We won the Accrington Soapbox Challenge 2026

At the 2025 Accrington Soapbox Challenge, the wheel fell off during our first run, and we didn’t qualify. We were heartbroken, we’d spent all summer reworking our Thunderbird 2 inspired cart to be as light as possible. Mike had spent countless hours completely rebuilding the chassis out of aluminium whilst I had recreated the nose cone out of carbon fibre.

We hastily fixed the issue and competed at Longridge a couple of weeks later, coming 4th overall on time, but not without more damage. We shattered the nose cone and finished off what was left of the insulation foam “sausages” that ran down the side of the cart.

For 2026, I just wanted to get a time and find out if we were competitive. But we did a bit better than that. With a time of 15.80 seconds, not only did we win our community category, but we also bested the time of Baxenden Car Breakers, the winners of the Business category. It a great day.

The format was slightly different at Accrington this year. The first run wasn’t a qualifier, and everyone was guaranteed two runs. However during the lunch break, they altered the course and added a chicane and other obstacles. Matt skillfully navigated the lot, but it caught a lot of other drivers out and wrote off a couple of carts.

We managed to bag a third run during the lunch break, I came back from lunch and the team were all “quick, they’ve said we can do another run, we’ve got to go”. As the course was in use, we had to push the cart on the main road to get back up the hill, stopping at the traffic lights with the normal traffic.

Improvements for this year included remaking the sausages out of carbon, while Mike continued to tinker with the chassis - adding more brakes, a floorplan, and lacing his own wheels so that we could use tubeless tyres.

Next year Mission Improbable will return to Accrington and we plan on attending the new “Burnley Soapbox Challenge”.