On junkyards--with a little twist. Okay, make that a BIG twist...

Sometimes you just gotta do something nutty. (This word, nutty, will appear numerous times in this blog. If this word is somehow offensive to you, or if the sound of it is of the nails-on-the-chalkboard ilk to your tender eardrums, then I would advise you to hit your “back” button now, ‘cuz I’m a-gonna use it a lot.)

Have you ever heard of a place called Sycamore Speedway? I suppose you have if you live in this area, but for those who live in other parts of the country, it would please me greatly if you would allow me to paint you a picture. Or, at the very least, supply a few with my trusty and ever-present camera phone.

And before I begin mixing paints for my verbal palette, I’d like to hearken you back to a previous blog of mine, entitled “Junkyards,” in which I regaled you, O honored reader, with tales of my exploits at a local automotive recycling facility to replace the stereo in my cursed complete-piece-of-shit minivan. Along the way, I endeavoured to express my love of machines in general, and of cars in particular, and how it is sometimes heart-rending to see these objects, inanimate though they are, come to such an end after all the romanticizing we do. You know how we Americans love our cars. In fact, it would seem that the face of our country is much more sculpted by our love of the automobile than other countries, where roads and byways were marked more by the passage of hooves and carriages than Buick Roadmasters and Ford Thunderbirds and Chevy Biscayne wagons liberally papered with bumper stickers and full of screaming kids. And, if you look a little deeper, you can kinda tell that this beautiful sprawling country with which we were blessed was explored, and trails blazed, by brave men and women on horses, but the true population of this great land was done by—at first—the train, and, in a much greater capacity, the car.

So we love our cars, and our country is based on this love—drive-in theatres, drive-thru (notice how it’s never drive-through, but always thru? God, we suck) fast food joints, motels, billboards, parking lots, driveways, to say nothing of the culture—The Fast and the Furious, Dukes of Hazzard (MY favorite), blinged-out ‘Sclades, Navigators and Hummer H2s. Gas prices are through the roof, but you sure notice a lot of new Mustangs (hell, I dig ‘em), Dodge Magnum Hemi RTs with gas-suckin’ 5.7 litre Hemi V-fuckin’-8’s, and there is a lady who lives across the street from my folks who drives a Bentley Continental GT. That thing gets 10 mpg on a good day, and we wonder why we have to import crude oil from the Middle East?

I can’t say anything, though—I was raised a motorhead, and as such, I gotta find outlets to get my fix. Thank God for the bike. Other people have to get theirs, too, and that’s where Sycamore Speedway comes in.

I should preface anything forthcoming with this—ever since I was old enough to want anything, I wanted to drive. As soon as I was old enough to want to be something, I wanted to be a race-car driver. My dad used to race, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I didn’t know if I would ever make it to the Indianapolis 500, but I didn’t care. While my brother and his friends were out playing baseball and fantasizing about the World Series, I was driving my soap-box racer and dreaming of Daytona, or Le Mans, or Monaco. When I was seven, I spotted a go-kart for sale on the street and rode my bicycle home at top speed. I pestered my dad, who finally gave in, over the protestations of my mother, and at last I was driving something I didn’t have to push. I got right to work on practicing my apexes, my drifts, my heel-and-toe downshifts (I knew it was only one speed, but fuck it—I had fun) and my Le Mans starts, where you have to run across the street, jump in, fire up, and get underway from a dead stop. I asked for a helmet for Christmas one year, and a Nomex driving suit the next. I got the helmet, but Nomex is expensive shit for a someone who’s gonna grow out of it in a year.

Well, God’s got a plan for every one of us, and racing wasn’t mine. That’s okay—I’m happy where I’m at. But for all of us who dreamed of Grand Prix races and fell short, there are places like Sycamore Speedway.

Sycamore Speedway is a quarter-mile dirt oval about five miles due east of DeKalb, Illinois. It’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields and asphalt two-lanes for as far as the eye can see. As near as I can tell, no one lives within a mile of the place. That’s a good thing, because on race nights, huge stadium-quality lights blaze down from 100-foot utility poles, the bellowing of huge oil-fired beasts relieved of their exhaust systems rattles the leaves on the nearby corn plants, and, by the time two hours have passed since the first laps were turned, a fine blue haze composed of all the myriad fluids of which a vehicle is capable of burning off hangs motionless over the track, until the predominantly easterly wind comes up around three in the morning and wafts the noxious airborne mixture off towards Lily Lake, the next town over.

On Saturday nights, they run late-model modifieds, V-8 powered brutes that resemble regular production cars in the nation's new-car showrooms even less than NASCAR stockers do. They’re big and scary and fast, and since the track is dirt, they spend much of their time in lurid four-wheel drifts, flinging the track surface towards anyone stupid enough to sit in the front row. Nutty.

