A cross-country car chase and Web series predominately featuring CEOs and other business leaders will rev its engines in Hartford this year for the first time.
The Fireball Run, which is in its ninth season nationally, was founded in 2007 by an Orlando, Fla., production company of the same name, using businesspeople and their automobiles as the main draws in a Web series featured on Amazon Fire and Google Play. The race, which enlists about 40 teams, hits eight destinations in a cross-country route, with each team participating in a Trivial Pursuit-like contest; questions are based on historical and cultural facts of each particular destination.
The whole contest is then packaged into a 13-episode Web series.
The ninth season of the Fireball Run is called Space Race, and it will start in Harford. Forty teams will compete and travel down the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic going from Hartford and finishing at Cocoa Beach in Florida’s Space Coast. Other destinations include Queen Anne’s, Md.; Williamsburg, Va.; Topsail Island, N.C.; Florence, S.C.; and Liberty County, Ga.
The first three days of the event will be Sept. 25-27 in Hartford, and the race will end Oct. 4 at Cocoa Beach.
“We are going to try to put a different spin on Hartford,” said J. Sanchez, executive producer of the Fireball Run. “The reputation is that it is this insurance capital, but we are going to show it is so much more than that … Hartford is a very art-centric community.”
Fireball Run anticipates a live audience of 85,000 people during the race. The show itself typically ends up with 1.7 million viewers for each season.
— Brad Kane
