A Day at the Races

I love the smell of grilled food and engine fumes in the morning. It smells like...like victory. Well, victory for some, losses for others, and for all the intermingling of the pain and joy of competition. In short, it smells like a day at the races.

What better way to welcome June than to go to Byron Dragway in beautiful Byron, Illinois. It was my first visit there and, just as any man should, I enjoyed it. Blue sky and bright sun shining down on a drag strip in the middle of rolling Illinois prairie, a place teeming with fast cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles (yes, snowmobiles) and women with tattoos on their legs. Who wouldn’t like this?

To be fair, you don’t need to be a man to enjoy car racing; my wife liked it as well. There’s something captivating about a car or a snowmobile (yes, I said snowmobile, now stop asking) shooting down a strip of pavement at top speed. The races and time trials only last a few seconds, but they’re a pretty exciting few seconds.

What brought us to the track this fine day was our friend C.J. Williams and his Ford Mustang. It’s a beautiful black machine (the car, not C.J.) and it’s fast and it’s loud. That’s the thing about auto racing. Loud and fast. Lots of noise and speed and fumes and plumes of smoke as the tires spin at the start of the race and it’s quite a sight. It’s the kind of sight that leads one to suspect that what we see at the racetrack are little boys (and girls too) grown up and able to play with expensive toys. But beyond the money spent, there’s love, love for creating a machine capable of getting up to speeds well in excess of one hundred miles an hour in only a few seconds.

Racing is a test of the ability to build and maintain a machine that will be super fast while not flying apart at the seams, and the skill of the driver to make the machine do what he wants it to do. Racing is competition, something beloved by Americans from the early days of our country.

Ultimately though, racing is fun. That’s why the racers race, and that’s why people watch. And that too, the urge to have fun, is also very American. I mean, where else do they race snowmobiles on dry pavement? You don’t see that sort of thing in the former Soviet Union, do you? Nope. Only in America do snowmobiles race on blacktop. Why do it? Because we can.

Man and machine: Pictured below, C.J. Williams and his Ford Mustang.