were all warmed up, it was time for the grand finale. I was manning the camera, and Elrod was at the helm. Starting about 60 yards out, he must have been gotten that Scorpio up to 40 before hitting the ramp. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it much farther than 5 or 6 feet, and fell like a led zeppelin into the sludge. Maybe it was the divine hand of Robert Plant smiting us down for infringing upon his almighty copyrights, or maybe it was that all the weight of the motor was at the rear and threw off the balance. Either way, things did not end up as planned.

We would have had to abandon our hoonmobile right there, but a couple of the boys had winches bolted to their rigs. Jerry’s was a Warn Winch, and Ramsey, of course, had a Ramsey Winch. They rock-paper-scissored for the job, which took a while because both kept throwing up rocks. In the end, Jerry had to reel us back to shore, and we towed the Merkur back home for some repairs. We still can’t get that old dog to start up, but we’ll be back on the scene soon enough with our beater, our camera, and our boredom-induced, self-destructive hijinks…and a winch.


Not sure that I can recommend hooning but I can give a "thumbs-up" to the winches we used: Warn Winch and Ramsey Winch. I swear they could uproot a tree, I know they can un-stick a Merkur. - David S. Brooks