Web Video / FailRace

FailRace is a YouTube channel hosted by Alex Day (not the musician) that features various automobile races, stunts, challenges, and other manner of vehicular shenanigans within video games. While any game with vehicles is technically fair game to be featured, the most common ones are Grand Theft Auto V, BeamNG.drive, Wreckfest, and the Forza series.

The channel is home to a number of series:

• FailRace, a weekly, mostly-viewer-submitted Clip Show comprised of amusing and/or impressive clips from relevant games.
• Survive The Hunt, a monthly series where Alex must hide from a pack of "hunters" within GTA V and survive for 24 hours of in-game time.
• Hunt The Survivors: Usually played in a Forza game, Alex tries to tag (i.e. run into) as many players as possible within 20 minutes.
• Driven Till Destruction, in which Alex drives various vehicles around destructive courses in BeamNG.drive until they break for good.
• Gone In 48 Minutes: Similar to Survive The Hunt, Alex has 24 hours of in-game GTA V time to steal as many specific cars scattered across the map as possible and return them to his starting point, while evading or eliminating other players guarding the vehicles.
• Stop the Beast: A game played in BeamNG.drive, where Alex drives a heavy, powerful vehicle like a large truck, while his friends have to find a way to trap him or disable his vehicle within a time limit.
• Survive the Descent: Another BeamNG.drive game where all the drivers must drive down a steep obstacle course, with the winner being the one whose car is both able to drive and steer under its own power.

A majority of other videos are races within GTA V or the most current Forza game.

Since starting in 2011, the channel has grown to 478,000 subscribers as of May 2021.

This channel provides examples of:

