At This Speed........

Following, is an excerpt from an article entitled "Dale Earnhardt Jr. Leads NASCAR Nation," written by Jeff Macgregor, in the July 1st issue of Sports Illustrated. I think Jeff did a fantastic job relating what it's like to be a race driver.

"When I was just a little squirt, I clipped pictures of racecars from my magazines and taped them to my bedroom walls. From floor to ceiling and wall to wall ran the elegant and delicate Formula One machines of the mid-'60's, like the Lotis and BRM, as fragile and complicated as insects, and the factory Ferrari, as low and wide and red as appetite itself. Next to these were the exotic 24 hour GT-Prototypes from Sebring and Le Mans, the blunt Porsches and the swooping Jaguars and the perfect Ford GT 40's. Among them ran the muscle bound and slab-sided family of sedans from Plymouth and Chevy, big-block Detroit iron, their V8 pistons flat as feed buckets, thundering around the Southern stock car circuit. Beside these were the last of the bulging, broad-shouldered front engine Indy cars as poky and old-fashioned as stagecoaches even then."

"I scissored out pictures of the drivers too, and around the room grinned the heroic faces of Hill and Clark and Stewart, the Unsers and the Pettys, Foyt, Andretti, Yarborough and Lorenzen, even the great Fangio. I dreamed of being one of them."

"At night, in the desolate freedom of those dreams, I moved across a shadow landscape at terrifying speeds, goggled and tattooed with grime, an eight-year-old boy with a front-page smile, rakish and death-defying, trailing a white silk scarf and the noise of a distant crowd. Speed was everything."

"Only much later did I learn that at this speed the wall is liquid. At this speed you are deaf to everything but the greedy furnace blast of the engine, blind to anything but the tunnel you drill through the glare. At this speed time itself thins and cracks into useless theory. Your future - that impossible mirage of fame and adulation beyond fantasy, of privilege beyond measure, of houses and cars and ;those ice-cold millions uncountable - shimmers out there in that demon heat six inches ahead of you, and your past, that earthbound and dismal history, is nothing but a greasy breeze feathering into the stands 600 yards and a lifetime behind you. Drive fast enough and you hit life's escape velocity; dead or famous, you're better off either way. So manage your fear, ride it, man, keep that oily churn in your gut buckled down tight. 'Cause if you don't, it might climb into your throat and choke you."

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