Friday nights, however, are another thing entirely. Friday nights are devoted to what is known as “spectator-class” racing. The rules are simple. Take any car you want, knock the windows out, remove the head and taillights, wire the doors shut, paint a number on and go racing. Most of the cars are big ol’ rear-drive behemoths—Lincoln Town Cars, Ford Crown Victorias and Mercury Grand Marquis, Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the occasional Cadillac, and a shitload of Chevrolet Caprices. Tell you how it is, my children—if you have ever lusted painfully after an older Chevy Caprice, like the old taxicabs and police cars, get one now, because they are a dying breed, and places like Sycamore Speedway are killing ‘em off.





If the big guys are too imposing for you, there is a class for compacts. Name something small and you’ll see it in there somewhere—Honda Accords and Civics, Toyota Celicas, Corollas and Tercels, Chevrolet Cavaliers, Ford Escorts and Tempos, Hyundai-this, Saturn-that, and the occasional Geo Storm or Plymouth Reliant. Tonight there was even a Dodge Daytona. They have no mufflers, and they snarl like pissed-off Chihuahuas, madly spinning their front tires on a dirt-track designed for drifting. Also nutty.



I feel like a spectator at a butcher shop, the old melancholy washing over me as I watch these tired old heaps fling themselves around the track at the cruel behest of the last masters they’ll ever have. And sure, they’re just machines, but somewhere in there is a Saturn SC2 that someone’s older sister saved and saved for, working two jobs just so she could make the payments, her and her friends blasting the stereo and standing on the seats with their heads out the sunroof on a gorgeous summer evening on one of the few nights a month she got to have off. Somewhere else, there’s a Buick Roadmaster or Cadillac Fleetwood that was the last car your grandfather owned, and wasn’t he proud when he pulled into your folks’ driveway in it, the paint freshly waxed and looking so deep you could swim in it? Somewhere in there there’s a taxicab that once carried a movie star, or a police cruiser that once carried an officer to the scene of a domestic dispute where he saved some poor woman’s life from the murderous hands of her ex-boyfriend. And now here they are, battling it out on this clay track out in Redneckville, trading paint and knocking fenders, and when that oil line springs a pinhole leak and the light on the dashboard comes on, the driver just pushes harder, hoping to take out that guy in the Pontiac before the engine locks up completely. In a way, it’s sad.

And, in another way, it’s a fuckin’ blast, watching that guy trying to limp that Cadillac into the pits on three flats, or seeing someone roll over three times in turn four and land on the wheels with the engine still running. I spend a lot of times in the stands thinking, “This is nutty.” There’s other interesting things to watch, too. I learned early on that rear-wheel-drive cars with independent rear suspension are bad ideas in a setting like this. Some schmuck in a newer Thunderbird got collected from behind by another guy in a high-balling Chevy station wagon, and got sent ass-first into the wall. When the smoke cleared, the guy in the Thunderbird was able to get the thing moving, but its rear end was completely destroyed, the rear suspension collapsed like an unlucky animal that has somehow gotten both of its hind legs broken in a trap. The Thunderbird, miraculously still moving, made its way off the track. Later I saw it lined up outside the car crusher at the rear end of the paddock. End of the road, babe. In a place like this, you want a nice, solid, live-axle out behind you.





Walking around the pit area is like stepping into a Mad Max film. There are battered cars of every make and model here, in various states of disrepair. There are also people, of course, but they seem to come from one vein of descent. Mainly, they’re males in their twenties or thirties, heads shaved, tattooed, smoking liberally and often with a keg of some Miller or Budweiser product within easy reach. I once saw a guy beat the absolute shit out of a Cadillac DeVille with a mostly-full beer keg. Every time he’d slam it down on the hood, or the trunk lid, or the roof, the keg would spew a fine mist of beer from the place where the tapper was supposed to go. Each time he did this, his friends would cheer lustily, which fed the gentleman’s enthusiasm. When he was done, he was drenched in beer, and the Cadillac was pretty thoroughly fucked. I can’t say as I’ve ever seen that before. Very nutty.

You have to be careful walking around out here, because it’s nighttime but, as per race regulations, all the cars have had their headlights removed. You step around a tree onto the gravel paths that pass for roads here, you hear a growl of unmuffled exhaust and before you can turn around, you’re street pizza. Beer and loud exhausts do not inspire moderation.



Walking around is all well and good, and sitting in the stands watching people go really crazy redneck stupid fast is fine and dandy, and checking out the occasional guy beating the crap out of a poor multicolored Oldsmobile Delta 88 two-door with a sledgehammer is mildly entertaining (see above), but after awhile even this scene gets old. Thank God for the One-on-One Drag races. Now this is nutty.

To drive in this class, you need a) a car, b) a helmet, c) proof of insurance, and d) a Social Security Number in case they have to drag your monkey ass to the hospital in the ambulance they keep on the premises. That’s it. The entry fee is $25, and you don’t have to knock out any glass, or paint any numbers on your car. My good friend Mike Honegger, with whom I went there, entered his 2000 Pontiac Grand Am. I drove there in the Dragon, so I entered that.

Hee hee.

All righty, stop right there. Stop stop stop. We all know and love the Dragon. No one more so than I, believe me. And I understand the sheer absurdity of racing the thing. It’s like asking my beloved Lois to pull a dog sled. It’s like asking your old asthmatic and emphysemic grandfather to help you shovel the driveway. Fuck, it’s like asking your grandmother to help you move the couch, for Christ’s sake. I know this.

