Racing against a clock is fun, but nothing compares to lining up on a stripe, looking over at an opponent, and wondering if you can beat them in a race. Of course they’re looking at you the same way. As they Beach Boys sang in Little Deuce Coupe, “You don’t know what I got.”
Well, it doesn’t appear to be a race, per se. They don’t seem to be going in any particular direction. The pits and the parking lot are the same thing. I can’t tell the difference between the audience and the participants. …
Don’t give me any of that Madison Ave. beer commercial scheisse. Juan Manuel Fangio was the most interesting man in the world. Born in Argentina in 1911, he was the son of two Italian immigrants. His father worked as an apprentice stonemason, and his mother was a housekeeper. He dropped out of school when he was 13 to work as a mechanic. He served time in the Argentine military, and when he got out, he started rebuilding junk cars into race cars in a shed at his parents house. He drove a rebuilt Ford taxi in his first race. You call Uber to go two blocks.
Racing wasn’t like it is now. It was mostly held over long distances, often on dirt roads. Some of the races lasted two weeks. If your car broke down, you had to fix it yourself. He raced in all sorts of converted cars, Chevies and Fords, and won this and that. World War II came, and nothing much happened in racing until 1946. …
Wait, 339 kilometers per hour is fast, right? That’s, like, a lot of kilometers. Too bad I don’t speak gibberish, otherwise that number would actually mean something to me. It’s like 3.9 hectares per cubic second, or something.