Category Archives: Americana

The Winternationals continued

Americana, Cars

“This is not my demographic…but I’m having a great time.” Malcolm Pearson

Before I talk about actually going to the Winternationals, let me get a couple of obvious and far from obvious facts out of the way;

  • We are deep in Trump country, while we see only one Trump flag – that over a Thin Blueline Flag – there are way more American flags than we would see at, say, the Coachella Music Festival or a vintage race at Laguna Seca. It is the kind of race in which the Army is a major car sponsor. However, it is also in Los Angeles County, the very same Los Angeles County that went for Hillary in a big way at over 72%. The mix results in a crowd that is overwhelmingly white but not exclusionary, everybody is here to have a good time and it is infectious.
  • The NHRA has over 200 classes and many of them are running today but the big hitters are the Top Fuel Dragsters, Top Fuel Funny Cars, and ProStock (which almost look like real cars).
  • Drag racing is not as simple as it looks. Drag racing may have started as a short race between stoplights in Dad’s car, but it didn’t take long for the loser to make his or her car faster. That led us down a slippery slope that has resulted in Top Fuel Dragsters that…well, let me quote the National Hot Rod Association: the fastest-accelerating machines in the world, 10,000-horsepower {no, that is not a typo, ten thousand horsepower and it is probably higher now}…They are capable of covering the dragstrip {one thousand feet long} in less than 3.7 seconds at more than 330 mph. Top Fuel dragsters burn up to 15 gallons of nitromethane fuel during a single run. That 15 gallons of fuel has to be pumped into the intake airstream in 3.7 seconds, so fuel pump technology is a big deal in drag racing. Two other interesting factoids are 1) that the huge tires in the rear expand as they reach higher revolutions; they go from 36″ in diameter to 44″ at the end of their run when the car is going more than 330 miles per hour and 2) these cars don’t have a transmission, the engine is bolted directly to the differencial and it only rotates about 870 times during the 3.7 second run (compared to about 24 thousand times when I take my Hyundai on a twelve minute drive to the grocery store). 
  •  So that brings up the question, is this really a sport? does it really take skill? and the answer is Yes…Hell yes! These engines are so powerful that the driver can make the wheels spin any time by flooring the gas – throttle actually, I guess, since these cars run on nitromethane – so the run has to made at partial throttle, balancing on the edge of adhesion, adhesion that is constantly changing as the car gains speed, until the very end when they can floor it. With too much throttle, the driver spins the tires and the driver is an also-ran, and with too little throttle, the driver is an also-ran; it takes incredible finesse and feel for what is happening. In Top Fuel or Funny Car, this finesse takes place while wearing five layers of Nomex racing suits, a helmet, and a gas mask because the nitromethane environment is so toxic. 
  • Top Fuel Dragsters are violent machines and very dangerous. The day before we were there, probably the greatest driver in drag history, John Force, made a mistake that blew up his car – he ran the next day – and the day after we were there, Courtney Force, John Force’s daughter had a brutal accident that sent her to the hospital for observation.
  • This is a sport in which man and women play in the same pool, and women do well. 82 different women have won over two hundred and fifty major races. Four times, women have won the Top Fuel National Championship, Shirley Muldowney three times – incidentally, there is a very good movie about Muldowney, here is a clip, that, I think, is still relevant and inspirational – and Courtney Force last year. The day Malcolm and I were there, two women were running in the Top Fuel Finals.

Malcolm’s and my plan was to have a leisurely breakfast, go to the races, have a late lunch, and then drive home for about seven hours. The day before, when we had been inside at the museum, the temperature had been in the mid-eighties but our day at the race track was forecast for overcast with the temperature in the high fifties, low sixties. When we got to the racetrack, mid-morning, it felt even colder. Once we got inside gate, we ran into what seemed to be an impromptu old Hot Rod and Dragster Show. 

The place was chock a block with delicacies like this AA Fuel Altered Roadster of some sort. 
Classic deuce
This seems to me to be the classic Hot Rod and what I love about it, besides that it has a supercharged engine that is crazy overkill, is the contrast between the engine and the wheels. Everything possible in and around the engine is chromed, including the firewall, and the wheels are painted steel. I love the little pinstriping detail by the door handle and just the spot of pinstriping on top of the radiator.
Dragster & Funny Car
A mid-60s dragster and an early Funny Car, so called because, well, just look at it.

