Just walked in the door after racing in western Indiana. It wasn't too good a night for us. You might say we had a bad tire day. Just 20 miles from leaving the house we blow out a trailer tire and tear up a trailer fender. We got these pit stops on the side of Interstates down to about 14 minutes now so we didn't loose too much time on that one. Well we found the track just fine. We were running second with 10 laps down in the feature when Doug managed to find the only unpainted tire turn marker on the entire track and ran over it (sure hope the DOJ isn't reading this).
We bent the front axle. one front wheel half and center, probably the spindle and drag link and on top of all that looks like we messed up one of them hard find steering boxes. We can take the axle and steering box over to AJ's and put them in his crankshaft straightener and fix them up good as new, Machine the center back to straight, send the shock off to ARS and have them repair it and probably up date it while it is there. That leaves us buying a new a spindle, drag link and wheel half. That I hope is about $450.00 or so to get back on the track plus my labor @ .25 cents per hr. My labor has not inflated like everything else has. For a non Do It Yourself type racer it would be closer to $1500.00 to $2000.00 to get back racing.
Driving home trying to stay awake while Doug is snoring on the other side of the seat, dodging 18 wheelers because I am holding the speed down to 60 MPH because we don't have any more spare trailer tires and listening to my favorite chamber music on some local FM station I got to thinking about what kind of track would I prefer to race on. Did I like those big white loader tires or did I like a track with a berm to define the turns?
We started racing at Salem's famous Wonder Valley Speedway. That is the little 1/5 th mile dirt track located in the 4H fair grounds in Salem Indiana. The guy who ran the track was named Steve Smith. Steve worked on heavy equipment and also operated them. He had an old Army Surplus World War I road grader. I have never seen a piece of equipment that was that old and still worked. Come to think about it Steve was the only guy that could make it work. Steve loved getting on that old grader with a cooler full of beer beside him and farm his race track. Steve was old school and spent hours farming that little track and always had a beautiful berm on the inside of his track marked with a lime stone marker line at the top of the berm. If you wanted to get on Steve's bad side just put a wheel or two on his berm. We spent a lot of time on his bad side.
Looking back I sure did like them berms. A good driver can use them to their advantage, aka the Swindell's at the Chili Bowl. The rest of us can use them sometimes, and very seldom would a berm do too much damage to a race car. Open wheel cars and Loader tires just don't work too good together. Them tires seem more like big old Packmen's, they just suck them open wheels right into them and don't let go.
My poll is as a racer or a race fan would you rather race on or watch a race with the turns marked with Berms or with Loader tires?
Honest Dad himself
