In news more shocking than the fact that The Amazing Race is still on television, IndyCar drivers Alexander Rossi and Conor Daly will be on it next year. The show is arguably most famous for a video of a woman catapulting a watermelon into her own face.
One can only hope that Rossi and Daly will suffer similarly hilarious fates.
Phil Keoghan is still hosting this stuff, too, and still sorry to tell teams that they have been eliminated from the race. What a wild day.
Daly and 2016 Indy 500 winner Rossi, who are alright at racing (or so we hear), went up against 10 other two-person teams earlier this year in the show known for thoroughly embarrassing people, like that poor woman who got hit in the face with a watermelon a few years ago. The race still awards winners with the same prize as it did when it premiered in 2001, $1 million, which sounds like a good deal for the show considering that inflation is a thing.
(Hopefully Daly got better at traveling before joining this big world race, or these two probably didn’t last long.)
Team IndyCar will be in the 30th running of The Amazing Race, which means they found something with more seasons than IndyCar itself to compete in. Filming started on Oct. 1, about two weeks after the IndyCar season ended, and reportedly wrapped up before the end of that month. Rossi, who hadn’t seen many episodes of the show before, called the race “an interesting experience” in a press release, and went to say that “it opened my eyes to what reality television is like,” which sounds like massive amounts of shade. That was after talking about how often the two had to sleep on the floor in airports, so it sounds like he had a blast.
The show premieres on Jan. 3, with Keoghan there to dramatically tell us all about detours and road blocks while wearing one of those necklaces he’s worn every season. This is a bigger blast from the past than a kindergarten yearbook.
Here’s hoping we’ll see professional race car drivers do some fun stuff like eat fish eyes, hang from a huge pole by their ankles, drink pig blood, or, if we’re lucky, get hit in the face with watermelons.