From 'Shine In The Stills To Right Turns And Hills ~ Why Road Course Racing Is
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I bid
you welcome gentle readers, and as always, we welcome as well our assigned
NASCAR reader, whose job it is to pass along to the proper authorities anything
we might say that could be considered detrimental to the sport of stock car
racing... Section 12-4-A of the ethereal and intangible
NASCAR Rule Book. (Wasn't that thing going to be put on line so that we,
the great unwashed, could actually read it rather than simply believing that what
we are told lies within... or was that to happen next year?)
Alright
then, with that bit of fun out of the way, come this weekend gentle readers,
we're going to a road course. Actually, we're going to two of them; one on
Saturday when the Nationwide gang tackles the twists and turns of the lovely
Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, and one on Sunday when the Sprint Cup
boys and girl take on the hills, dales and right turns of the Sears Point race
track in Sonoma, California... heart of the wine country. Though I wish with
all my heart that the Cup cars did get to race at Road America, my pleas for
that have so far fallen on deaf ears. After all, what do fans know about what
they like to watch?
And so
it is that today, we'll mostly be discussing the track at Sears Point, as it
was first known. Sears Point, as I understand it, is merely a spot in the
Sonoma Valley. For a few recent years, the track bore one of those sponsorship
names so dear to the heart of owner O. Bruton Smith, which will receive no free
plugs on these pages, and has now been "renamed" Sonoma Raceway. To
put things in perspective, the track is one year older than Talladega
Superspeedway, having opened in 1968, though NASCAR stock cars did not visit
until 1989, after the closing of an old favorite, Riverside Raceway in a more
southern part of the state. Sears Point was purchased by Smith and his racing
entity, Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI) in 1996, and things soon began to
change.
Below is
a diagram of the Sears Point track, showing two configurations in one. From
1989 until 1997, NASCAR ran the full track, 74 laps on a 2.520 mile road course
(186.5 miles), as outlined by the yellow "rope pattern." In 1998, the
section known as the "Carousel" was eliminated for the stock cars, as
denoted in dark green, shortening the track but actually lengthening the race
slightly to 112 laps on a 1.949 mile road course (218.3 miles). In 2000, an
alteration was made, lengthening turn 11 slightly as pictured in clear yellow, making
it 112 laps on a 1.990 mile road course (222.9 miles). One more adjustment was
made in 2003, not to the track itself, but the length of the race was shortened
from 112 laps to 110 laps on a 1.990 mile road course (218.9 miles), which is
where it remains today.
OK, I'm
ahead of you on this one. A lot of you are shaking your heads and are almost
bored to tears because you find the whole idea of racing up and down hills and
around turns that go both ways to be sleep-inducing. HELLO!?! Turning left 2000
times in 500 laps is exciting, but what I just described is boring? Each year,
when it comes time to go west and hit the road, as it were, I make a speech
about the actual roots of stock car racing, and each year, road racing gains
perhaps one or two new fans. So be it, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
In the
grand scheme of history, it wasn't that long ago that there were no auto races,
for the very best of reasons; there were no autos. Henry Ford is often quoted
as describing the birth of auto racing as being "when the second car
rolled off the assembly line." Truth is, he's
probably fairly close to being right. When the horseless carriages, as they
were known then, debuted, they were first raced against horses... and sometimes
the horse won because that clangin', bangin', poppin' fartin' machine couldn't go the distance... maybe 500 or
even 1000 feet.
But, the
cars got better and eventually, the horses caught a break and were put out to
pasture as the family set out on Sunday drives in their "Merry Oldsmobile"
or whatever. Auto racing in the early days was mostly a sport engaged in by the
elite of the European continent, and arrived on American soil rather late in
comparison to France, Germany, England and Italy. It was done in small, sleek sports
type vehicles that hugged the ground and reached amazing speeds... for the
times. And all the while the numbers of motorized vehicles was increasing; other
things were afoot within America. The decade of the not-so-roaring 20s gave us
prohibition, a time in which the federal government decreed that America would
be a "dry" nation, and forbade the sale of alcohol.
That of
course, produced the speak-easies in places such as New York and Chicago and
the likes of Al Capone to run the show, because by hook or by crook... quite
literally... America would have her alcohol, though the taste of "bathtub
gin" may have been quite different from the excellent imported distilled
beverages some were accustomed to enjoying. In another part of the country,
other solutions were sought and found, as the poor mountain folks of the Southeastern
states learned that something as simple as corn could become alcohol with a
little heat and a little coaxing. Corn liquor, White Lightning or Mountain Dew,
whatever you prefer to call it, fast became a way of life in those hills, and
while prohibition ended around 1933, distilling corn never did.
