"another suburban morning Grandmother screaming at the wall we have to shout above the din of our Rice Krispies we can't hear anything at all"I'm sitting in the car waiting for enough daylight to evade a ticket for no lights. It's overcast, still sprinkling a bit, and we don't get enough light to make a break for it until almost an hour past "dawn". Finally I get rolling east, pick up Highway 267, hit I-40 a few miles east of Little Rock.
"so put me on a highway and show me the sign and take it to the limit one more time"I'm normally a very restrained, law-abiding driver. Not to say I don't cut loose every now and then, but generally I allocate plenty of time to get where I'm going. I hate paying the insurance vampires any more than I have to. That's why Jay and I don't go motorcycling together - he has to prove something, I guess. I can cruise along with the Zen-like knowledge that gigondomundo amounts of turbocharged boost can obliterate most anything I see, on two wheels or four. Jay has to play Speed Nuts, running 10-15 over the limit, shooting in and out of traffic. Which is why my driver's license is clean, and Jay was using his (deceased) grandfather's license after his got pulled. I think he was a Traffic Points Poster Child. Then again, my last ticket was for 150 in a 45, and included a tour of the next county's law enforcement facilities. None of these chickenshit 58-in-a-55s for me.
"I'm travelin' down this road, I'm flirtin' with disaster I got the pedal to the floor, my life is movin' faster I'm out of memory, I'm out of hope, it looks like self-destruction"Driving straight into the rising sun, squinting around the brim of my Ozzie Osbourne hat. The state spent a zillion dollars changing the speed limit signs from 55 to 60, 60 to 65, and now, oh God, a whopping 70. Pretty soon we'll be going as fast as we were in 1973. I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date... screw it, I'd never see a cop anyway. Hammer down, the speedo moves up into the three digit zone, the little 2-liter motor sounding sweet as can be through the header and 2-1/2" exhaust. The Capri is tracking arrow-straight, though occasionally all four wheels were off the pavement. The LR- Memphis section of I-40 is a national disgrace, and I've run damned near the whole length of it in the last few years.
"Sign, sign, everywhere a sign messing up the scenery, breaking my mind 'Do This!" "Don't Do That!' Can't you read the sign?"I'd always gone to the track from Jay's, which involved chasing his van while behind the wheel of his Corvette, or chasing the Corvette with TRX. With Speed Nuts whipping in and out of traffic and freeway interchanges at 40mph over the limit, it's all I can do to keep him in sight, much less remember how to get to the track. "You've been there a dozen times! What do you mean you don't remember how to get to the track?" "All I remember is trying to keep you in sight; to hell with the scenery." This time I was coming in straight using directions Jay hastily dictated over the phone. What the hey! There really *were* some tiny little "Race Track" signs nailed to trees here and there. Soon the track was in sight. I had shaved what was normally a 3+ hour drive down to 2 hours, 9 minutes.
"You walked into the party / like you were walking onto a yacht Your hat strategically dipped below one eye / your scarf it was apricot You had one eye in the mirror / as you watched yourself gavotte"Uh, Mission Control, what the F is going on here? There are maybe 20 transporters in the parking lot, enough tents and awnings for Barnum & Bailey, and Porsches everywhere. What happened to "looks like hardly anybody is coming?" It's between sessions, so I cross the track to the infield. Memphis is all paved, has grandstands, water, electricity, toilets, and amenities some much more famous tracks lack, but it's all infield, along with the parking. No bridge. Jay's not in his usual spot. I troll around until I find him, with a spot marked out for me right alongside. I back in and start unloading the car so I can take it through tech. Apparently all, or almost all, the club racers showed up, so we've moved from sparse to bulging over full.
"we don't need no education we don't need no thought control no dark sarcasm in the classroom hey teacher, leave us kids alone"Got my paperwork from the sign-in table, slapped the magnetic numbers on, whipped the car into Tech. Granted the car was fairly grungy, but I wasn't really expecting any difficulties. It was originally built for SCCA Street Prepared, and when I got tired of the SCCA it got built further. We're sitting on brand new soft compound Sumitomo tires on custom-built wheels, revised suspension geometry, billet aluminum sway bar brackets, rod ends in the sway bars, rock-hard springs and shocks, no rubber anywhere in the steering; by most standards it'd be a pure race car even though it spend most of its time on the street. And it has a brand new motor full of high tech ceramic and moly coatings too.
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