• Affectionate Parody: Sometimes in the narration Alex will imitate the narration style used in Top Gear.
• The Alleged Car:
  • Occasionally, a Forza race will involve the group building deliberately crappy cars and then swapping them around to others for them to use.
  • Invoked in a BeamNG.drive video in which Alex attempted to do a lap of a circuit while a certain mod caused random failures to happened to his vehicle every few seconds.
  • Thanks to its more realistic crash physics; pretty much any car used in BeamNG.drive has a tendency to become one of these after any challenge.
• Artistic License – Physics: The channel's eponymous series, in part, plays homage to the occasions of this that occur in various racing games.
  Alex: "That's not how you physics!"
  YouTube commenter on the November 13, 2022 stream: "What the physics?!"
• Awkward Stoplight Moment: Survive The Hunt often sees Alex stuck at a stoplight next to a hunter's car (or what he believes to be a hunter's car) and having to make a choice between continuing to look inconspicuous and running for it before all the remaining hunters close in on him.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Alex frequently mentions having a "brown trousers moment" whenever near-misses happen.
  • They raced two tracks named Brown Pants and Browner Pants.
• Butt-Monkey: All of them can be one from video to video, but special mention goes to InvisibleAK, AKA Chris. From the famed "Chrisplosion Award" going to the first person who dies in a GTA V race, to the various jokes made in his expense in the Hunter's chat in Survive The Hunt, he does tend to get treatment the most.
  • For GTA V Races specifically, Ninetales. If the race goes wrong for him, he'll find somewhere well away from the track to park up.
• Captain Crash: If there's a helicopter showing up in GTA V and it's not because of someone's wanted level, it's piloted by Narreths. Multiple viewers believe that if Narreths pilots a helicopter, the crash is a matter of when, not if.
• Car Skiing: Usually showing up during races, Alex refers to them as "two-wheeled moments."
• Catchphrase: The "hello, and welcome to the show" that begins every video. ^note excluding those taken from various twitch streams
• Cheaters Never Prosper: GTA race videos contain two races; in the first one, the participants don't actually start until one minute into the race, to allow Alex time to do his intro. However, setting off a few seconds early is common, and whoever starts it is usually rammed into a wall or off the road at the first opportunity by the rest of the field. Since such cheating is almost never beneficial, it's mostly treated as bonus entertainment.
• The Chew Toy: The Dilettante (or Toyota Prius, to use its real-life counterpart's name) within GTA V is a frequent target of abuse by Alex and other channel regulars, usually in the form of blowing them up. The car is also commonly used in games where the objective is to avoid getting crushed by larger vehicles.
• Clip Show: The channel's eponymous series is this, with most of the footage submitted by viewers.
• Color-Coded Characters: Most of the regular player group will keep to the same color vehicle if possible, either within a single session or across multiple ones. This is most apparent in GTA V races, where it's fairly easy to tell who is who just based on vehicle color over dozens of races.
  • Alex himself (Casino Royale) and UltraBlAkEy95 both use orange vehicles, leading to Alex christening them "Team Orange". For one GTA video, everyone but one copied Alex and Blakey (the one who didn't proceeded to do so in the video's other race, making them the titular "Sneaky Alex").
  • Raregliscor1 uses pale blue.
  • Impega1957 uses white.
  • Longbow MkII uses dark green.
  • Timid Ninetails uses scarlet red.
  • DANGERMAN8000 uses crimson.
  • LeatherCapG and Bumpy0 both use electric pink.
  • JowoHD uses a more muted pink.
  • Laddosaurus used royal blue; has switched to yellow since Brazen stopped being a regular.
  • Liamt007 uses black.
  • TmDc HypeR and Stevie1055 both use purple.
  • ProfCranePorter uses pale green.
  • InvisibleAK uses pale grey.
  • revs39 uses lime green.
  • ewanm9389 uses gold.
  • Lv8FoodSource uses pale cyan.
  • BrazenMiscreant uses yellow.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Partially. Around 2017, the text in video thumbnails began to provide some sort of indication of what type of video it was: green for GTA V, orange for Forza, and yellow for real life videos. All other videos used blue text.
• Comeback Mechanic: Almost every race that will allow for it has the given game's catchup mechanic turned on, to make for more exciting races and to allow for participants to still possibly have a good race if they get somehow screwed over at the start. Sometimes it ends up in a huge last-lap pileup.
• Cool Car: Alex owns a 1965 Plymouth Fury with a vintage NASCAR-style livery and a 2009 Audi RS6 Avant.
• Dressing as the Enemy: For the April 2021 episode of Survive the Hunt (debuting on April Fool's Day), Alex decided to play a trick on the hunters by copying a distinct avatar of one of the hunters, down to replicating that player's usual custom car.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • A lot of the more famous parts of the Survive The Hunt series, most notably the exploding Prius part, are missing from the first few episodes, largely owing to the extended (as in, still happening) tweaking of the rules.
  • For a long time, Alex's filming crew members was never referred to by their names and within GTA V they were referred to by their car colors instead. Also, while there are some members that are regularly present in the numerous games that Alex played, many of them took part in just one game only. It was only in early 2019 that Alex would start to refer the filming crews by name... Which coincided a period where a consistent cast of filming crew members started to become a regular presence in his videos.
