Giant Archery

This week, our teams are travelling 100 miles from the start line in Suffolk to 11th-century Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire. Waiting for them is an appointment with a giant archery circuit. We're providing the arrows but the teams will be building the bows, which they have to attach to their radical roadsters. In order to succeed against our three intimidating medieval targets, our teams need to build some seriously strapping siege engines. The judge Steve Ralphs is a master bowyer and archer, he's the man who taught Legolas (Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings) and Guinevere (Keira Knightley in King Arthur) how to shoot a straight arrow. He's appeared in quite a few films, too. Remember the bloke with the flaming arrow in Gladiator? 'On my signal, unleash hell…' – yep, you guessed it, that was Steve. These days, Steve makes traditional weapons for just about every archery purpose, however, he's built just about every type of projectile weapon imaginable from spear guns in Australia to crossbows crafted from leaf springs. He's obviously ideally suited to being a Scrappy Races archery judge.