We wanted to see the Top Fuel and Funny Car Qualifications so we hurried by the pits where the brutes were being prepared. The change in weather also changed the humidity, which for dragster mechanics, is a big deal. A change in humidity changes the air density and that affects the fuel/air ratio, so the mechanics were all busy adjusting to what they hoped would result in optimum performance. In about 1/4 of the cases, it didn’t work. 

Our seats were about 70 feet down the track from the starting line I know because we were just past the 60-foot marker – and the Top Fuel Dragsters were going over a hundred miles an hour by the time they passed us. In the picture below, I was panning the car – moving the camera with the car – and the background was already blurred. To quote Malcolm, watching and feeling the cars take off was “a full chakra experience”. I could feel the sound as deep, throbbing, vibrations that rattled the stands, vibrated up my legs to my groin and traveled up my body. I had a panicky moment when I thought it might damage my heart. Then it’s over.     

It is the loudest noise I’ve ever heard. A Formula One car puts out about 800 horsepower and that’s loud, but this is over 10,000 horsepower. With earplugs in and my hands covering them, it is still painfully loud and it seems as if I can feel each cylinder explode. It is literally earthshakingly loud; for 3.7 seconds. 

We watch about ten pairs of Top Fuel cars and ten pairs of Funny Cars qualify, wander back through the pits and then the arcade where Malcolm buys a pair of pink souvenir Britney Force socks for Emma. Then we get a hot dog and fries at Pinks – probably the best hot dog I’ve ever had, BTW –  

and drive home, talking about drag racing and politics. 

 

 

 

The Winternationals

Americana, Around home, Cars

Last weekend – well, when I started this it was last weekend, now it’s two weekends after last weekend – Malcolm Pearson and I went to the Winternationals. I am sure that there are lots of sports – and I want to get to that – that have a Winternationals, but, in the car universe, there is only one Winternationals, the racing weekend that starts the Drag Racing Season. It is always in Pomona, Southern California, and is always the second weekend of February. I am not a drag racing fan and neither is Malcolm but this is where drag racing started, it is where hot rodding itself started, and this was more of a pilgrimage than a trip to see a race.

Because this was a pilgrimage to an unexplored country, at least to us – although I had been to several legal and official drag races in the 50s and even ran in one with a ’48 International flatbed truck – Malcolm and I wanted it to include some background to help us understand what we were pilgrimaging to. In this case, our homework is going to the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum which is, unironically, “dedicated to safety” (sort of like a Rock and Roll Museum dedicated to ear health).

 

Ever since the second car, people have been trying to make them go faster. In the entry to the museum is a 1932 Ford three-window coupe, the kind of car a young doctor might take on house calls, facing that transportation device is the same car, now without fenders and a bigger engine, being transformed into a Deuce, the classic hotrod. 
At first, I guess, hot rods were just cars that could go faster, however, by the fifties – when I first started driving – the Hot Rod had become a separate, identifiable,  genera, divided into three basic species, Hot Rods people drove on the street, Hot Rods modified for top speed, and Hot Rods modified for maximum acceleration. The most visible species are cars designed to drive on the streets. These Street Rods, it should be noted, however, are not meant to be road racers, they are meant to be cars that look good, within strict parameters, and can be driven on the road (the road racing hotrods, like Troutman & Barn’s Scarab or Max Balchowsky’s Old Yeller, are, for some unfathomable reason, not considered Hot Rods). It turned out, to my surprise, that Street Rods, my favorite, are in short supply at the Wally Parks, but a couple of very classic Hot Rods were hidden in a corner.
There was also a Custom ’49/’50 Mercury on display and I was reminded of how disdainful I was of “Lead Sleds” like this when I had a real Street Rod, a five-window Deuce (even though it was really a 1932 Plymouth with a Ford Flathead engine).
After saying that road racers are not Hot Rods, I want to show the exception, a recreation of the original Hot Rod Lincoln built by Bill Stroppe to race in the La Carrera Panamericana in the early 50s. 
While the Stroppe brothers were building Hot Rod Lincolns, other hot rodders wanted to see how flat-out fast they could go. With the fortuitous combination of a large number of engineers and mechanics that had worked in the aircraft industry during the war and dry lakes, Southern California soon became a hotbed of very sophisticated, if somewhat obscure, hot rods that became known as Lakesters or Streamliners. The car on the right had a top speed of 178 mph with a flathead Lincoln engine producing about 120 hp in 1952! The car in the middle went 307.977  with a supercharged four-cylinder Chevrolet engine.   
We had come here for drag racing and that meant drag racing cars. The National Hot Rod Association – hereinafter called the NHRA – was founded in 1951 by Wally Parks, in Southern California, but it took years for it to spread. We did not get an official drag race strip in Northern California until I was 17, in 1957. Before that, we raced on the streets and one of the favorite streets was a usually deserted section of Cañada Road near the Pulgas Water Temple. Occasionally, some out of towner would show up with a ridiculously fast car which always made me wonder how an out of towner would know about us but the police never caught on. One Friday night, a friend’s mother showed up and was shocked at what was, obviously, risky behavior. Even more shockingly, her reaction was to write an editorial in The San Mateo Times campaigning for a legal drag strip. And even more shocking than that was that we got one, at the Half Moon Bay Airport. The tradition of ridiculously fast cars showing up to challenge the locals continued and the car above is one of them, Called Swindler A, with a blown Crysler Hemi, stuffed into a 1941 Willys, cars like this toured around challenging the locals. These cars still burned gas but they were well on their way to becoming specialized dragsters.  
A couple of early dragsters. The purple car in the background, BTW, is the Glass Slipper and I saw it turn a 166 miles per hour at Vacaville Raceway, in 1959 or 1960. I was going to write about the Winternationals in one post but there is too much here so I will do this in two parts.

