Zoom Zoom

Still cool for May. Got a little rain yesterday (?) clouds today ...

Indy's coming up -- and it's making me look at cars again ("as Dreamland's comin' on -- Dreamland, Dre-ee-ee-eamland!").

Down heah in the Southlan' we used to see impo'ted sports cars about as often as we felt earthquakes. Anything "imported" had the label "Made in Japan" -- which then was not a good thing. The oil embargo hit when I was in college ... the first Honda Civics (these things would fit inside a modern Civic -- and leave room for the driver!) with their spare tires sticking out the back hatch lid were almost always yellow. I think I remember seeing an orange one while I was at the Hill. They would go 100,000 miles easily on nothing but regular oil changes -- utterly unheard of in domestic vehicles.

Not too long after that, the Reagan recovery started -- ending the Carter inflationary "malaise" (he had low budget deficits, though, as I recall). People who had some money down South got more as economic development began picking up steam for the first time since the textile boom in the 1920s. And in the tiny mill towns I lived in -- some doctors and lawyers began driving 921's around town -- once and a while, you'd even see a red 911 parked next to a 20's era three-story brick house renovated into offices. One lawyer had a Saab -- a new black one, not a rust bucket belching gas from the 70s with tye-dye cloth covering the holes in the upholstery and flower decals in the back windows. One of my editors was on his second 100,000 miles in his original Civic.

Muscle cars did not return to the scene, at least where I lived, until the 1990s. State capitol reporting brought hourly sightings of Boxters, 6-series Beemers, and two-seat Kompressors. I salivated in anguish at these sculptured beauties. But it actually all began right in my backyard. I was reporting in a town (man, 15 years ago!) when BMW decided to build a plant there to make roadsters. The subsequent sports car was all the rage as soon as the cars started coming off the production lines in the mid-90s. I got a bad neck crick yanking my head at all the custom-colored ... s zipping past my usual walk routes in those days.

Like all American boys of my time, I was fascinated with cars early. My dad didn't buy a 'stang, he had a pal selling Chevvies those days, so he opted for a blue Camaro -- the first one, a kind of compact of the day. A big green monster followed two years later -- eight cylinders of raw Camaro power tore down the new interstates being built in our area. I didn't wreck it -- no one let me drive this low slung behemoth unsupervised!

For some reason, though I was born and raised at the nativity of stock-car racing with what was then called a Grand National track fifteen minutes away, I never cottoned much to Junior'n'em's sport. I listened to races rabidly on radio on Saturdays (that's when they were run then) but I was just as rabid for the hourly updates in (I think) '64, when Phil Hill and his team drove the first Ford to race at LeMans in the prototype category. This GT car was a beauty! (I still have the Matchbox version I bought back then.) The racing mags I bought at the coin shop up the street from the store my dad ran raved about all the new American cars entering the European sports scene -- as well as the Lotus team that came to Indy that year (or maybe it was '63 -- I'll have to check.) The mags drooled the following year over two new entries in the Grand Touring scene -- the Shelby Cobra and Jim Hall's Chapparral -- gorgeous and powerful, the pair of them! Bruce McLaren introduced the Lola not long after, another dream machine to watch.

There were no videos of these races back then -- just a few film clips on the Wide World of Sports. No in-car cameras, no color pictures, even! But the crude entertainment technology of the day only served to enhance a boy's imagination. WWoS occasionally did a Grand Prix or GT race -- but with cameras the size of small refrigerators mounted on tripods that had to be hand-swiveled by two people, it didn't look like much after the starting flag fell. Frustrating, but imagination-firing. Oh, the wait for the stills of the races in Road and Track three months later!

But as time went on, the racers I rooted for began dying. McLaren, Jim Clark, and others, died in crashes. The new cars -- regardless of marque or formula -- had outstripped the tracks they were running on, and did not have the reliability on a par with their performance -- both of the technology and of the drivers. Other drivers began quitting, or going into smaller race cars, or maybe not racing as much. Jackie Stewart, Dan Gurney, Graham Hill, etc. just didn't seem to appear as often as they had in the heydey. (Though Gurney made an F1 run with the American Eagle.)

Now, races are overall much safer. Though some drivers still tragically die in races, the accidents are much more survivable. They are safer for fans, too. The second year (again I need to check) Jim Clark drove his Lotus at Indy -- a horrible starting lap crash killed two drivers and some fans as flaming car parts flew into the stands. There were calls for huge safety revisions (I recall a Jackie Stewart article in SI when I was in high school had recommendations that many thought could kill the sport -- but they were eventually implemented for the most part, I think), but not until a crash a few years later that sent a huge wheel into the stands that killed or injured several people, did things get serious at Indy, at least as I recall. Oddly, F1 racing got much safer after a champion driver (Nicky Lauda) actually survived a burning crash. However, he was disfigured for life. He did many interviews as he recovered, and F1 racing got safer -- again, as best I recall.

I fell away as a fan of motor sports as I got older, and as other things began to take my interest (those miniskirts made the girls look a lot sleeker than a BRM!), but every time I even see a Honda 2000, some engine in the back of my memory roars to life, if only for a second.


LJ orig.: 05/27/07