Dirt track racing used to be a guilty pleasure. I recall attending one such meet in Milpitas, California, with a high school friend back around 1959 or 1960. I was in living with my parents in Palo Alto.
It was a Friday evening. I saw mostly beat-up hotrods, none of them less than ten years old. There were even a few surviving cars from the late 1930s and 1940 or 1941 models that had been stripped and heavily modified. The track was rough and rutted, and the lighting was what you might've, given the downscale socio-economic status of most of the attendees. This part of California hadn't changed very much from the times and places that John Steinbeck and William Saroyan wrote about twenty years or so earlier.
I drove race cars once - asphalt road tracks. Scores of great memories, here's one: We sometimes had standing starts, all of us tightly queued up in rows of two. You could not hear or feel whether or not your own car's engine was running, before the start, so great was the noise and vibrations. You glanced at the needle on your tach instead. Then they dropped the flag and a bumper-to-bumper mass drag race toward the first turn began. Or didn't. Frequently someone's engine had stalled either before or during the start. When that happened a pileup ensued. We called the aftermath "mating turtles" because that's what open cockpit race cars look like when they end up one on top of another.
Grew up there and it was always part of our lives.
Americana at its best – dirt track racing!
Dirt track racing used to be a guilty pleasure. I recall attending one such meet in Milpitas, California, with a high school friend back around 1959 or 1960. I was in living with my parents in Palo Alto.
It was a Friday evening. I saw mostly beat-up hotrods, none of them less than ten years old. There were even a few surviving cars from the late 1930s and 1940 or 1941 models that had been stripped and heavily modified. The track was rough and rutted, and the lighting was what you might've, given the downscale socio-economic status of most of the attendees. This part of California hadn't changed very much from the times and places that John Steinbeck and William Saroyan wrote about twenty years or so earlier.
Saturday night at the 1/4 mile dirt track. You could hear the roar for miles. 'shiners practicing.
I drove race cars once - asphalt road tracks. Scores of great memories, here's one: We sometimes had standing starts, all of us tightly queued up in rows of two. You could not hear or feel whether or not your own car's engine was running, before the start, so great was the noise and vibrations. You glanced at the needle on your tach instead. Then they dropped the flag and a bumper-to-bumper mass drag race toward the first turn began. Or didn't. Frequently someone's engine had stalled either before or during the start. When that happened a pileup ensued. We called the aftermath "mating turtles" because that's what open cockpit race cars look like when they end up one on top of another.
Lucian, what a nice distraction from all the woes you've been writing/we've been reading about!
Americana at it's best!