Board-track racing was a popular event in the early days of automobiles, but once the cars got too fast and the centrifugal forces too strong, it became an attraction for only the craziest motorcycle daredevils... at least in the US.

In India, however, they're all over the place! Popularly known as The Well of Death, they're as common an attraction at a local fair as concerts by Molly Hatchet and The Marshall Tucker Band are on this continent.

Here's a clip from a fair in Pushkar, India featuring a couple of death-defying mirth-mobiles:

"But how do they stop without crashing?" I hear you cry. The answer is: "very carefully." This clip's got a great shot of a couple of cars slowly climbing their way into orbit and then coming down again, miraculously testing the limits of wood, metal, and gravity:

Finally, here's a much longer clip, featuring a guy in a Where's Waldo shirt STANDING UP on his whirling motorcycle. As the poster says at the outset: "If we do it is a circus, if we fall it's a death."