Yahoo Autos Made in the Shade
From the November 1992 issue of Road & Track
Well, I should have known better. I took off work (if you call this work) two days early to go to the Chicago Historic Races at Elkhart Lake with my Lotus Seven this year so I could register early, find a choice spot in the paddock and begin the weekend relaxed and refreshed.
There were a few big transporter rigs already in place on Wednesday afternoon when I arrived, and quite a few large open-sided tents of the Medieval jousting tournament variety, so I steered well clear of those. Choosing a patch of open field I judged to be about 50 yards from all tents and trucks, I rolled the Lotus off my third-hand homemade water-pipe-and-scrap-iron trailer (with 3-bolt Citroen hubs!), unhitched the trailer and carried my toolbox to the back of the trailer ramp.
As I was getting out my deluxe Kmart blue-plastic sports canopy, a kid came riding up on an official ATV and said, "You can't park here."
"Oh?" says I.
He pointed to a tent at the end of my pit row. "The people who rented that tent might want to park their transporter truck here, or they might have guests who need to park."
I gazed about the vast, empty paddock area and said, "Where are all these people who want to park here? I mean, I'm here and they aren't."
"I'm sorry but you have to move," he said. "They've paid for this place."
I lifted my hat and scratched my head in my best Will Rogers imitation and said, "Well, what about that big empty area over there?"
"That area's reserved too," he said.
"For whom?"
"I think some transporters are going to park there."
I pointed to my old rusty trailer. "This is a transporter," I said.
The poor kid, who was trying his best to be polite and patient, just looked at me as if I were out of my mind. I might as well have pointed to a steaming heap of horse dung and said, "That there, my boy, is a solid mountain of pure gold." He knew a transporter when he saw one.
Finally I just said, "Well, where can I park?"
"I think there are still some spots down on the lower part of the hill, near Corner 14."
So I hooked up my trailer, put my toolbox and tarp away and moved. But not down to the lower 40. I wanted to be near the gas pumps and a bratwurst stand. I found a large empty area in the upper pits, so far from the nearest tent or transporter that no one could object. Wrong. I was asked to load up and move again. This time by an adult official who explained that all tent renters had been promised parking on both sides of their tents equal to the square footage of the tent.
If I had read the fine print on the registration form, of course, I would have known all this, but I never do. I have a condition that renders me partially blind in the presence of large additional rental fees, especially when I've already paid $250 to enter a race.
"Just show me where you want me," I said.
So he did. A nice spot of grass next to the fuel pumps, along a fence, near an electrical hookup. Perfect.
Later that afternoon a man in a huge motorhome politely asked if I could trade paddock spots with him so he could park his motorhome next to the electrical hookup and his other friends' motorhomes.
No problem. This move involved a simple roll down the hill to a nice grassy spot between two trailers with large canopies. Not an official parking spot, apparently, but done with the gracious permission of both teams.
Home at last, and the neighbors couldn't have been more friendly. They invited me to share their shade, tools, food and anything else I needed. I felt like a Kurdish refugee who'd been taken in by the world's nicest family of cheerful Americans.
Up to this point, I'd been a one- man race team because Barb-and everyone else I knew-had a real job and had to work through Friday. But on Saturday morning she showed up with a raft of our friends and weekend guests. When Barb finally found my spot in the paddock, she looked over the larger scene, shook her head ruefully and said, "We look so poor and little. An old trailer and a dented blue Chevy van. The Lotus looks nice, but everything else is kind of worn-out and tired..."
I turned and regarded our little corner of the universe. She was right. By comparison with the surrounding elegance, we looked like Dogpatch Racing Team. Perhaps revenuers would come and search our digs for a hidden still. Perhaps I could have a few teeth pulled and learn to play banjo, like the kid in Deliverance. We lacked nothing but a mule tied to the rear bumper of the van, some discarded washing machines and a few sleeping coon hounds to complete the picture. A racing team that only James Dickey could fully comprehend.
I had two minds (which is better than the usual none) about this picture.
First, a slightly tongue-in-cheek sense of misguided pride in the Dogpatch Effect.
