Sooooo, little may most people know, I’m a big fan of racing. Yep, kinda redneck like that……
I say redneck because that’s how my experience and love for racing began, with a bunch of rednecks drag racing. I grew up in an area that had it’s own rodeo, so the community had a bit of a country feel to it. I mean hell, we had more than one tack shop in the town. So, a few friends of mine had some pretty old cars that they had built up and used to take the local track and race them…… or find a nice back road to go blasting down.
Now, they weren’t really messing around either. One of them had an Oldsmobile 442 with a bored out 454 in it, the kid was ranked in amateur drag racing with the car. Oddly enough, it was still street legal too! That car was a fun one to ride around in, he had drag radials in the rear and had the hardest time keeping that car going straight. Plus with the stereotypical high schooler lead foot he ended up burning out and swinging it into the side of a truck one day. Pretty shitty.
My other buddy had a Pontiac Firebird 400, which was the motor from a GTO making over 300 horsepower! Now that was a fun car to ride in! He had built up the car so much he had to bump the transmission into neutral at lights because the stock brakes couldn’t keep the car stopped. The engine would literally idle so powerful that it would push the car even when you’re standing on the brakes. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty impressive…. or maybe sad, that his brakes couldn’t stop it lol
Now, I drove a 92 Camaro RS with a 305 V8 in it, not much, but definitely enough to have some fun in. I actually crashed that car a few times, but somehow I always got it fixed and back on the road. The first time I crashed it, well, almost crashed it, I was turning into my buddies neighborhood which was off of a street that had a 40 mph speed limit, I decided to take the turn at 40. Slid the car sideways and into the rocks they had for a median. They were like those river rocks, the smooth round ones, so I kind of just slid on top of them, no worries. But they crazy part about this, what makes it story worthy, the fact that ten inches to the left was the concrete sign for their neighborhood, ten inches to the other side a rock about 3 ft. in diameter. Yeah, it was pretty close, but being young and dumb I brushed it off, threw it in reverse and went on my merry old way.
The funny thing is, everybody noticed the tire tracks going right between rock and the sign, but they never found out who it was. Maybe a month later, one of the people in the neighborhood did the same thing as me, except he wasn’t as lucky. He actually ended up getting his BMW stuck on top of the rock….. Yeah, don’t ask me how he was able to accomplish that, but I think it’s fair to say everyone blamed the tire tracks on him now lol