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what's wrong with vintage racing

To: fot@autox.team.net
Subject: what's wrong with vintage racing
From: "Jack W. Drews" <vinttr4@geneseo.net>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 13:58:36 -0500
I think the whole scene is pretty neat, for richer or for poorer, for 
better or for worse.

I counted up the number of open trailers at the Road America event -- 250 
entrants or so, about ten open trailers. But that's okay by me. It was also 
okay that one of the guys who had a Big Rig was from Atlanta. His people 
drove the hauler, and he arrived in a Lear Jet, which buzzed the track. Of 
course, he went home each night to Atlanta and returned the next morning in 
the Lear.

I remember the very first time in my life that I saw what I considered the 
epitome of racing luxury. It was at Wilmot Hills (now defunct) in 1963 and 
belonged to the guys in Waterloo, Iowa who bought Huffaker's Jensen-Healey. 
They arrived with the race car on the back of a flatbed Ford one-ton truck. 
The truck also had an oxy-acetylene cutting rig on it, and the ultimate 
touch in racing equipment -- a six inch jaw vise, bolted right there to the 
floor of the truck.

I think that the great equalizer between the guys at both ends of the scale 
is that all of us share one thing that makes us equal -- four little tire 
patches on the pavement. Considering this as the method used to measure 
fun, nobody has more fun than me.

By the way, that 1963 truck still exists, and so does the Jensen-Healey, 
parked where it was rolled off the truck after winning the national 
championship. Seeing it made the little hairs on the back of my head stand 
right straight up.

uncle jack 

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