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What we can learn from drag racing
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A drag strip worker raises Old Glory and the state flag of Missouri.
Leaving behind Kentucky's bluegrass and rolling hills for a day, we hopscotch across the Ohio River, stopping briefly in Cairo, IL at Shemwell's BBQ -- a local eatery renowned for its unique style of barbeque pork (sliced, rather than pulled or chopped) and pale, yellow-orange, vinegar-based sauce. My guide for the day, Bryan Dorsey of Barlow, KY, counts Shemwell's as a fixture on his near-weekly trips to our ultimate destination: Sikeston, Missouri.
After ordering and devouring pork sandwiches liberally doused in Shemwell's sauce -- Bryan's lightly toasted, mine normally toasted (I always trust local, family-owned restaurants with the proper preparation of their signature offerings, mainly because I envision an indignant cook in the back yelling, "What!?! He don't like the way I toast!?!"), we take a quick, rolling tour of the historic town made famous in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, as the cradle of Jim's eventual freedom.
Nearly any tour of Cairo is going to be quick and rolling, as there are very few places in this decaying, rubble-strewn battleground of the war on poverty where one feels entirely confident in coming to a complete rest. It's a place where the "California Stop" is as instinctive as avoiding the gaze of a ranting schizophrenic on a street corner. Except, there's no one to rant at on the street corners. Even the crazies have fallen on hard times.
But Cairo isn't completely devoid aesthetic recommendation. Where the ruins of the Great Society lie on the east side of US 51, the artery that cuts through the center of town, on the west side, you'll find the residential area once known as Millionaire's Row -- a peaceful subdivision of homes ranging from the post-war domiciles that sprung up in the early 50's to the antebellum mansions of the Deep South. Bringing home the utter contrast of it all was the smell of freshly cut grass and the occasional abandoned property that dotted the otherwise unblemished landscape -- the basal cell carcinoma of real estate.
The twenty minute ride through this dichotomy of historic glory and post-modern dystopia left me and my guide without much to say until we'd escaped the city limits and landed on the comparatively festive interstate highway system, which would take us across Mark Twain's Mississippi River and into the vast expanses of crop land sprawled across the Missouri Bootheel.
Where it is nearly impossible to laugh in Cairo, southeast Missouri makes it necessary for the preservation of sanity. And that shouldn't be taken as an insult. Because, whereas the town we had just left made any degree of penetrating conversation an exercise in heartbreak, the miles and miles of open fields of potatoes, wheat, and corn have a way of forcing wayfarers into very welcome lighthearted banter, and from there to, in our case, a discussion of the raucous contempt for political correctness of South Park and its creators. The "City Wall" and "Jonas Brothers" episodes provided enough guffaws to carry us all the way to our destination, and the object of this piece: The Sikeston Drag Strip.
As we rolled up to the gate leading into the pit area, our way was blocked by a black, late model Chevrolet pickup, parked sideways to prevent crashers from evading the $12 price of admission -- up two dollars from my previous visits, in an apparent bow to inflation and declining attendance. But, for those who revel in competition and obscene displays of horsepower, and in comparison to ticket prices for nearly any other sporting event, the pit pass is a marvel of entertainment value. One could easily pay twice as much to look at similar cars lined up in a grassy field or asphalt parking lot, never exceeding the 10 mph speed limit in the park where the cars are showcased.
The owner of this facility, and the pickup truck that obstructed our path, is Ray Poirier -- a stocky, energetic man, in his late fifties (to the best of my reckoning) who would later come to regret having worn the shorts and shirtsleeves he chose for the night. My guide, Bryan -- a fixture at this track for nearly every weekend that it's been open over the past ten years -- introduced me to him and informed him that I was planning to write a story about the track for my web column. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what shape this piece would take, and when asked what kind of story I was writing, I stumbled through an explanation that I wasn't really sure was true at the time. Perhaps sensing my trepidation, he nevertheless gladly welcomed me, answered a few questions, and offered to answer any others I may have over the course of the night.
And the course of the night would be a long one. Having arrived at around 2:00 p.m., we wouldn't be pulling out of the pit area until after 1:00 a.m., tired and half-deaf from the events of the evening. The allure: $1,900 for first place in the Pro class, with $400 going to second place, $100 to the losing semi-finalists, $75 for fifth and sixth place finishers, and $50 for seventh and eighth place. The promise of a $1900 win brings out a lot of cars, which means a lot of rounds of racing.
But, make no mistake about it; drag racing is not about the cash. As Ray put it, "If you're in this sport for the money, you've made a bad decision." Indeed, the impression you get walking around the pit area and talking to the competitors is that the majority of them would (and actually do) do it for free, and even at considerable expense. And, one of the grim facts of life for drag racers is that every race brings with it the potential of disaster -- be it a blown engine, or serious injury as a result of a crash.
