Today we woke up with an actual agenda item scheduled. We were going to Twin Cities Raceway Park for the stock car, super stock car, modified car, sprint car and Hornet races. While all this may sound exciting, there is a bit of clarification required at this point.
First, there are not any cities, much less twin cities, anywhere near this racetrack. The name is a complete mystery unless they are referring to Vernon and North Vernon being the cities. North Vernon is a tiny little burg with an intersection of three two-lane highways being it’s claim to fame. Vernon has a large, brick building which houses the county probation department and the Log Cabin restaurant. Right between them, down a narrow, one-lane road, you will find the racetrack.
Twin Cities Raceway Park has a name which may be a bit overstated. There is only one track, not multiple types of tracks as the name might imply. The track about 3/8 mile dirt although, due to the torrential rains a couple days back, it was mud when we arrived at about 6:00 PM. The race staff had all the car types out on the track simultaneously going the wrong way in an attempt to dry out the track surface. This strategy may have paid off in the past but, today, the Hornet class racers kept driving through the thick, gooey mud at the interior lane of the front stretch and goosing the throttle which tended to throw the track surface all over the surrounding area. After about 30 minutes of this shaky technique, they let all the classes head back into the pits for whatever they do in the pits.
The real event started with a probably fortunately invisible woman singing her version of the national anthem. She didn’t merely miss the high note so many others have trouble with at the end; she missed almost all the notes, the cadence and the melody such that the tune was almost unrecognizable. First out for hot laps were the wingless 410 sprint cars which are very light vehicles with far more power than they need to merely move ahead. Once they got a heat of cars onto the track and push-started all of them (this class have no starters to keep weight down), they allowed them to whiz around the track for a few laps to bring their engines up to operating temperatures and, as an added bonus, to completely cover the track outside walls with a fresh coat of mud spun off from their tires. Other than when driving down the very short straightaways, the front wheels rarely point in the direction they want the car to go due to the excess of horsepower which makes the back half of the car almost unmanageable whenever the operator goes anywhere near the throttle.
Following the sprints were the modifieds which are a bit larger and have rudimentary bodies but exposed front tires. They also have substantially more power than they need to be considered automobiles and have similar cornering characteristics with the sprints, i.e. no ability without horrendous fishtailing. Then came the super stocks, the stocks and, finally, the Hornets. Hornets are a class for kids and lunatics and the cars are small, four cylinder, front-wheel drive foreign and domestic autos with automatic transmissions, no straight body panels nor glass. The aftermarket or complete lack of tailpipe systems make them sound like pissed-off bees, but louder.
After about an hour, all competitors had run their hot laps and the racing began in earnest. Wingless 410 sprints started the racing with 3 heats of almost miraculous control exhibited by the drivers since only rare collisions, spin-outs and no flips occurred during the heat racing. The flips had to wait for the modifieds since the first heat of that class had one car doing one and a three quarters turns to end up resting comfortably on the driver’s side. The driver was okay and came out in subsequent heats with a dirty car with a very irregular roof line. Hammering seemed to have been the method used to repair the only slightly earlier squashed roof and twisted body panels.
All the fun continued until about 9:30 when they took a break of about 20 minutes. It was at this point we were finally able to hear the speaking of others in the stands with us but that was not necessarily a good thing. There was a family of some 4 generations just below and to the left of us that all came to the races together. Grandma seemed to only be in her late 40s or early 50s and her baseball-hatted relative of about the same age sat just below me. During the break, he would turn my way and sounds would emanate from his mouth that I found to be incomprehensible jibberish. He would give me a very serious look and start making noises from the mouth. Once I suspected he was done with whatever pithy comment he was trying to give me, I would nod and respond with something like “Is that a fact?” Grandma would periodically chip in with equally incomprehensible statements or periods of sound to which I would reply with something like, “Hey, that’s great” although she may have been telling me about her son, who was seated nearby. He was a true piece of Americana with the tiniest head I have ever seen on a human, a lower jaw like the business end of a scissor-boom steam shovel that had some teeth in it although they all pointed in different directions. As far as I could tell, he had no upper teeth but he did have a locating ankle bracelet that I believe lets the local probation authorities know where he is at any point in time. The interesting dental configuration he possessed limited his ability to speak jibberish as well as his ancestors so virtually everything he said or tried to say was lost on us. As soon as he arrived, he removed the shirt from his slightly irregular body to reveal a full set of tattoos apparently scribed onto all parts of his torso by someone completely lacking artistic ability of any sort. He also seemed to have reproduced at least twice, although I could not be certain of his children’s father’s identity, and both kids had come to the races with their father figure. Grandma attempted to communicate to us that, I believe, the eldest of the two babies had come to her first races when she was merely 3 weeks old, perhaps explaining her seeming inability to hear. Her head was almost the same size as her dad’s. She might have been 13 months old.
After about 20 minutes, the races started back up with much more fun during the evening although we were now conflicted over whether to watch the races or the crowd since they were both so interesting. Peggy and I stayed for the sprint and modified finals and then departed the track at around 11:15. Once we got home, we were able to hear that our camp spot was not nearly as far from the track as we had suspected because we were able to plainly detect the sounds of the remaining classes racing and crashing from our bed.
Small track racing is indeed fun to watch. Although I have attended many types of racing in the past, this is the first time I have been able to see racing on dirt which adds a whole new, albeit uncontrollable, aspect to automobile racing. Mud flies everywhere, crashes occur regularly, spins are almost commonplace, flips and turnovers are regular and the unique, small-town crowd make this style of racing almost magical. I noted when we arrived back at the Invader that even our camera had a good coat of brown crud on it from the wheel-spinning action. What a gas!
