In the village of Pinchcliffe, the inventor Theodore Rimspoke lives with his animal friends Lambert (a nervous, pessimistic and melancholic hedgehog) and Sonny Duckworth (a cheerful and optimistic magpie). Theodore works as a bicycle repairman, though he spends most of his time inventing weird Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. One day, the trio discover that one of Theodore's former assistants, Rudolph Gore-Slimey, has stolen his design for a race car engine and has become a world champion Formula One driver. Sonny secures funding from Arab oil sheik Abdul Ben Bonanza, who happens to be vacationing in Pinchcliffe, and to enter the race, the trio builds a gigantic racing car: Il Tempo Gigante—a fabulous construction with two extremely big engines (weighing 2.8 tons alone and making the seismometer in Bergen show 7.8 Richter when started the first time), a body made out of copper, a spinning radar (that turns out to be useful when Gore-Slimey starts engaging in smoke warfare during the race) and its own blood bank.
