Originally appeared in:
FasTrack racing weekly
July 27, 1995

Perhaps we remember the things of our youth because they were special or perhaps we just have selective memories. Whatever the reason, the recollections of racing from my teenage years are clear, accurate and totally unbiased. My brother and I went to the races three nights a week, if we could afford it. I was probably the only guy in my boot camp company to have a picture of a race car instead of a girl taped to my locker door!

This weekend I am going to make a run. I will try to visit two race tracks situated about 150 miles apart, one on Friday and one on Saturday. When I was younger, the cost of admission was the deciding factor in where we went. Now days, the tiebreaker is often the required distance to drive home after the races, tired and on dark, dangerous highways with the loons. The other factor is fuel costs. My Bowtie van, a 9:1 355 with a 3.08 posi, gets maybe 13 mpg on a good day, if the speed is kept under 60 mph. Push to 60-65 mph and the 4 bb's secondaries start to open no matter how delicately the foot rests upon the pedal. At 30 bucks pop, fill-ups every 200 miles definitely scribe an arc around the possibilities. Nebulous territory outside the circle is marked by the ancient rune, written in glowing dollar signs, "Bankruptcy Be Here."

Today I feel alive, and, with raucous gulls whirling in the wind off the cool Pacific, the world sparkles as I fill the tank before starting to the Watsonville Speedway. Mid grade, not the cheap stuff. Means about four degrees more advance allowable, plus, no pinging going over Pacheco Pass to Madera Speedway on Saturday even if it’s 100 degrees on top. Madera itself is likely to be nearer 115 degrees. The Southwest Tour race there has 35 pre-entries according to track officials. I am especially interested in watching Jim Pettit II race. He won two out of three late-model Sportsman features at the Altamont Speedway last Sunday afternoon as its first annual Northern California Asphalt Track Championship race was held there, besting even the awesome, midseason NASCAR Pacific Coast Regional Champion, Dave Byrd, in the process. Byrd's GrandAm owner, Bob Foote, reports Dave will be driving a dirt Late-Model at San Jose Speedway on Saturday and will not be at Madera’s SWT event. That rematch would have been fun to watch!

I remember a beer run my brother Bobby and I made one frosty fall evening in 1962. We left Doylestown, PA, and headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to New York, then the only state in the East with a drinking age of 18. We were driving my 1951 Ford business coupe with a 1952 Mercury flathead engine. The Merc's had ¼” more stroke than the Fords. This one was relatively stock at 239 cubic inches with a set of used, high compression finned aluminum heads installed that very afternoon.

We got to New York City uneventfully, found a bar and bought a case of beer, all legal of course. I was 18. It was on the way home that trouble began. Yup, one of those heads was cracked! Before we got back home, it was way late, we had gotten really lost, and all water in the radiator, along with our case of beer minus one shared can, had been boiled away through the exhaust pipe.

There were no ill-gotten gains that Saturday night. Some losses, as a matter of fact. Both my brother and I were grounded for a month and our girlfriends, who were along, weren’t allowed to see us for six weeks, but their parents relented after our month's curfew was over.

I guess, despite the costs, we have all been making runs of one sort or another all our lives. The reason is simple. There’s something special in knowing you can get yourself there and back, although I now test new stuff at home before taking it on the road. And I always carry plenty of water!  

© 1995-2003
Will Eberle

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