The previous night, regular competitor Howard Harper t-boned the concrete wall at the strip while making test runs in his Dodge Dart "Swinger" just a few hours after dropping a new, higher performance engine into it. He walked away uninjured and, though he did appear at the track the next night, his racing season is very likely over. No one asked if he would be back. It's simply assumed.
That's not to say that drag racers are completely undeterred by fiscal reality. Asked whether the economic downturn has shown any effect on track attendance, owner Ray Poirier replied that he's seen a nearly 50% drop-off so far this year. It is difficult quantify how much of that decline is a result of the struggling economy, since this season has had an unusually high number of rain-outs so far. Still, drag racers are subject to the same budgetary constraints as anyone else, and while tough economic times won't necessarily cause them to give up the sport, it can certainly influence the frequency of participation.
The vast majority of racers are self-financed, though some do get help through sponsorships from local businesses in exchange for placing their names or logos on their cars. (Auffenberg Dodge, a local dealership sponsored this night’s main event.) Most of them do their own mechanic work, as well. There are no pit crews to speak of, unless you count friends and family members who help them to load and unload the cars, hand them wrenches, hold flashlights, and give hand signals to help them get properly lined up at the starting line. Drag racing is a sport participated in by people who simply have a passion to go fast, and a competitive drive to do it well.
And drag racing -- particularly the form of it practiced at the Sikeston Drag Strip, known as "bracket racing" -- is no respecter of big-money horsepower at the expense of the wrench-turning gear head. In bracket racing, victory is not won by the car, but the driver. And, the drivers are less in competition with each other than with themselves, the clock, and the conditions at the track. Though, to be certain -- there is a very healthy degree of competition between drivers. Rivalries and hurt feelings are not uncommon.
Probably the biggest rivalry on the track, however, has to do with brand loyalty. There are Mopar devotees (Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge), Chevrolet fanatics, Pontiac mavens, Ford partisans, and fans of any other automaker out there you care to name . . . as long as it's an American automaker. It is highly unusual to see a foreign car on the strip, and nearly as uncommon to see one parked in the pit area as a means of transportation to and from the races. In fact, small-time drag strips may be the last place in America where domestic cars maintain supremacy.
But, there is something striking about the cars you see at these small-town tracks. It's not so much the smooth as glass paint jobs, the extreme modification that renders familiar models almost unrecognizable, or even the jaw-dropping horsepower that the owners are somehow able to extract from the engines -- all of which are striking enough. What really stands out to the observer is just how old most of the cars are.
Walking through the pits, one is hard pressed to locate a car that was produced after 1985. Yes, there are exceptions -- late-80's and early-90's Chevy S-10 pickup trucks and a few late-model Mustangs and Camaros (longtime staples at drag strips). Still, the vast majority of the cars were produced between 1960 and 1980 -- and the majority of those prior to 1975. In more than one sense, Detroit resembles Cairo, Illinois. And, like the people who stubbornly mow their lawns on the right side of the tracks of that historic city in decline, drag racers tenaciously hold on to the golden age of American muscle cars as a symbol of what America does better than any other country in the world: Power.
The fate of the Big Three was a topic of some discussion as Bryan and I made our way around the pits, talking to the many drivers he's come to know over the years, and making introductions. Some were more sanguine about the current situation than others. One Trans Am owner philosophically observed, "Well, I guess it'll make our stuff worth more," in response to the shutting down of Pontiac production. Though, there didn't seem to be a great deal of satisfaction in his voice. And, a minute or two later, he went on to extol the virtues of Chevy and GMC trucks, noting how completely trouble-free his experience had been with them, and the fact that his wife currently drives a Tahoe. Bryan, of course, agreed. We rode over to the race in his GMC pickup, after all, which had gotten him to and from nearly every race over the past ten years.
Royce Thomason, a 66-year-old retired assembly worker who built Corvettes at the St. Louis plant from the 60's until production was relocated to the facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1982, feels that General Motors brought much of its trouble upon itself by building too many plants to increase production. After 32 years, he ended his career working on the Chevy truck line. He races in a '66 Chevy II.
Thomason has been racing at the Sikeston strip under its various owners since the mid-60's. And, while he never stated such, it is revealing to some extent that a man who’s made his living working for GM from the mid-sixties until he retired in 1994 would choose to race in a mid-60's Chevy. It doesn't necessarily speak to the quality of earlier models compared to more recent ones. Likely, it has as much to do with nostalgia as anything else. Yet, nostalgia isn't a meaningless thing.
