Festival of Fire

Sears Point Raceway - Sonoma, CA - 7/5/1997

Maybe it’s just me. When I was 12 years old and infatuated with cars, my dad took me to Detroit a couple of times to see the drag races, and these were some of the closest times I ever had with him. He’s been gone a number of years now, but somehow, I always feel close to him again when I’m immersed in the world of fast cars.

So we went to Sears Point to see the Festival of Fire on July 5. What more American way to spend the Independence Day weekend than to commune with dad and with those few for whom "fast" is never fast enough?

Sears Point has got to be one of the nicest raceways in the world, settled in the hills of Sonoma County, 20 miles from LTW headquarters. The pit area is entirely open - no separate pit pass - you can walk entirely by accident right into the staging area. We looked into many cars; the interiors, the engines; it was easy for me, in brief flights of imagination, to picture myself hunkering into that tiny cockpit and gripping the butterfly-shaped steering control for dear life. Many of the teams had T-shirts for sale at their vans, and even, apparently, giveaway stuff, which small groups of kids avidly collected from crew to crew. At the bleachers (at this event - some others have assigned seating), you can choose to sit anywhere from within fifty feet of the christmas tree to down near the finish line. At the cafés, they were barbecuing chicken and burgers on an open grill. Parking is ample. The entertainment was kept at an even pace, with an amazing aerobatic show between races, the biggest firework display in the Bay Area afterwards - for almost ten hours in the hot sun, we were left with barely a minute to go pee at any one time.

This day was all qualification rounds. Hundreds of fast cars race two by two against time to try and end up at the front of the pack. I’m not familiar with all of the classes, so bear with me.

I need to make a trip to the library, or the Web, but I believe the National Hot Rod Association was founded in the late 50s or early 60s in Southern California, a club organized by people who first raced illegally on empty streets late at night. They’re still today trying to figure out exactly who can get to the end of a quarter mile the fastest.

In the stock categories, they’re still using the cars of my youth from the Big Three Point Five Detroit automakers - the heyday of Detroit Iron, when cars were built with complete disregard for fuel efficiency, when there were still some highways with no speed limit, when GMC, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors spent considerable portions of their R&D budgets on racing: Mustangs, T-Birds, Camaros, Firebirds, Barracudas, Road Runners, Darts, Chargers, and the occasional AMC Javelin. These cars were built to get from A to B in the shortest time possible, and to look cool while doing so. As a pre-teen, I read the magazines avidly, waited each summer with bated breath for the new models to come out, attended races and car shows with dad, in complete awe of tricked-out street machines straight from the factory and future car prototypes which would never hit the road. Sure, you had your Ferraris and Lamborghinis that could go 180 mph on a good day, but those were fragile, delicate instruments which would leave a trail of tiny parts behind them while doing so. Detroit Iron was big-block V-8 engines, matching cubic inches for horsepower almost one to one. Compare today’s top of the line Mustang with 5.0-liter V-8 - 302 cubic inches - that’s the equivalent of the second-smallest V-8 Ford used to make. The Mach I Mustang came with a 351, and they made a 390 and another in the 400 range. Chrysler today mostly makes sorry little V-6 shopping carts, but in the 60s, the 426 hemi engine won most of the races. Pardon me while I shed a tear for those bygone days; you shouldn’t’ve got me started.

But you have not seen or heard real speed till you’ve watched a pair of alcohol dragsters shoot down a straight quarter mile in less than six seconds, at 280 mph. (Note: at the Autolite Nationals, later, we saw nitro-burning dragsters and funny cars - some of which exceeded 300 mph in under five seconds.)

They’re absurd, these machines. Monstrous. This is what happens when engineers go bad. Thirty feet long, with gigantic rear tires and little tiny wheels in front, huge supercharged 5000-horsepower V-8 engines perched precariously on ten-inch-wide frames, the drivers crammed in, almost an afterthought, directly in front or behind. These people are seriously demented. You may as well strap a JATO unit on your car and point it at a cliffside, as get into one of these things. If anything goes wrong, you are going to go 100 yards or more in a random direction with no hope of stopping.

First, they roll up to the staging area, where track employees have sprayed water on the pavement. After rolling through, they gun the engines. As the tires spin in the water, they expand in a cloud of steam, and the car shoots forward as they heat up and begin to get traction. Where we sat, about 100 feet from the staging area, we were treated to a fine rain of water and rubber bits after each of these burnouts. It’s loud, louder than rock’n’roll loud, louder than gunfire-and-explosions loud, louder than natural-disaster loud; feel-it-in-your-chest, eardrums-meet-in-the-middle-of-your-head loud, scream at the top of your lungs and not even hear yourself loud. "Deafening roar" doesn’t describe it. By the time they’ve coasted to a stop, they’ve covered most of the quarter mile.

Federal Mogul Dragsters Burning Out (Click image to see AA Fuel burnout at AutoLite Nationals 1998)

Then they back up and get in place for the actual run. The "christmas tree" starting lights go down - pair of yellows, pair of yellows, then the three yellow lights in a vertical row. The two machines rev up, and when the green light at the bottom goes on, there is nothing else audible anywhere in the world. They don’t waste any time starting to move, they’re just gone. In 5.9 seconds, they’re at the far end of the quarter mile going 250 mph (the track record is 300 in less than five seconds, but these were just qualifying races), parachutes twirling crazily to slow them down before the sand trap. Think about it for a second: in the short space of 1320 feet, and in under 6 seconds of pure roaring propulsion, you’re packed like a kipper snack in this machine which takes you from zero to 250+ mph, and maybe, if you’re lucky back to zero over a more reasonable time period. This is not acceleration that you can comprehend in any rational kind of way. Your own car might go from 0-60 in some number of seconds; might top out at 140 mph or so; you might even pull some fraction of a G for a moment as you zip up the onramp onto the interstate - these guys almost seem to appear, as if from another dimension in which they were already speeding along, at the green light, suddenly going 100 mph and still accelerating, rattling the fillings out of teeth all up and down the strip. These guys don’t pass through 5, 10, 25, 50 mph in line with normal laws of physics - they’re already there, from zero, in a thousandth of a second.

Lastly, an exhibition round of two jet cars. These are nothing more than jet engines on wheels, with the drivers perched ahead of the front axles. The warmup is most impressive, as they shoot flames some ten feet behind them…

And the Indy 500 is for sickly folk who can’t handle going fast. And those guys who tool around twisty tracks in Jaguars are woosies. And the hotshot in the ‘ultimate driving machine’ on your tail on the backroads is nothing more than a paramecium, with little squiggly cilia, floating in his medium of agar and bacteria. The people who watch this stuff, all of their excitement comes from waiting for the accidents. You can talk about the finesse of closed-circuit track racing, but it’s just a bunch of excuses for not going faster. If you want to talk speed, don’t even come to the table if you can’t break 240.

And there were several moments when I was so awestruck that I forgot, for a millisecond, where and when it was, and almost said aloud, "did you see that, Dad?"

You can learn more about drag racing at the NHRA "Tutorial" site, or see some cool QuickTime movies of drag racing at their multimedia page.

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