Originally, this was going to be a single post but it is running longer than I thought so I will show the actual races in the next post. 

Super Moon(s)

Americana, Around home

This year, as luck would have it, the last Super Moon of a cluster of three fell on Michele’s birthday. And to make it even more special, according to Michele, this Super Moon was a Blue Moon – meaning that it was the second Super Moon of the month – with a total eclipse that resulted in it being a Blood Moon just before the dawn of her birthday. If you are into that sort of thing, which I am not, but Michele is, it is almost too exciting to bear. The day before ended with a sweet sunset. On the West Coast, the moon eclipse was about five in the morning and Michele’s plan was to get up every hour starting about three. I slept so I can’t attest to how many times Michele got up, but about five she woke me and it was pretty terrific.

It was dark and cold, silent except for the sounds of a couple of owls, with a light fog layer hanging over the tidal flats of the upper Tomales Bay and, above that, was a red moon, much bigger and rounder than I expected. Michele took several pictures and this is the one I like best (BTW, Michele’s reflection is on purpose).      , 

 

The Post and the Women’s March

Americana, Around home, Bay Area Walks

Michele and I saw The Post, the other night and I liked it, a lot. Maybe because it is political, maybe because it is a sort of homage to old-timey newspaper movies, but, mostly, I think because it is so comfortably familiar. I’m not normally a Steven Spielberg fan but he was the perfect director for this movie. The scenes of Merrill Streep walking into a room of all men, all in their dark power suits, seem so familiar  from my growing-up past and Streep’s tentative reaction is perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up in that environment, but I did grow up in an environment that was trying to ape that life. A life in which rich, cultivated, women were close to powerless but had the time and money to look great in their clothes. It was a time when a woman  being powerful was considered crass. Merrill Streep is great as one of these powerless women, Kay Graham – trusted only to manage the family while her husband was given a newspaper to run by her father – is forced to take control.  

This movie tells of a time, that seems longer ago than it was, when it wasn’t as obvious that men were killing the world (to paraphrase Mad Max Fury Road). It takes place in 1971 and Spielberg’s suburban, optimistic, sensibility is perfect for the time, giving us scenes like Graham leaving the supreme court and walking past a group of almost Rockwellian women, seemingly waiting for change. What a difference it was getting off Bart and going up an escalator into an immense crowd of, mostly women, who are no longer waiting; they want control now. Control of their bodies, control of their lives, and, I hope, control of the world.

Almost always, however, control is not freely given, it is seized. In this case, the only way to seize political power is through the ballot box and while slightly more women vote than men, only about 68% of women voted in 2016; I would guess that that number was considerably higher in this crowd. Everybody was in a celebratory mood and the most heartening thing to me was the high turnout of young women.

To answer the President’s question

Americana, Psychological Musings

“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump

First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000  and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion,  I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with  Nigeria. 

As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren. 

And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.