Category Archives: Cars

The Winternationals continued

March 9, 2018Americana, CarsSteve Stern

“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

February 26, 2018Americana, Around home, CarsSteve Stern

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.

We have a new transportation appliance

February 20, 2017Around home, CarsSteve Stern

It is a Hyundai Tucson and it is a dreaded SUV. it is also one of the very few cars that I’ve owned in which my relationship is passionless. Actually, when I think about it, this Hyundai is the first vehicle l have ever bought from my left brain. We ended up with the Tucson for three reasons, it is one of the few small SUVs that has a differential lock so it should be at least sort of off road capable, we rented a Hyundai on a drive to Albuquerque and it was surprisingly quiet and comfortable, and most importantly, it comes with free service for 75,000 miles – including a brake job and the 60,000 major service – and Hyundai has a 10 year 100,000 miles warranty.

My justification for buying such a practical car – if soulless, using the term very broadly – is that buying this vehicle will be like an arranged marriage in which the bride and groom learn to love each other after the marriage. And I think it may already be happening. Yesterday, we were driving over a narrow road that had the right shoulder covered in packed snow, I stopped with the two right wheels on the snow and the two left wheels on dry pavement and floored it. The Tucson drove away quicker than I expected with no wheel spin, channeling all the power to the wheels on dry road. That is sort of astounding and it is all done electronically.

Hyundai has taken on the same philosophy as Samsung, trying to get a jump on the competition by betting the house on an emerging technology. Samsung was making cheap TVs, limping along in the world of Cathode Ray Tubes that everybody knew how to make cheaply. They got out of the CRT business and took a flier on the, then, very esoteric and expensive flat screen technology. Now they are the leading manufacturer of flat screen TVs and monitors. With Hyundai, it is the world of auto-related electronics. The car – and I’m using car in the most general sense – drives OK, but it is not outstanding; this is not a car I would take out to drive the Pacific Coast Highway for fun, but it is quiet, comfortable, and fast enough. What is outstanding are the peripherical electronics like door handles that light up when we get close to the car or a tailgate that opens automatically when we stand next to the back of the locked car. I think that it is the electronics that also control the traction.

As an aside, I was reading a couple of days ago, that smartPhones take such good pictures, not because of the lenses, but because the software is getting so good at interpreting the raw data (much like our brain interpreting raw data from the eyes). The reason the software is so effective is because the cost of development can be written off against the sale of a huge number of smartPhones. High-end digital cameras never sell at the same rate resulting in the software, used to fine tune the picture, being much cruder. We are nearing the time when smartPhones will take better pictures than profesional grade SLRs. End aside.

Ending here seems slightly incomplete but there is not any more to say. In the meanwhile, we are planning our first big trip…to Big Bend National Park in Texas. Hopefully, the Tucson will work perfectly.

Random thoughts on the road to and from a memorial

October 4, 2015Cars, UncategorizedSteve Stern

We drove down to Escondido last week for a Memorial Service and drove back home last Thursday…in a rental car. The Memorial was for Tom Halle and it was more an anthem of his life than a dirge. Still, we all knew we would never see him again and that cast a pall over the Service and the whole weekend.

Driving down, we were constantly reminded of the drought and how everything, eventually, becomes political.
We seem to live in a time when everybody wants individual rights over the collective well being and is going to have a hissy fit if they don’t get it. As a liberal, it seems crazy to me that a person’s right to own a gun, without any restriction, should trump public safety. For a conservative, it must seem crazy that the left goes ballistic over Kim Davis’ private meeting with the Pope. All this being played out center stage, in front of Europe starting to close its borders, Russia jumping into the quicksand of Syria, a growing Civil War in Libya, and Afghanistan convulsing back to tribalism.

The day after the service, we comforted ourselves by spending the morning at one of Southern California’s great beaches. Or, I should say that I spent the morning at the beach with Ophelia Ramirez while Michele and Peter Kuhlman spent it in the water,
and then, for our last night in Southern California, we joined a birthday dinner for Ophelia, in a restaurant…wait for it…in a Lexus dealership. The food was great – no kidding – and we ate outside, in a half tent on the rooftop parking lot near a lovely group of Lexi. It both seemed like an incredible Southern California cliche and a totally unique place and experience.

The pall returned when we were driving home. Michele’s trusty Volkswagen GTI ate its water pump while we were leaving the In-N-Out Burger in Kettleman City and we ended up across the Valley in Fresno saying Why did our fucking water pump give out? and, by the way, how can VW blatantly cheat and think they are going to get away with it?

Both questions have pretty much the same answer. Volkswagen wanted to be the biggest automaker in the world and they pushed hard to make that goal. A big part of that push were diesels, clean and powerful diesels. We all thought that the diesels were clean and powerful at the same time – and so, probably, did the head of VW and the company even ran a Super Bowl ad showing its engineers sprouting angel’s wings for that incredible accomplishment – but, we now know, the diesel engines were programed to be clean or powerful, not both. They did this on purpose, so on purpose that it was wired deep into the software. Trying to make as much money as possible does not promote morality, it promotes making as much money as possible and that translates to pushing people to get desirable results.

