Chapter 8

So, I was forced to reassess my position as I rode around with the driver's ed kids the rest of the day. I still didn't think I should do it, but Mike had given me a couple of good reasons to reconsider. When it was all said and done, I knew that I was going to at least have to bring it up to Arlene. I guess I was really hoping that she'd tell me no.

I guess I should have known better. That evening, I explained the whole thing to Arlene – Smoky's asking me, Mike's comments about it, and my thoughts. "It might be fun, in a way," she smiled. "I've been missing the racing, too, you know. It wasn't bad when we were living in town, but hearing the roar from the track every Saturday night keeps making me think that we at least ought to go check it out sometime. We don't have to go racing, and you don't have to get involved in this thing with Smoky, but wouldn't it be nice to touch the old days a little?"

"I'm glad you didn't say 'good old days, '" I snorted. "Compared to what we have today, they weren't all that good."

"No, they weren't," she agreed. "But it was a real adventure, something to remember. Come on, I'll find a sitter, and we can at least go see how bad it is. It'll be nice to be away from the kids for an evening."

That didn't leave me with a lot of choice. The next morning, I called up Smoky and told him that Arlene and I were going to come check the track out Saturday night, and he agreed to have pit passes waiting for us at the back gate ticket house.

As I recall that was a Thursday. I spent the next couple days being a little nervous. I knew darn well that I was thinking about doing something that I really shouldn't do because I knew trouble lay down that road. I had a feeling that going to the race that night was going to lead to more darn trouble than I wanted. I could still get out of it but was pretty sure that I wasn't going to try.

Finally, along late in the afternoon Arlene and I got set to go. As dirty as we knew the place was going to be, we just dressed in jeans and work shirts since there was no point in messing up good clothes. We had an early dinner since we had no idea what the track food would be like and it seemed pretty likely that it wouldn't be much good. The babysitter was a college girl I'd known through high school; she showed up on time, and there was no longer any putting it off. We got in the Chevy since there was no point in messing up the good car, and drove down to the track. Sure enough, there was Diane Ziegler, a kid I'd had in one of my history classes, and she had the passes for us. We talked for a moment about how her summer was going. She was going to be a senior that year and was looking forward to being done with school, but we ran out of conversation pretty quick, so she had us pin the passes to our shirts and we drove on into the pit area.

I parked the Chevy off to the side and got out. It was still pretty early, but there were a dozen or so cars there already. "What do we do now?" Arlene asked.

"I guess we just wander around and see what's to be seen."

We walked over to the nearest car, which was still on the trailer. It was what they called a modified, but one look at it told me that the car was stretching the definition about as far as it could be stretched. It was still sitting on the trailer, and a couple guys were underneath it, draining the oil out of the rear end so they could change the gears for this track. While they were messing with that I took a closer look at it, and it didn't take much looking to see that this thing had never been a street car. It had a space frame chassis welded up out of steel tubing, sort of like the old Kurtis Kraft midgets I used to see – and like the Indy cars I used to see, too. The body looked like it might once have been a '32 Ford coupe chopped and channeled to within an inch of its life, but a closer look revealed that it had never seen a Ford plant – it was fiberglass. The engine was clearly a Chevy V8; it had two four-barrel carburetors.

"What's that mill?" I asked.

"Three twenty-seven," came a voice from under the car. "Bored out to 390."

"Winds out pretty good, I bet," I commented.

"Yeah, when it's running right," the voice said. "We tried running a Corvette fuel injection on it, but it doesn't run worth a shit with it. We decided to try dual quads and see if that might help."

I knew better than to ask what kind of horsepower it might have – these guys might not have had it on a dynamometer and if they did that was something they might want to keep a secret. Smoky had said that there were cars out here that had to be pushing 500 horsepower, and I could believe even more – that big of an engine, those carbs, probably a hot camshaft and custom headers among other things made 500 even seem like it might be on the conservative side. Although it was a bigger car than the midgets Arlene and I had driven, it was clear that this thing was considerably hotter. Even if this weighed twice what one of those old MMSA midgets weighed, it had five times the power. That was going to make for a lively ride, at a minimum.

More cars were arriving, some on trailers, others on tow bars. We stood and shot the bull with the guys for a couple minutes – we never saw their faces, at least not right then – and finally we decided to wander on down the line. "Not exactly like the 2 car, is it?" I chuckled softly to Arlene.

"Good grief, no," she shook her head. "I don't think I'd care to drive one of those things, even just for a hot lap or two."

"Me, either," I agreed. "There was a time I would have liked to have tried, but those days are long gone. Let's look at some of these Junior Stocks. That's what we came for, after all."

We found one not far up the line. It was a '51 Plymouth with the old Chrysler flathead engine. The car looked pretty beat up; it was rusted out more than a little bit, and there were several dents, some of them pretty big. The left side and right side front fenders didn't match the paint on the rest of the car or each other; the grillwork was missing and the bumper was bent. The car had been gutted out, there was a single seat behind the wheel. The number "64" had been painted roughly on the side, with a cheap brush, it looked like. It was pretty much what I would have considered a jalopy, except that it was newer than the jalopies I remembered. There were four teenage butts hanging out from under the open hood. "Beats the hell out of me," I heard one halfway familiar voice say.

"Problems?" I spoke up.

Four teenage heads looked up at me. "Yeah," one of the boys said. I recognized him; it was Don Boies, from my Auto Shop II class the previous year. I knew the other kids, too; two of them had taken Auto Shop I, and one was Phil Sharp, who had been out at the track with me earlier in the week. "The only thing I can figure is that it's jumped time, but we don't have a timing light."

"It'd be useful, but it's not absolutely necessary," I told them. "You can tune it pretty close by ear if you can get it running at all."

"That's just it, we can't get it to run. It won't hit a lick," Don said.

I took a little closer look at the engine. "Not surprising," I said. "You've got it flooded to beat the band from trying to start it. Got a screwdriver?"

"Flat or Phillips?" Don asked.

"Doesn't matter," I told him. "Take the air cleaner off and stick the screwdriver down the carb throat to hold the choke open."

"This has a hand choke," Don protested, seeing what I was driving at. In those days, sometimes an automatic choke would stay closed on you when you wanted it open when the engine was partway warm.

"Might be that the cable has come loose," I told him. "I can smell the gas."

Don shrugged and pulled off the air cleaner so he could get at the carb. He reached out and moved the choke – it swung back and forth, sliding on the cable. He took the screwdriver and tightened the screw that held the cable on. "All right," Don said. "Phil, get in and hit the starter."

It took a little bit more fiddling since the car was badly flooded, but soon they had it going. It was running pretty ragged. "Yeah," I said. "Your timing's off, but it's not that bad. Sounds like you need to retard it just a hair, maybe two hairs since you're going to be racing it. But you've got a miss there, too. It's most likely a plug or a plug wire, I'm not sure which."

Three of the four kids had been through my auto shop classes, so it didn't take them long to figure out that it was the number two cylinder that wasn't firing. As I stood there watching, Don found a plug wrench and yanked the plug. "Jeez," he said. "Pretty foul."

"Yeah," I agreed, glancing at the plug. "The gap is off, and you're getting some oil in the cylinder. Probably needs rings, but you might not want to bother on a heap like this."