Y’all ready for the Mississippi Grand Prix?
If you can dream it, you can build it. That holds true even if you work at a tractor factory in Belarus and want to go racing at the highest level of motorsport. All you gotta do is cobble together an open-wheel race car out of tractor parts and then hope nobody at the FIA looks too closely at your work.
The oddity you see here is the work of Minsk Tractor Works, a Belarusian farm and utility vehicle manufacturer. According to The Autopian, its official name is the “MTZ 50 Formula 1,” a nod to the company’s line of tractors, which includes the MTZ 30 that some of its parts came from. It may be more John Deere than John Player Special, but it looks enough like a real race car that it’s not hard to imagine it being used on a track.
In fact, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claims he’s put the car to the test, pushing it to 174 mph on a ring road. It’s not clear if he’s doing a bit, or if he’s doing his dictator posturing thing, but we know he’s full of it. That’s because Minsk Tractor Works said on Facebook that the MTZ 50 F1 is just a show car, a mockup: not a running vehicle. It’s not the only such Frankenstein the company has made, either—it also built an immense motorcycle out of tractor parts that almost looks like it would work.
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