A decidedly different event rolls into town Sunday

Rolling contraptions, pedal-powered beasts, gears, levers and large mustaches will take center stage in downtown Santa Rosa on Sunday for a new kind of arts festival celebrating the marriage of art, science and turn-of-the-century imagination.

The Handcar Regatta, or more formally known as -- take a breath -- The Great West End & Railroad Square Handcar Regatta & Exposition of Mechanical & Artistic Wonders -- takes its cues in part from Humboldt County's 40-year tradition of kinetic sculpture races.

It also incorporates what's known as "steam-punk" aesthetics, bowing to fictional, futuristic ideas about transportation and exploration typified by the 19th-century musings of French author Jules Verne.

"There's a whole group of underground tinkerers and eccentrics and artists" around Sonoma County, said Clifford Hill, an event organizer and member of Krank-Boom-Clank, a Santa Rosa team whose "Hennepin Crawler" is entered in Sunday's race.

"What I want to bring to the regatta is the sense that there's a hub of oddball artists in this area -- and in the East Bay and San Francisco as well, so they can come up, too," Hill said.

At least 12 vehicles are registered for the "race," which includes awards in a variety of categories beyond speed, Spring Maxfield, one of the event creators, said.

An additional eight vehicles may be entered -- if they're completed in time, she said.

"One of the key aspects of the event is the fact that while organized, it is still very freeform," said event producer Ty Jones.

The registered entries include something called the "Lumbering Contraption," a kind of giant hamster wheel for rails, from an Oakland team; a Viking ship called "Welded Sykkellen," entered by a local group called The Uff-Da's; and "Random Tandem Pandemonium," a pedal-powered four-seater cycle out of Santa Rosa.

A wide variety of other mechanical creations and vehicles also will be on display, including a three-story Victorian house on wheels and a huge, three-wheeled metal duck.

Musical groups, craft vendors and roving performers will also take part in the event, which is free and begins at 11 a.m.

The idea for the regatta sprang from an empty stretch of train track through downtown Santa Rosa that may one day bring commuter traffic to Railroad Square, and a chance conversation at a local gallery last winter, organizers said.

Jones and Maxfield, partners in the Ray Design Studio near Railroad Square, had been mulling ideas for a new arts festival for close to two years but couldn't find a model that was unique or "edgy" enough, Maxfield said.

"We wanted to raise the bar of what an arts event could be, and we knew there were hundreds of people in Sonoma County that were right there with us," she said.

When Santa Rosa artist David Farish, another of the Krank-Boom-Clank clan, wandered in one day to shop for rugs with his girlfriend, he commented on a group of friends hoping to build a giant pedal-powered contraption for this year's Burning Man arts festival.

His ideas on alternative transportation melded with Jones and Maxfield's dream and became the Handcar Regatta.

The city's downtown Santa Rosa Arts District gave $4,000 in seed money for the event.

Farish, whose obsession with welding, spare parts and pedal power had already resulted in several unique wheeled conveyances, said one of the most gratifying aspects of the event is "seeing the people come out of the woodwork who are interested in this."

Word of mouth, online networking, the annual Burning Man arts festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and a clever Web site ostensibly hosted by one Erasmus P. Kitty, a fictional dentist, inventor and impresario, have attracted interest from around the Bay Area, organizers said.

Maxfield described it as "DIY (do-it-yourself) punk," or what the city's downtown economic development specialist, Raissa de la Rosa, describes as "guerrilla marketing."

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.