A good bit of the nostalgia for the muscle cars of that era stems from the fact that they were relatively affordable vehicles that didn't over-promise, or pretend to be anything other than what they were -- cars with lots of horsepower that could be repaired and maintained by everyday people with everyday tools. And, it's worth noting that the affinity for cars like the Chevy II isn't limited to people who were around during their heyday. Ask any under-30, Chevy-oriented gear head if he'd like one and you'll get a reaction not unlike what you'd get if you asked Amy Winehouse if she'd like some heroin.
Some might be tempted to attribute this to a Luddite tendency among what some less-than-charitably call "grease monkeys". For some reason, the popular perception of the mechanically inclined is that of a class of idiot savants. This seems even more to be the case with racers, who are widely viewed as redneck idiot savants. One has to wonder why this is the case with gear heads as opposed to, say, mortgage bankers. Your typical drag racer can calculate the effect of relative humidity, air temperature, and barometric pressure on the horsepower and torque output of a Mopar 440 Wedge, bored forty-over, with 11-to-1 dome-top pistons, and how many thousandths of a second that will add, or subtract from the .5-second perfect reaction time in order to maintain a consistent total elapsed time over they course of a 40-car field in double elimination competition with a one-time buy-in. Mortgage bankers, on the other hand, are apparently incapable of figuring out 20% of net annual income.
Seems if you're looking for a mouth-breathing dullard, you're much more likely to find one at FannieMae and FreddieMac than you will at the Sikeston Drag Strip. Come to think of it, you're more likely to find them in the executive suites at the respective Big Three office buildings, as well. The guys down at the drag strips have figured out a way to keep their product running 30 - 40 years after manufacture, and perpetuate brand loyalty from one generation to the next.
If the Big Three can't pull their fat out of the fire and make it under their own power, whatever the cause, it won't be Toyota's or Honda's or Nissan's fault. All they're doing is what the Big Three used to do so well -- build cars that people want, and build them well enough that people swear by their name on their grandmothers' graves. Unfortunately, it appears the Big Three are taking the same route to renewed glory that Cairo, Illinois has taken.
In the same sense that I was struck by the age of the cars at the drag strip, I was struck by the new buildings that dot the main thoroughfare through Cairo. They all seem to have fairly similar designs, and they look well-kept enough. There's something to be said for tidy, spartan uniformity in a place that otherwise looks like "The Business District that The Surge Forgot". But, leaving aside the very basic appearance of the buildings, there's something else they all share. It seems every piece of real estate in the entire city that has been developed since the 1960's bears a government sign of one kind or another.
Now, as clean and non-crumbling as these buildings are -- and they're surely an improvement over three-story debris heaps lining streets that no tumbleweed would cross beyond dusk, and only the hearty ones in broad daylight -- they don't bring any appreciable improvement to the atmosphere. A scant block away from the bullet-riddled facade of the Alexander County District Court House, you'll see a shotgun shack with plywood windows surrounded by waist-high weeds that almost obscure an abandoned Lincoln Town Car on cinder blocks. A mere two blocks from Magnolia Manor, and St. Mary's Park -- where both William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt once spoke to crowds from a pavilion that still stands there -- the shell of a home, whose curbside wall long ago collapsed and gave way to what must be poison ivy, squats amid houses where one can easily imagine Opie Taylor performing chores for spending money.
This is a prime example of where government, when it isn't doing more harm than good, is doing no good in the face of ongoing harm. There are two phenomena working against the fate of Cairo: A willingness to engage in unconstructive construction, and unwillingness to engage in constructive demolition. And the government, in all its big-footed oafishness, seems incapable of recognizing what is taking place just across the highway from its battleship grey buildings on clipped, trimmed, and meticulously edged lawns (purchased at unknown cost).
And, as if the extent of the benign neglect in the auto industry were somehow insufficient up to this point, the government has seen fit to insert itself into mix in its typical barbed-wire catheter fashion. As a consequence, what we'll end up with is a line of grey cars that look functional enough, don't seem to cost that much based on the sticker price, and seem to get you wherever you need to go, but somehow never seem able to get you back home. And, of course, there's no warranty. And, oh yeah . . . you're stuck with the towing fee.
Contrast what the government has accomplished in Cairo with what Ray Poirier has accomplished in Sikeston. Government plops down new buildings abutting a strip of asphalt whose only purpose seems to be to challenge drivers to traverse it as quickly as possible without getting a speeding ticket, in a place that would qualify as a war zone, if only there were enough people who deemed it worth making a fuss over. Ray, on the other hand, takes a flat piece of land, some blacktop, some concrete, a two-story structure with an observation deck up top and a concessions stand on the bottom, adds a few lights, some clocks, a couple of laser beams no more advanced than those at your typical bowling alley, and people line up down the street to pay their twelve dollars just to watch -- more to participate.