    • Speaking of this, filming crew member LeatherCapG was initially referred by Alex using her gamertag. This changed in late 2021 when Alex began to call her by her real name Amy in his videos and it has been kept to this day.
• Epic Fail: The channel doesn't have its name for nothing.
  • Of particular note is when the cast is taking turns driving the beast on the 21 July 2023 livestream; on Ollie's turn with the firetruck, he manages to flip it in 13 seconds.
• Heroic R Ro D: The premise of Driven Till Destruction is to drive vehicles around punishing tracks until they break down, and see which one went farthest.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The most common tactic for the hunted in Survive The Hunt is to blend in with AI traffic, which involves obeying traffic laws, driving relatively inconspicuous vehicles, and even avoiding areas where the type of vehicle being driven is less likely to spawn.
• Hollywood Police Driving Academy: Alex is quick to point out the multitude of wacky, ineffective, and often spectacular tactics used by police vehicle AI across various games, giving them the collective name of the FailRace Police Department.
  • A stream donation for a Survive the Descent stream in BeamNG.drive has expanded the FRPD to being only part of an entire city of incompetent emergency services, as besides the police department being better at wrecking their cars than at catching crooks the FailRace City Fire Department is better at starting fires than fighting them, the paramedics drive a fleet of ambulances in the color scheme of a Beam creation of Brazen's, and the recovery services are owned by Laddo (due to his frequent use of a recovery truck in BeamNG.drive videos spawning the vehicle's nickname 'Laddo Recovery Service').
• I Meant to Do That: Alex will often jokingly use this excuse to brush off accidents or bad driving on his part, such as saying he did it "for science".
• It Amused Me: The player Alex impersonated in the above example for Dressing as the Enemy caught on to what he was doing, and for fun briefly avoided confirming their own identity to the other hunter players, essentially working against them for a short time.
• Lame Pun Reaction: During streams, viewers tend to donate money with a pun in the donation message. Bad puns result in Alex stating "That's going to be a boo to you from chat and from me".
• LOL, 69: Some donators during streams try to get the total donation bar to end in 69, to which Alex quips that a 'Cult of 69' is active. One chat regular, by the alias 'Cowbell', is a particularly adamant member of this cult, to the point that one donation in a Wreckfest stream explicitly said 'Time to annoy Drake^note another regular, full online name 'DrakeGamer85', who's equally adamant about a 'Cult of 1P'.'
• Non-Standard Game Over: Whenever a round ends for someone because their game crashed.
  • On the first run of the 21 July 2023 "Stop The Beast" Livestream, The Beast was pushed into a small enclosure which Alex was unable to escape from, despite his truck still being operable, this was nonetheless considered to be a successful stopping of The Beast.
• One-Steve Limit: As revealed when the gang went Karting and some real names came up, there are at least two Liams; Liamt007 and Laddosaurus.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Averted. Several of the gang are usually referred to by their real name rather than their gamertag such as Pleasedonteatme (Oli), InvisibleAK (the above-mentioned Chris) and LeatherCapG (Amy) for instance. Alex himself, for that matter.
• Signing Off Catchphrase: "That is going to be it for this video. Thank you all very much for watching, and until next time, a goodbye," or some variation thereof.
• Tempting Fate: Alex has noted the "curse of the commentator" on many occasions, where he'll almost inevitably run into trouble shortly after he expresses even the tiniest bit of gloating about how well he's doing in a race or other game mode.
• There Are No Rules:
  • A few episodes of Survive The Hunt suspend most of the usual rules for the sake of entertainment. This includes the hunters being allowed to use all weapons and vehicles, since they're normally restricted to pistols and shotguns and can't drive supercars.
  • The group typically conducts Wreckfest races the same as in any other game, with deliberately aggressive tactics banned. On occasion, they run races in that game with such rules suspended for the sake of the spectacle provided by Wreckfest's damage physics.
• Tree Cover: In one game of Survive The Hunt, Alex, being chased on foot and with little options, hides within the branches of a pine tree. He ends up losing the entire hunting party, even when two of them run within mere feet of where he's standing.
• Unusual Euphemism: Alex has a few different words to describe someone who doesn't follow the rules, mainly applying during livestreams where viewers are allowed to participate. The odd one, the one that applies to this trope, is 'plank'.
• Verbal Tic: Alex has a few tendencies:
  • Referring to vehicles as "the [color] machine".
  • Adding "a" before player names, such as "there's a Longbow" or "that's a Chris".
  • Using "having a look" to describe a car attempting to go for a pass.
  • Environmental objects that vehicles can collide into is "street furniture".
• Wacky Racing: Naturally, although "the inverse law of FailRace" states: the sillier the setting (whether the vehicles, the race track, or both), the better the race.
  • Wreckfest streams usually involve multiple races with everyone in a certain vehicle at one of the more destructive circuits. At least one of those races is dedicated to school buses on the Hellride circuit.

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