But in the Dragon’s case, it also looks fuckin’ cool. ENTER THE DRAGON!

So I go up to the lady at the counter and I pay her my $25 bones and I sign all the legal waivers and I show her my helmet and my insurance card. Eventually, we get the call to line up by the paddock next to the track entrance gate. Mike and I stand there bullshitting and contemplating just how stupid we are. To be truthful, I am about to get out there in a car that is over thirty years old that looks like it just came off the set of the Brady Bunch, but unlike Mike, I’m not still making payments on my car.

A track marshall comes walking down the line, checking his registration list and marking each car’s windshield with a number from his red paint-pen. In front of me is a guy in a clapped-out Lincoln Continental Mark VII. His car gets the number 8. The marshall comes over to the Dragon. He gives it the eye, then fixes me with a bilious stare.

“Hey, all the Spectator-class races are over! You’ll have to wait until next week,” he says.

“I’m not here for the Spectator class,” I say, Mike deep in the throes of a snickering fit behind me. “I’m running in the One-on-One drag races.”

He looks at me for a while longer, taking a huge drag from his cigarette. After awhile, he replies with, “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m fuckin’ serious. Give me my fuckin’ number.”



“All right, all right. God,” the guy whines, painting a large red 5 in the upper left corner of my windshield. He moves on to Mike, who has recovered somewhat from his snickering fit.

We stand there waiting. Mike is a highly cultured guy, with refined tastes in beer and music. We both feel like cockroaches on a wedding cake. After awhile, we get the cue to head onto the track. Motoring through the gate, I catch a track marshall motioning frantically to me. “Helmet! Helmet! Seat belt!” I already have my seat belt on, but sliding my helmet over my head while behind the wheel of the Dragon feels as alien and out of place as anything I’ve ever done.



There are about ten cars entered in the One-on-Ones. The races work like this—two cars are staged at the middle of the front straight. When the green flag is dropped, it’s a race to get around the track to the starting point first. The loser gets the bum’s rush; the winner gets staged against the winner of another one-lap drag. The ultimate winner gets the trophy and the adoration of countless rednecks. The track marshalls do their best to stage the cars according to equivalent performance. Ahead of me, a Hyundai Excel takes on a Honda Accord and gets eliminated. It’s my turn next, and I find myself next to Mike. We find this is actually not a bad match-up; he’s got about the same horsepower, but he’s pulling half the ass. And remember, O Honored Reader—the Dragon’s got a big fat ass. To compensate, they put me on the inside.

As we are staging, I hear the announcer barking out our names over the P.A. to the crowd.

“We’ve got Mike Honegger in a 2000 Grand Am, versus Jay Oh—how do you say this?--Oh-lah-something in a—get this—a 1973 Ford Gran Torino Station Wagon! Give the guy some credit just for showing up in a heap like that!”

I look over at Mike; he is laughing his ass off. Surprisingly, it sounds like the crowd is laughing too. And that's fine with me—I know I’m gonna get my ass kicked, but who’s lame enough to show up on a racetrack in a car like this? Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, do your best to make ‘em laugh and you’ll go out a star.

Remember, Mike is still paying on his car; I have no such inhibitions. When the green flag drops, I put my foot to the floor. The Dragon heels over, the whole thing leaning in a reaction to the torque of the big-but-slow V8 under the hood. If I can make it to the first turn before Mike, and keep the inside line, I may have a chance. I toss the old beast into the corner, trying to keep a handle on where Mike is, not wanting to trade his nice shiny red paint for some of my puke-green, but putting about on the port tack throws the Dragon into a sizeable list to starboard, and I forget about Mike and just concentrate on not cracking the wall.



Apparently I have boxed Mike out; he is forced to take the high road through turns One and Two; he reels me in on the back straight but not enough to take the inside advantage from me. He takes the pit exit and I line back up.



This time they have me up against a guy in an older Cavailier Z-24—one of the older ones with a V-6. It’s pretty beat up, but it still has license plates on it. It’s a daily driver, apparently, but way too big a piece of shit for the owner to worry about what happens to it.

We stage up, and the crowd is really yelling. I hear a guy near the front row bellowing “Gran Torino! HELL yeah!” as though he might ejaculate all over himself at any moment. The starter drops the flag, the guy in the Cavalier beats me to the first turn and the race is over as neatly as that. I try to salvage some dignity by hanging the tail out, but the Dragon is not powerful enough for that, and the OIL lamp flickers on the dashboard after a few seconds of trying. Oh well. It was fun, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it, but this tired old thing still needs to get me home, and I need it next week to haul some gear. I head for the pit exit. The Cavalier goes on to get beat by a guy in a Pontiac Grand Prix, and an eighteen-year-old kid smacks the wall in his mother’s Ford Taurus. Life is pretty good.

Hmm. Maybe I could get my hands on an old Caprice or something and go back next week, this time for real. I’ve done crazier things. I guess. Wait...well, I’ll get back to you on that. I’m sure there has to be something...