This particular Saturday night, 40 cars participated in the Pro class. My own estimate would put the number participating in the other classes (Junior Dragsters, Trophy Class, E/T, Drag Radial, Limited Street, and Super Pro) at 60 - 70. Monitoring all the action from above in the tower is the father-son team of Roger and Jared Smith. Roger has been the track announcer since 1987, keeping racers informed of when their particular class is due at the track and generally working to keep things running smoothly. Jared has for the last ten years been what is blandly called the "Computer Operator". What he is, actually, is something closer to a combination of Wall Street runner and roulette dealer with a computer terminal.
Jared's job is to man the software that monitors the race times -- reaction time, total elapsed time, and dial-in time, which is basically the benchmark that drivers set for themselves as a point of consistency. (If a driver runs over his dial-in time in a race, he risks losing to the other driver who may be closer to his own dial-in time. If a driver actually beats his own dial-in time, it's called a "break-out", which means he automatically loses.) Since drivers can change their dial-in times between runs to account for weather and track conditions, he has to enter these throughout the night as each race begins. He also keeps track of the individual race results and fills in the brackets as the night progresses.
Is it big business? Absolutely not. In fact, it's one of the smallest of businesses. But, it provides an honest means for a few people to be paid in exchange for their labor, be it maintaining the track, announcing races, or being a computer operator. It also provides an outlet for people from around the four-state area, and beyond, to pursue their passion. And, more than any other sport I've witnessed, this one truly is a family experience. It is extremely common to see fathers, sons, mothers and daughters all pitching in to do their part for the sake of "the team". Wives stand in the staging area, helping their husbands position themselves for the starting line. Dads bursting with pride as their sons chalk up a near-perfect reaction times under the pressure of competing against more seasoned drivers.
The Junior Dragster class is an example. These are miniature rail cars outfitted with, essentially, lawn mower engines that propel them down an 1/8 mile track in, many times, under nine seconds. The cars are generally driven by kids 12 years old and under. On this night, the final heat was between a brother and a sister -- Jake and Hannah, of Campbell, Mo. And both parents were on hand to guide them -- pushing them up to the starting line, offering words of encouragement and advice as they stage themselves for the race, and condolences should they come up short.
Jake ended up winning the race when Hannah drew a red light -- which, in essence, means she crossed a laser beam at the starting line too soon, disqualifying herself. Granted, it's not the ideal way to end a night. But, despite the assertions of enviro-scolds, there are worse ways for young boys and girls to spend their Saturday nights than with their parents, burning off high-test gasoline getting from Point A to Point B as quickly and consistently as you can.
Other winners from the night include Corey Lowe (Sikeston, MO) who beat out Tommy Shoemaker (Vienna, IL) in the Trophy Class which, as its name suggests, is strictly for the glory. There's no cash prize. Tommy Nolen (East Prairie, MO) edged out Dennis Harty (Dudley, MO) in the E/T (Elapsed Time) Class. Daniel Pharris (Sikeston, MO) outran Billy Kennedy (Colt, AR) in the Drag Radial class (cars with street legal tires). Neil Tobnick (Cedar Hills, MO) got past Woody Woodruff (Arnold, MO) in the Limited Street division. Justin Dempsey (Dyer, TN) beat out Phillip Buhler (Poplar Bluff, MO) in the Super Pro class.
In the big event of the night, Greg Harty (Puxico, MO) outlasted Mike Lunsford (Park Hills, MO), taking home the $1,900 prize, while Lunsford walked away with a smaller, but still not bad for a night's work, $400.
Back home in Kentucky, having had the chance to digest the sandwich from Shemwell's, and the events of the evening, I find myself more convinced of the virtues of private enterprise and the pursuit of happiness. In one short day, I witnessed the privation inflicted upon communities that rely to too great an extent on government to bring about improvement in their lives, and the fulfillment that comes when people are allowed to follow their passions, and entrepreneurs are free to provide them with a channel for them.
I saw the determination of people who are members of once proud communities like Cairo, and believers in institutions like the American auto industry, to hold on defiantly to the things they love and cherish, and fight to preserve them against forces that are so often beyond their control. It occurs to me just how inherently conservative these people are, whether they would classify themselves as such, or not. But, in the very purest sense of the phrase, the last holdouts in Cairo's battle against the ever-encroaching poison ivy and the preservationists of America's golden age of muscle cars are "standing athwart history, yelling Stop!"
At this point, it remains to be seen how successful these good people will be in holding back the proverbial tide. I feel pretty good about the drag racers' chances, given the way the tradition passes from one generation to the next. I wish I could say the same for Cairo's "Millionaire's Row" and Shemwell's BBQ.
[The Alexander County District Court House was incorrectly referred to as a Federal District Court House. It has been corrected. Apologies for any confusion this may have caused.]
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