What fascinates me is Who was the highest guy in the Volkswagen hierarchy to know? Presumably, some software engineer realized that they could cheat the tests – after all they cheated before (and got caught and fined only $120,000 in 1973) – and told his boss. It might have started innocently You know it is possible to tweak the code to make the car act differently on a dynamometer, wouldn’t that be a great rf and it would serve them right for these stupid rules and the more possible it became and the more seemingly impossible, or very difficult, to to be caught, the more plausible a solution it became. At some point, somebody must have said – or thought – You know, I don’t think I am going to tell my boss about this, he wouldn’t want to know. And he probably didn’t want to know, he wanted a cheap, powerful, and clean diesel; he wanted to be a hero in the Becoming the Biggest Company Game.

The disgraced CEO said he didn’t know, and he probably didn’t, but he set the tone of the company. He didn’t say We want to make the best cars in the world or We want to be scrupulously honest or Saving the planet for our children is our top priority, he said We want to be the biggest company, make the most money. It is sad, it is sad for our increasingly endangered Planet; it is sad for Germany and her vaulted automobile industry, but it is also sad for Volkswagen.

Finding the elusive Pagani in a world of excess at the Monterey Car Week

August 27, 2015Around home, CarsSteve Stern

Standing on a platform, overlooking Carmel beach and the Pacific Ocean, at about 6 o’clock a week ago last Wednesday, I felt like the proud father of a kid that had just sung a solo at her third grade graduation. The temperature was in the low eighties and there was not a breath of air with the Pacific as placid as a millpond. Standing there, listening to the babble of voices and laughter from all over the world – mostly Chinese and French, it seemed – I felt, totally irrationally, that California was putting on a great show just for the out-of-town visitors and I was, somehow, partially responsible.

Later, driving away from the beach on Ocean Avenue, with the top down on Michele’s car, all the better to feel the soft air and see the supercars parked around town, like Toyotas at Costco, we both yelled, There’s a Pagani. It was our first sighting in the wild. We circled the block, found a place to park and walked back. Looking at it parked in a standard parking place, the Pagani looks small. It is only a little longer than the Miata in front of it and not any taller. Somehow however, it has a presence that is way out of proportion to its actual size; it is about as unobtrusive as Sofia Vergara at that third grader’s pool party.

I do read that the Huayra is easy and pleasant to drive which is not always a feature of a hypercar. Of course, I will never find out, and therein lies the paradox – to misquote the Bard – cars are meant to be driven and while the overwhelming majority of us are only able to ogle, how they drive – how fast they are – is part of their allure. The Pagani has plenty of allure with a six liter, twin-Turbo, AMG V-12 Mercedes engine that puts out 730 horsepower giving it a 0 to 60 time of about 3.2 seconds and a top speed of about 230 mph.

As an aside, Horacio Pagani made his fortune making carbon fiber and the Pagani Huayra is a legacy of that. Carbon fiber is cloth woven from threads – thinner than a human hair – made from carbon atoms bonded together to form a long chain. These are then woven into a very thin cloth. According to howstufworks.com, it’s five times as strong as steel, two times as stiff, yet weighs about two-thirds less. What they don’t say is that it is way, way, more expensive. The Pagani Huayra’s basic body is made from four layers of carbon fiber, each about one millimeter thick. Because the carbon fiber has a weave and it takes more to match the seams – like making the pocket weave match on a nice shirt – in the least expensive versions of the car, the carbon fiber covered by paint. End aside.

I want to say that, in the Pagani’s case, the exquisite details are what give it the most kick, but that really isn’t the case. Everything just adds to its show stopping presence and I think that is because Pagani is the creation of one person. Most cars, most for-sale designed things, are compromises with what people supposedly want. When a designed object gets too far from the mainstream, it risks being ostracized. No matter how good it is (think Raymond Loewy’s Studebakers which, looking back, are much better looking than anyone gave them credit for). The result is that most car designs are watered down, but not the Pagani. Often, I will rave over a car and Michele will be lukewarm saying Yeah, it’s OK but it is too masculine for me. That is not the case with the Pagani, it is soft and luscious and very feminine. Even the mirrors are supposed to evoke a woman’s eyes (although who besides Sophia Loren, I have no idea). Still, for me, the best part is the heavily chromed steampunk interior which contrasts with the chromeless exterior. Of course Ferrari wants to remain the premier Italian car so, to take on Pagani, they have come out with the 1.5 million dollar Ferrari LaFerrari. It is drop dead gorgeous, in a very studied way, and the contrast to Pagani is striking. Michele described it as The Pagani is a young rich man’s car and the LaFerrai is an old rich man’s car. Of course, the Huayra and the LaFerrari were not the only treats. Everywhere we turned, there were memorable cars. This year, there were lots of Cunninghams – an American supercar from the 50’s – a wonderful 1931 Alfa Grand Sport with a body by Touring, and one of my favorites, a Cadillac built for Rita Hayworth with a body by Ghia. I can hardly wait for next year.