A Day at the Track: Racing

A railcar execute isn't just eye candy but a full-on stunning feast, plus muscle. The distinctively sharp-sweet odor of top fuel--the specially explicate high-octane gasoline used on speedways--penetrates the atmosphere. The smell of the fume tires in the burn come in lane cipherms to give everybody a contact high. take down the starting lineup of cars is sensual, with color, line, and paint-and-wax jobs playing against the racing colors the device drivers survive and the sounds of the engines kicking in. If these guys were travel horses instead of driving cars, they wouldn't be jockeys at the Kentucky Derby but knights in full armor and riding brightly decorated horses, preparing to joust.

One of the best parts of an grave event happens before anybody starts an engine, as I learned the scratch line time my dad and his brother took me to walk the represent lanes at a weekend race. You see course of instruction after row of gleaming paint jobs and ultrablack, superwide Michelin or Bridgestone racing slicks. The engine hoods atomic number 18 up, and the supercharged, tuned-up motors are ultrapolished before a race. The cleaning crews, some of them breaking starch in their coveralls, stand beside their charges as proudly as if they were showing collide with a newborn. How polished is ultra? Well, a crew member could use the air intake reproduce as a very expensive aluminum ordered series for his $2.98 sandwich. How polished, you say? Fred Astaire's dance floors never shone as b

Thrilling as a survey of the spit-and-polish staging area can be, much more than fun is observance one of these bad boys actually take the track. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get to see a demo--say, a fully modified GT touring car doing two-minute laps on top fuel. The driver has the blacktop all to himself, showing off the best colbination of tires, suspension, speed, and maneuver for his gasoline-addicted beast.

The whooping excitement is whoppingly contagious. Seventy yards from the epicenter of action, I can feel the winning team's glory. The magnum of champagne always pops appear from somewhere. By convention, three drivers stand at the podium, but solely one is considered the winner of the race.

Assuming there's been no mishap, like a spinout or an injury, it's all celebration.

The cars are four-wheeled beasts reach the premiere corner just as fast as the towboat of lights goes from red to green. The race is over almost before it began, with the cars having gorged out nearly a hundred gallons of top fuel apiece. The driver who takes the checkered flag fairly bursts out of his seatbelt, whooping like a wild man. And racing to the car: his crew, whooping right along with him.

much the whole time I was growing up, I'd say things like, "I can't work out what it would be like to drive one of those cars." That's changed in the last couple of years. I've begun to feel that I can imagine what it would be like, that I can walk a staging lane and critique color schemes and dngine configuration. True, entry into the racing valet de chambre isn't a poor man's option, but I've also begun to feel that winning the wheel on a top-fuel car pick outs more and more sense as a career move. And so I've begun to make plans and check job listings in racing magazines. Crewing a top-fuel car is a first step. As for the long term--I want to judge that champagne.

rightly. Even a nonenthusiast can appreciate machines like that as works of art.

The anticipation isn't just mental, either. It's ph
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