Downhill Racers

Tom Mason’s idea of fun is lying down on a seven-foot aluminum frame on wheels and whipping down steep, winding roads in the dead of night.

Mason is a practitoner of the street luge, the bastard sport spawned by ice lugers and skateboarders. Speed is what this sport is all about. On a good day Mason can hit 80 mph-and that’s without brakes. Lugers stop their sleds Flintstones-style.

“I’ve ripped right through my shoes, man,” said Mason, a cocky, 36-year-old building contractor. “I’ve ripped the soles off my feet before. One time I even ground through my wedding ring.”

Lugers lie flat on their backs on what looks like a narrow bed frame on skateboard wheels. To negate drag and lower their center of gravity, the boards are built about an inch off the ground. Lugers also wear skin-tight leathers and helmets to protect themselves from the inevitable road rash that comes with the sport from time to time.

“Sometimes you scrape your elbows and shoulders when you lean,” says Mike Colabella, another luger from Studio City. The leathers, Colabella said, actually cause lugers to accelerate if they fall off their boards. “They’re usually OK as long as they don’t hit anything like a telephone pole or a car.”

Since luges have no steering wheel, leaning is the only way to turn. Most of the time it is effective.

“The other night I hit a road button with my elbow,” said Mason. “I might as well have hit a brick wall. I thought my arm was shattered.”

In addition to aerodynamics, the rider’s skill and the construction of the luge itself, speed depends on the condition of the raod and its angle of descent. So just as skatboarders are always looking for the gnarly curb to hop and surfboarders seek the mighty wave, lugers search out the smoothest, steepest, most deserted roads to roll-sometimes in the Santa Monica Mountains, sometimes in the hills above Castic Lake.

Streets such as Mulholland Highway and Malibu Canyon Road in the Santa Monicas attract lugers in the middle of the night, when traffic is at is lightest, Mason says.

“It’s illegal, but we have nowhere else to practice, so we just go out on a road,” Mason said. “It’s hit and run, man. By the time the neighbors call the cops, we’re gone.”