The Car

When I utter the words, "Yes, I have a race car," many people get grand visions of a clean sanitary workshop with a car that is equally sanitary. Those same people, usually knowing what a NASCAR looks like, start thinking of stickers and sponsor logos. They also start thinking that the car is meant to be raced at one of the local asphalt circle tracks. Upon viewing my "race car" people start wondering what type of race I plan to try and survive, much less win.

My family has some history of doing "circle track" racing. This is the type of racing with which most people are familiar. NASCAR, is in fact, "circle track" racing. Cars spend their time turning left and trying to turn left faster than the other cars that are turning left. At amateur levels this type of racing is frequently done on clay tracks. These clay tracks are given the moniker "dirt tracks." Dirt track racing is quite a bit of fun, it's exciting to watch, relatively inexpensive, and gives anyone who can afford the car and the entry fee the ability to race in front of a crowd every Friday and Saturday night.

When I entered college I had the ability to finally purchase a car of my own. While I could afford a cheap dirt track car, I had no place to put it. That meant no dedicated garage, no place to park a trailer for a car, the money and motivation existed but the logistics simply did not make sense. I had some experience with drag racing from high school and settled on attacking the drag strip. Drag racing rules allow drivers to run street cars, so I could park the car on the street and actually drive it from place to place without a trailer. For the uninitiated, drag racing is one of the earliest and simplest forms of racing. Two cars position themselves at the starting line and the one who crosses the finish line first wins. There are no turns, no bumps, no jumps, just two cars going down a straight line. There are some more subtleties and tricks to making all of this happen but generally, two cars go down a straight line.

The car I'm campaigning is far from the clandestine typical race cars of childhood dreams. To be specific, the car is a 1984 Mercury Capri RS-Turbo. That is the full designation. I pulled this car out of a field in Iowa and to be perfectly honest, have not done anything to clean up the exterior of the car since then.

To give a bit of a preview, this blog will detail the adventure of campaigning my car through the racing season. I will be back-blogging on the progress that has been made.