It
became a game between the mountain boys and the "revenuers", as the
boys carried their cargo to market under dark of night and learned how to
outrun their pursuers almost every time, with faster motors and better driving
skills. Then, as boys will do, they got to wondering who was
the best among them, and there was only one way to settle it. Let's have
us a race! Much has been written and many movies made about how moonshine
running gave birth to what we know today as stock car racing, and it's all
true. Oh, the movies probably overplay it to some extent, but that's what
movies do... make a story larger than life.
The road
racing game... between a bunch of good ol' boys and the "Feds" went
on through several states, and one of the more famous racers to come out of all
that was Robert Glenn "Junior" Johnson, whom
Thomas Wolfe immortalized as "The Last American Hero."
Johnson's
father and uncles had a still back in the early days, and Junior of course, was
taught the trade and how to make successful "shine runs." He will be
the first to tell you that moonshining was "the hardest way in the world
to make a living, and I don't think anybody'd do it
unless they had to." Running whiskey was just a way to survive, like
"making a milk run or something"
Even as
a young lad, Johnson was one of the fastest on those midnight runs, earning him
the early nickname of "The Ronda Road Runner."
"...on
the roads, that became a cat and mouse game... and as a result, I learned how
to make the motors fast and how to make the cars drive good, and it was a trade
that I took right on to racing with me"
As for
the lawbreaking part, Junior has an explanation, and darned if it doesn't make
sense. "The government was selling whiskey in liquor stores, so most
people didn't look at it as against the law, but there was a law against
it"
And then
comes the good part; seems our federal government has always had a hand in our
pocket, and this was no different... "If you made a gallon of whiskey,
they made $11 in tax on it...How did they expect you to pay $11 a gallon when
you only sold it for $4 dollars a gallon?"
Now
Junior wasn't the only one to migrate from the stills to the tracks. A good
many of the early racers got their training up in the hills, outrunning a
lawman to make a dollar, honest or dishonest. Your scribe lives just over the
hill from Dawsonville, home to Raymond Parks and later, Bill Elliott and the
Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, but also home to the Georgia Mountain Moonshine
Festival, which each year assembles upwards of 150,000 fun-loving folks within
the confines of an otherwise small town and simply celebrates the days of
moonshine and all that was associated with it.
And so
they came down from the hills and assembled first in fields and later on rough
dirt tracks and finally on paved asphalt or cement tracks, all to prove once
and for all who was the best of the best. In sixty five years, since running
under the sanction of NASCAR, that still has not been proven, and so they race
on. This weekend, when they gather at the road courses, don't turn off your TV. Watch the
action, and though the elevations of the Sears Point track are not the
Appalachian Mountain Chain, picture in your mind those that have gone before...
who they were, where they came from and what brought them together. Those men
from early times didn't go around in circles... except for an occasional 180
turn to evade pursuit.
Road
course racing is the genetic parent of stock car racing, and there is no
getting around it, so my suggestion is learn to understand it and you'll come
to love it. It takes a very talented racer to get the best out of a car that is
traversing hills, valleys and multi-directional turns; it’s like racing through
the mountains of Carolina with a Trooper on your tail, and that Trooper is
likely to look a lot like Marcos Ambrose, Kurt Busch, Clint Bowyer or maybe
Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart or Kyle Busch. Today's drivers have learned to race
the roads in very respectable style and are far more adept at the changes the
tracks bring than were their predecessors of twenty or even ten years ago. The
reason we see almost no road course "ringers" anymore is because the
driver that is in the car for the rest of the season is more than competent to
handle it on the roads as well as the ovals.
The game
is played differently on a road course and one has to be thinking out of the
box right from the green flag in order to reach the checkers first. I just love
trying to second-guess the calls we see made on a road course and they raise my
esteem for crew chiefs, which is already very high, to a new level. Try it; I
do believe you'll like it once you give it a fair chance.
And now
gentle readers, it's time for our Classic Country Closeout, and though perhaps
not exactly "Classic", these songs are most certainly apropos to this
article. First, we have Robert Mitchum (Lord, I still
love looking at that man) doing probably the only song he ever sang, "Thunder Road", from the movie of
the same name. Please enjoy:
And to
close out our day in fitting style, here are the Stanley Brothers with some
really awesome banjo pickin', doing their version of
"Good Ol' Mountain Dew."
Be well
gentle readers, and remember to keep smiling. It looks so good on you!
~
PattyKay