Indy car racing is cool, but it’s not what I grew up with. It was a stretch to call it stock car racing since very little about those jalopies was stock. More accurately, we called it junkyard racing.
Junkyard because that’s where all the car owners and drivers assembled Monday mornings to find replacement parts for their cars after Sunday’s romp around the fifth-of-a-mile dirt track at the fairgrounds.
Today’s racing is serious business. Expensive too. On the other hand, I doubt anybody had more than a hundred dollars in their machines back then. A lot of the drivers traded parts. One guy had an extra radiator and another had a spare axel. The junkyard filled in the rest, and whatever was bought and installed into the cars on Monday usually came back broken the following week.
Winning wasn’t as big an issue as survival. There were more bets placed on which cars would actually finish the race than who would win the $50 purse. It was sort of a warped honor to have your car die before it made it once around the track. And, by the time the day’s racing was over, there were more disabled vehicles lining the track than those still running. The town marshal always closed the road back to town for an hour so everyone could tow their disabled steeds back home.
Nobody ever got hurt either. It’s hard to get up enough speed circling a track not much bigger than your back yard to do much damage to either car or driver. There were some colossal messes on the track however, but mostly because one car stalled and brought all the others to a standstill.
It cost a dollar admission to the track, and everyone brought their own beer. Including the drivers.