A buddy of mine once told me he liked to race because it gave him better stories to tell. As someone in the storytelling trade, I felt it made perfect sense. It seemed a bit odd for him to say it because he is in software engineering.
He was not what I would consider a raconteur in the classical sense, but he had a point. Racing with NASA, instructing, competing in Time Trial and climbing the HPDE ladder or bombing around cones on an autocross course gives you way better stories to tell.
For example, at one autocross event I attended, I pointed out a particular Subaru wagon that had been lifted a bit to add ground clearance. No sooner had I questioned the logic of running it in an autocross that I glanced over to see it up on its two outside wheels after it rounded a sharp turn. Mind you, I don’t mean it lifted the inside wheels. It was jacked to angle between 20 and 30 degrees, and when it came back down, we heard it all the way across the parking lot.
Another favorite, per se, while sitting on grid at Buttonwillow a few years back, I remembered that I had not topped off my oil for the race. It was too late for me do anything about it, and as a one-man team, I had no one to check my oil. “Oh, well,” I thought. “My last time on track was a quick qualifying session. I’m sure the oil level is fine.”
We studied cognitive dissonance in grad school, but it turns out I’m just as susceptible to it as any other mortal. Sure enough, about three-quarters of the way through the race, I sensed a loss of power. Exiting the Grapevine section, I began losing a lot of power, and the guy behind me walked away from me on the back straight.
So, of course I kept my right foot planted, and by the time I got to Riverside, the engine note turned sour. I had heard that sound before. A four-cylinder car engine at high rpm has a distinct noise it makes shortly before it expires. It’s not a miss or a knock. It’s too late for that. It’s kind of a sour exhaust note with a muted metallic Bronx cheer of a racket that precedes a cloud of smoke billowing out behind the car.
I heard that noise for a moment or two, felt the engine quit just as I felt a thump in my feet through the floorboard. I checked my mirrors. Bluish white smoke was all I could see. Apparently, my oil level was not up to snuff. The motor was coming out that offseason anyway, I rationalized.
I keep a reminder of that story on my desk. I see it every day. It’s the No. 4 connecting rod that exited the oil pan. Or what’s left of it. It’s bent in two dimensions. The big end is blued from the heat that built up from a lack of oil, and knackered from hammering the crank, block and the pan. The rod cap is missing as is one half of the big end. The wrist pin bushing is dinged up on both sides and the small end is chuffed from the skirt of the piston, which came out in pieces.
I made a table out of the destroyed engine and cylinder head, which I sold when we moved to a smaller house. But I still have the photos, and the stories.
These yarns came flooding back to during that end-of-year reflection we all do around the holiday season. And that, of course, leads one to wonder what stories we will be telling as a result of our adventures this season. I can hardly wait.
