The 500

Mountain Girl is going to hate this.  She won't post to rankinblog because she claims every time she clicks over here I'm bleating on about NASCAR or the Civil War.  Well, I've got Stonewall on my left, and here's today's meditation on tomorrow's Daytona 500, which I posted to Velociman and decided to put here, too.  The Daytona 500 means Spring, hope, and high revving engines and the smell of burning rubber and racing fuel.  All is well with the world on Daytona Sunday.

I've never watched this one in person, always on TV.  Daytona is pretty much a freak, unlike the rest of the season for these teams.  The paradox of Daytona is that if NASCAR let the teams continue to build engines and develop aero unbridled the cars would be pushing 250mph by now.  Couple that with the habit some drivers have of clipping each other to gain position and you would have flaming debris killing a hundred people or more in the grandstands.  Good for TV, bad for the sport.

So, NASCAR instead chokes the air flow into the carburetors and slows the cars down into these balky, 175 mph packs, where the same small move (or mistake) instead takes out 20 cars at once.

Most drivers hate racing at Daytona because they know they often have very little control over their fate.  Having to use their mirrors and rely on the draft and decide in a nanosecond who to follow, they know they could be flipped on their lid, flames spewing, scudding down the frontstretch in front of 200,000 people.  Or turned into the wall in a fraction of a second at top speed, their skull cracked its entire length like Earnhardt's.  The few that actually like it are true daredevils, men with steel balls as dense as Evel Knievel's.

We should stage a Daytona trip from the Velocihovel some February.  Bring along plenty of fireworks and medicine and legal counsel.  Kick out the jams and hoist a toddy in Daytona Biker bars and howl with the Junior fans--Johnson and Earnhardt.  I think that would be right nice.

Be sure to link back tomorrow when our subject will be--The Mule's Shoe, vainglorious murder or turning point in Grant's campaign?

rankin' s rob

Comments

[Dixie Butcher]

That photo should be subtitled: The day D.W. met Dr. Nick....

All hail the Daytona 500!!!

[rankin' rob]

Dr. Nick--now THERE's a character from a bygone age.