The Gumball 3000 Rally for 2005 kicked off at 6PM in London today (bound for Monte Carlo on mostly legal roads at mostly illegal speeds) - what a sight! I was there in Trafalgar Square with a few thousand other random passers-by and car nuts: never have I seen such a pound-for-pound or minute-for-minute display of car-connoisseur-cars. Well over a hundred started... everything from a classic Pontiac GTO to numerous high-spec Hummers, Nobles, Aston-Martins, Bentleys, [yeah, yeah, plenty of Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis, you-name-its UPDATE: believe me, I'm not being dismissive of this latter group - some rarely-seen Ferrari F430, Enzo, etc graced the field... indeed I daresy every car out there was either jaw-droppingly (a) beautiful, (b) rare, (c) fast, (d) custom-modded, (e) hi-tech, (f) insane or (more typically) most of the above].

Check out the Gumball3000 site. the first photos I could find were posted on Flickr by 'dotben'.

GetReal readers who are not car nuts may nevertheless be interested in the live location tracking: every car reports back to mission control in real time, and location is displayed on the web, courtesy CoPilot GPS/cell-phone/PDA navigation, with a customised real-time display for Gumball3000, for which I've included a reduced-size screen grab below. The race car and fleet-tracking industries have had this technology for a while, but what's new is that this variant is provided to each contestant in a mass-consumer-friendly version.

[Tags: gumball, 3000, rally, geolocation]