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If you’re sitting at home, bummed out over the world crashing and everything you love in life being canceled, you can take comfort in knowing that the internet is still the same weird, hilarious place it’s always been. We might not be able to watch a live race, with real cars and cheering fans, but there’s a solution: Marble racing. Marbula One is the hobby community’s answer to Formula 1, and it’s the perfect distraction from our daily lives right now.
If you didn’t already know that marble racing was a thing (we didn’t), it might be surprising to find out that there’s a thriving community around it. Jelle and Dion Bakker, the two brothers behind both Jelle’s Marble Runs and Marbula One, have built an online empire around the hobby and amassed well over 600,000 YouTube subscribers in the process. Their marble madness has grown to include several teams and events, and there’s even a season with points counting toward an overall championship.
Their videos comprise of everything from a marble demolition derby to a series of sand and obstacle course races, all of which feature expert commentary and excellent video quality. The whole thing is so well done that it’d be easy to mistake it all for a legitimate, professional sport. Of course, after the year we’re having, marble racing may be all we have left for entertainment.
These are serious times, to be sure, but there are plenty of light-hearted distractions to take our minds in positive directions. The motorsports world has responded to the current crisis like every other industry, which means that race and tracks alike have been hammered with untimely cancellations. Getting your speed fix might be harder these days, but the answers might be hiding where we least expect it.
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