As an old club racer, I still have a vestige of that ancient idea that the racing car is the only part of the equipe that really matters. When I first started racing sports cars, it seemed that virtually everyone but the factory teams (British Leyland, Datsun, etc.) had to race on a shoestring budget, some without shoes. So excessive attention to trailers, motorhomes and tow vehicles was seen as a distraction from the matter-at-hand, which was trying to win. A really good trailer represented a lost opportunity to own a spare engine or close-ratio gearbox. Private teams with beautifully painted, matching vans and trailers were almost always slow, just like guys with excessive rollcage structure. A visible misplacement of priorities.
I am also just old enough to recall that romantic era where world champion drivers sometimes ended up driving their D-Jags, Astons, Vanwalls, Lotus 11s or Formula 1 Ferraris from little borrowed garages in the villages outside Le Mans or Spa, the cars themselves delivered in vehicles that were little better than converted bread vans. The funky, gifted-eccentric days of professional sport when Grand Prix cars were painted their national colors and drivers awoke on race day in old stone hostels rather than sleek motorhomes with dark-tinted windows. And club racers awoke in pup tents, smelling like wood smoke and that most specific of all racing scents, spilled beer on stale Nomex.
Looking about the paddock at Elkhart Lake, it occurred to me that scores of amateur vintage racers now showed up with semitrailers, living quarters, tents and parts trucks in a support effort that would have absolutely dwarfed the Ferrari or Lotus teams when I saw my first Grand Prix in Spain in 1971.
There was something slightly odd about a polished stainless-steel 40-foot semitrailer with aerodynamic tractor, pulling up and disgorging a couple of Formula Juniors and an old Bugeye. Kind of like using an ICBM to deliver an anchovy pizza, without onions. Or having a C-5A Galaxy transport plane lower its cargo ramp and drop off the Energizer rabbit.
Was it symptomatic of something going slightly out of kilter? Or was it just that the stability of vintage-racing rules had finally allowed the drivers to whip their cars into a state of relative perfection, so the next obvious step was to make the paddock more hospitable and civilized?
A little of each, I suspect, but more of the latter. People who spend a lot of time racing, on the road from one track to the next, gradually get tired of wood smoke and pup tents. They begin to crave clean clothes, hot showers, real chairs, cold drinks and a place in the shade. Just like pioneers: Once the fields are cleared and the Comanches stop shooting those flaming arrows at your cabin, you can sit down with the Sears catalog and order a new enameled cookstove, some curtains and a chandelier from Paris, France.
Continually improving one's surroundings is an American tradition, not just for personal comfort, but also to make guests and friends feel welcome. Racing teams with tents and canopies, drink coolers and extra lawn chairs always seem more inviting and friendly than a sunbaked little encampment like our own. A shady canopy where one can have a beer or a glass of wine at the end of a race day is, let's face it, much more appealing than ordinary sunstroke.
So, having returned home from this vintage-racing weekend, I've decided to take action, galvanized by all this contrast. Our car is finally in nice shape, so there are no excuses left. A little civilizing of the paddock scene is in order, if not long overdue.
After years of towing my various cars on rickety open trailers with welds and wheel bearings that would strike fear into the heart of our insurance company, if it has a heart (a premise that fortunately remains untested), I've decided it's time to sit down, open that Sears catalog (or whatever) and up grade the team. Goodbye, Dogpatch.
The first step-if I can afford it this year-will be an enclosed trailer. An 18- or 20-footer with a beaver-tail, or at least a drop-gate. It would be nice to have a place to store the car indoors at the track overnight and to protect the clean, polished race car from rain and road grime on the highway. Or to store tires, tools, paper towels, gas cans and battery chargers without having to unload after every race. A place to change into your driver's suit without causing women and children to flee the track screaming, like terrorized citizens in a cheap Japanese monster film.
When I get this trailer, I'm going to order a roll-out awning to mount on the side. Shade, and a place to set out a few lawn chairs. No more chintzy canopy where the wind lifts the tarp and the center pole falls on the hood of your car, trapping the whole team like a school of cod in a net of blue vinyl and nylon string.
All of this will weigh more than my old open trailer, of course, so I may have to upgrade my tow vehicle next year. The 100,000-mile Chevy 250-cu.-in. six just might get traded in on something with eight pistons about the size of depth-charge canisters.
That's the plan, at least. Unless I weaken at the last minute and, for the 20th year in a row, decide to wring one more year out of the old trailer and spend all my money on Carillo rods and Bosworth pistons. Or a good pair of coon hounds and a banjo.
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