Belfast Draws 40 Teams Back for Red Bull Soapbox Belfast

red bull soapbox belfast returned to Belfast on May 17, bringing the race back to Stormont for the first time since 2008. The event came almost 18 years to the date after the city last hosted it, and it arrived with 40 selected teams ready to take on the downhill course.

More than 300 applications were submitted for this year’s race. That left engineers, students and creatives competing for one of the 40 places, after being tasked with turning imaginative concepts into fully functioning race machines before race day.

Stormont Welcomes 40 Teams

The race was held at Stormont, where teams raced homemade, non-motorised machines downhill and were judged on creativity, performance and speed. Preparations began on Saturday, when teams dropped their Soapbox creations up to East Belfast ahead of the race.

The last Belfast Soapbox race drew 30,000 spectators, and large crowds were expected to gather again at Stormont on Sunday. Ruddell Metals from Hillsborough won that previous race, giving the Belfast return a clear point of comparison for how much interest the event can pull.

Family Day At Stormont

The day was built as a family-friendly event, with live entertainment, food vendors and large viewing screens alongside the race itself. That setup gave spectators more than the downhill runs to watch, while the 40-team lineup kept the field broad enough to include a mix of skills and ideas.

For teams, the race was the payoff after weeks of turning a concept into a machine that could survive the course and still score well on creativity, performance and speed. For Belfast, the return after almost 18 years turned a one-day spectacle into a measure of how much appetite remained for the event.