When the track announcer introduced the eight teams in the pre-show "beauty contest" — in which each team drives out in a specially decorated demolition derby car not used for competition -- the event didn't seem to be getting any more exciting. Every team had a monster-truck-inspired nickname like Road Rage, Stranglehold and, gack, Team Xtreme. Based on crowd response, the team known as Junkyard Dogs won the beauty-contest trophy — it seemed less for its purple 1969 Mercury Cougar than the Dogs plying the crowd with free T-shirts, using an airgun like those used at NBA games to fling swag to the crowd. So far, so yawn.

Then the racing started. It was the site of vehicular hell breaking loose, and within a half-second, I was hooked.

Here's how team demolition derby works: two teams of four cars each line up, two-by-two, on a mud pit. The team that wins is the first with a car completing five laps — or, if everyone smashes out, the car with the most laps — through an oval course marked by four large tractor tires. A lap is completed only if a car goes around all four tires. However, cars are allowed to cut through the middle of the course, or run the course backward, or go into reverse, or whatever else they want to do.

The first two cars in line for each team are the runners, who try to collect laps. The rear two cars for each team are the blockers, and their first task is to identify which runner on the other team is ahead, and do anything possible to ram that son-of-a-bitch into oblivion. So when the green flag drops, the front two cars for each team try to get a jump while sideswiping each other. The rear two cars go tearing across the middle of the track, or put the car into reverse to start racing the opposite way in pursuit of the enemy.

Within one-quarter lap a race devolves splendidly into old muscle cars — their glass removed and doors welded shut for safety, their radiators and shocks removed so the front of the car is higher, creating a bigger hit — bashing everything in sight. Emerging from the chaos is one runner to try to collect those golden five laps.

Team demolition derby then becomes the equivalent of blocking for a kickoff return, if two teams were returning kickoffs at the same time. The runner tries to weave its way through the carnage, looking out for the other teams' tacklers and using its blockers to gain space. The blockers have to know where the tacklers are so as to cut them off, lock them up (by hooking bumpers so nobody can move) or smash them into submission (most often by hitting them enough to turn their cars into twisted metal wrecks, and in the process stressing out their radiator-less engines so they overheat.) The tacklers try to avoid the blockers and get a direct hit on the runner.

The beauty of the sport is that it looks like wanton destruction, but a four-car squad has to use its collective brains, awareness and teamwork to ensure a victory. By about one-half lap of crashing, a team must identify its remaining runner (the other runner probably having been crashed out), and identify its opponents' runner. The Junkyard Dogs lost their first-round match to the Orange Crush when their runner — failing to realize he indeed was the runner, and that all he had to do was drive two laps to pass the Orange Crush's leader — decided to smash into somebody, putting his car out of commission.

Of course, having a fast, powerful car helps, too, to enable you to avoid and survive hits at speeds of 40 miles per hour or more. For the championship race, the Orange Crush's first runner brought out a 1962 Chrysler Newport refitted with a 440-cubic-inch engine. That car could take a hit and fly — it even did one lap completely in reverse -- and it wiped the muddy floor with its opponent, Stranglehold.

Team demolition derby has existed in various forms, like the one in which Pinky Tuscadero was victimized by the Malachi Crunch in the 1976-77 season-opening "Happy Days" three-parter. But those forms involved working together to smash cars, not race them, too.

This form of team demolition derby has raced around Chicago's south suburbs since 1950, coming to the Route 66 Speedway five years after a long run at the Santa Fe Speedway in Hinsdale, Ill., ended when the track was bulldozed in favor of a housing development.

The man responsible for its comeback is Jan Gabriel, the longtime Chicago-area TV, radio and track announcer whom the folks in Joliet identified as the original "Sunday, Sunday" man. In the late 1960s, on behalf of the now-dead US30 Drag Strip in Hobart, Indiana, Gabriel originated barking the race date twice in a row in hyperactive racing ads. (However, it's still not known who was the first announcer to declare, "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll ONLY NEED THE EDGE!")

Don't think Gabriel doesn't see the potential in officially trademarked Team Demolition Derby, not with the 10,000-seat Route 66 Raceway selling out for four events each summer, not with Speedchannel showing up, and not with a reality TV deal apparently just about in place.

At the least, I hope team demolition derby grows large enough to help the teams pay for their smash-'em-up hobby. Even with a $30,000 purse per race, and each car having sponsors (such as the junkyard that took away my totaled 1990 Mazda 323 after it got rear-ended), the sport still has to be a labor of whacked-out love. Figure that for each race, you have to have 12 cars prepared, and if you make it through all three rounds, you have to prepare for all 12 of them to be destroyed. Plus, you have to have 12 trailers to transport them. And you have to do all of this work in your spare time.

I'm confident, however, that if Jan Gabriel does succeed in getting some wide exposure for his circuit, soon we'll see kids wearing those free Junkyard Dogs t-shirts instead of Jeff Gordon wear, Team Xtreme hats instead of an NFL-logo baseball caps, or baseball shirts with the image of Strangehold's "Big Kahuna" instead of Triple H.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.