Yahoo Autos Memories of Brock
Brock Yates is gone. It would be a lie to say that I knew him. I ran One Lap of America twice, in 2005 and then again in 2006, so I had the chance to hear him speak a few times. He also did me a hell of a favor once, as I'll recount below. That's not enough for me to say that I knew Yates, the man. But Yates, the writer? That's someone I know very well.
I was perhaps six years old when I started reading Car and Driver. Obviously some of it was over my head, but even as a child I could see that, like the Beatles, the various long-serving C/D editors each brought unique qualities to the tables. David E. Davis, Jr. was the aspiring aristocrat who saw cars as an integral part of la dolce vita. Gordon Baxter was the folksy storyteller; Setright was the erudite intellectual. Sherman was (and still is) the uncompromising engineer, Bedard was the earnest engineer-turned-racer.
And Brock Yates? He was something else entirely-a Renaissance man of automotive journalism. He could quote from great literature, but he could also indulge in juvenile antics. Sometimes he could do both at the same time. Most importantly, he was a rebel, one given a cause by the despised "double-nickel" speed limit. He railed against it in print, which would have been enough for anybody else, but then he decided to do something.
That "something" became the linchpin of his fame, his notoriety, and his success. Much of what you will read today will be about the Cannonball Run, as an event, as a movie, as an idea, as a legacy. It's important to understand, however, that it wasn't the actual Cannonball that turned the automotive world on its head. The underground history of American street racing contains a thousand stories of records set on newly opened outerbelts, empty freeways, and remote roads. The Cannonball was simply a street-racer stunt writ large across the fruited plains.
Yates, center, with his Dodge Challenger and the cast of misfits from the last "original" Cannonball Run, in 1979.
No, it was Brock's writing that made the Cannonball Run epic. He put you right there in the driver's seat with him and Dan Gurney, then he made you feel like you were part of the action. He created a mythology from it. I was maybe eight years old when I first read Yates on the subject, but I felt like I was part of a secret society, one devoted to lampooning Ralph Nader and the "Safety Nazis." Brock could pull you in, convince you that of course the most reasonable way to rage against the machine in 1978 was to plop a brand-new Escort on the dashboard of your Jaguar XJ-S and rip from sea to shining sea.
Yates told you that the speed limits were bad, and then he broke them in public, and then he wrote about it. He was bold, daring, cool and collected. Among all the C/D editors, he was most responsible for creating that stereotypical idea of the elite driver, that man from the cognoscenti who wore Serengetis and fearlessly traveled at 85 mph (or more) guarded only by his radar detector and his keen sense of awareness. While the other guys on the masthead were racing Vegas or Pintos, he was roaring across the county in whatever the biggest, fastest car of the moment was.
I believed every word that he wrote, well into my late teens. When, at the age of eighteen, I acquired a car that could just brush the "100" mark on the speedometer going down a long hill on the Interstate, I imagined that I was Yates behind the wheel of a brand-new BMW 750iL or Lexus LS400. Long after the Cannonball closed its doors and the government grudgingly let go of its double nickels, Brock continued to fly the flag for skilled drivers and their right to damn the torpedoes while holding the throttle open to the stop.
It was a rare treat to open the magazine and see a Yates review. He could make a boring car interesting, but when he was given something like a big-block Mercedes sedan or a Lamborghini off-roader, he could write a review that simultaneously exalted the car and overshadowed it. "Expecting a squad of dropout draftees to field-service six Webers and a four-cam V-12," he once wrote, "would be like entrusting the Botswana Air Force with a space shuttle." Was there even a Botswana Air Force? Who cares? (If you care, then the answer is yes, there was, just barely.)
Yates wrote several books of genuine merit in an era where the typical "autowriter book" was a straight-to-the-public-library-and-nowhere-else large-format affair with nothing but manufacturer-provided stock photos and brief descriptive paragraphs. He wrote about men and dreams much more often than he wrote about camshafts or wheel bearings, and he wrote for the rebel in all of us, that driver who sees a speed limit sign and whose first thought is to calculate the amount by which it might be safely flouted.
"Banned?" Yates asked. Then he laughed. "Banned? Why would I ban you? This is the Cannonball."
Ten years ago, during my second One Lap of America, I had the not-so-brilliant idea to do a series of high-speed donuts in my Mercedes E300 turbodiesel while hanging out of the driver's door. Needless to say, I was thrown from the car during the second donut, at which point I had to run after it before it crashed into a line of parked cars. Having managed to hop back behind the wheel, I then proceeded to do more donuts, with my defiant fist raised out of the open window. This wouldn't have been so bad by Cannonball standards had I not done it in the rain, at Road America, on a section of asphalt that, unbeknownst to me, had just been laid the afternoon before.
I was unceremoniously ejected from Road America and from One Lap. Brock's son, Brock Yates, Jr., told me in no uncertain terms that I was done for the year, maybe for good. I was despondent. One of the "Lap Dogs," the veterans of the event, pulled me aside right before I exited the facility. "Go see Senior," he said, winking.
The next morning, I found Brock Yates, Sr., my childhood idol, standing under a tent at the Tire Rack in South Bend, looking generally annoyed at the heat and the noise and everything else. "Brock," I said, "I messed up, with that donut thing. Am I banned from One Lap?" He looked at me critically for a moment. Until right then, I hadn't really considered what an imposing human being he was, even in his sixties.
"Banned?" he repeated. Then he laughed. "Banned? Why would I ban you? This is the Cannonball." He smiled. Shook my hand. I walked away confident that my six-year-old self was right. Brock Yates was one cool dude. I still feel that way. And though the man is gone, his writing is still out there, waiting for you the same way it was waiting for me, a secret society requiring only your readership and your rebellion. Join us; you won't be disappointed.
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