Discover Some "Mud Roots" Racing!
The car caught my attention
right away, and not because it was pink; that’s hardly a fringe color in
race-car art, anymore. What stood out were the Mylar balloons tied to the
doorposts and fluttering above the racer. It was the driver’s 16th
birthday, and her race car was decorated to help her celebrate.
The celebration was taking
place at the Kingsdale Volunteer Fire Company Motorsports
Arena, a mud bog facility with a (more-or-less) flat oval track around the mud
pit. The oval was hosting a monthly session of “full-contact” junk car racing.
Several hundred other race fans were sitting along small hills to watch the Junkers
race and bang on each other. (Also on the program were lawn-mower races.)
Birthday Girl didn’t fare so
well, perhaps because she’d watched too many NASCAR races and was used to the
predictability-bordering-on-perfection available to Cup stars at the tracks
they run. This particular Saturday at Kingsdale was
different; they’d run the mud bogs the previous weekend, and turns 3&4 were
still very wet. The first car that had ventured into 3&4 in the “fast
groove” in practice had come to an immediate gloopy halt, and by the time the
track’s “wrecker” (a front-end loader) finished dragging it out, that driver’s
day was done.
Nobody seemed particularly
disturbed by the water hazard. Racers just hugged the very narrow dry lane at
the bottom of the track or took a loooong detour
around the outside. The trouble with the former approach was that parts of the
infield/mud pit were higher than the surrounding track, and if you hit one of
those sections, you might roll your racer . . . like Birthday Girl did.
Oh, and I need to mention,
too, that her boyfriend was riding shotgun in the race car. He crawled out the
back window first. The car was rolled back over onto its wheels, and after a
little repair work, got back into the racing, at least for a while.
I don’t remember Birthday
Girl’s name, nor those of any other competitors, and I can’t tell you who won.
I don’t have a t-shirt or cap for a Kingsdale driver
or the track itself. But I can say that I remember more about that race than I
do about the last Cup race I saw, because, frankly, it was more fun.
Here’s a shot from the
“full-contact” races at Arcadia Volunteer
Fire Company. Kingsdale’s races were a lot like these.
Part of that’s just me: I
like minor league baseball, and the last concert I attended was in a converted
small-town church in front of an audience of about 40. I really want to see
Hanover’s Black Rose Rollers Roller Derby team.
I’m not criticizing the
“spectacle” that surrounds big-time NASCAR racing; it’s not my thing, but if
other people like it, why should I complain? It’s just that I like racing
itself as entertainment, and all the glitter covering NASCAR doesn’t make it more
entertaining for me. Mylar balloons on Birthday Girl’s Junker-racer score
higher on my entertainment chart than Jumbotrons or miscellaneous country
singers tackling the National Anthem.
I’ve banged the drum of my
solutions to NASCAR’s issues often enough that I don’t need to fire all those
shots again, but I’ll say this… there’s a middle ground between Daytona and Kingsdale that might make NASCAR more entertaining.
Unfortunately, the charter system of ownership may have taken away the last
opportunity to move in that direction again.
So I’ll just keep looking for
my brand of entertainment/excitement and keep track of Cup races via Jayski’s Twitter feeds while I’m doing something else.
Unfortunately, the Kingsdale option no longer exists:
the promoters and the fire company couldn’t come to an agreement on the lease
the year after my afternoon described above, and then the fire company went
bust. The Arcadia Fire Company down in Maryland used to run these races at a
much nicer facility, but now it seems they only do demo derbies. Maybe next
year I’ll get to the Pagoda Motorcycle Club’s junk car races up between Reading
and Pottstown. They’re the best-known and seem to have staying power.
Things get exciting at these
races. They’re also run on a budget: at Arcadia,
the guy with the
red flag also was the race announcer.
Of course, short-track racing
does just fine, too. When I get back to Lincoln Speedway next year, I’ll be
looking for another finish like the night Danny Dietrich and Brian Monteith swapped the lead five or six times in the last two
laps, or the time there were so many contenders on the last lap that the car I
thought had finished fourth actually won.
I can see that kind of
racing, buy a program, enjoy a pit beef sandwich, popcorn and a drink for less
than $30 total, too. That in itself is kind of exciting.
With two races to go in the
season and the Chase, I hope things end up with a lot of excitement, because
NASCAR needs something to go right, but while that may keep up my interest in
the sport, it’s probably not going to get me away from Lincoln (or Kingsdale, if another incarnation of that track appears).
From my standpoint, they are where my money is most likely to buy something
memorably entertaining.
(If you’re interested, there are videos of the Kingsdale races, as well as those from Pagoda Motorcycle
Club, on YouTube. Take a look.)
In the Kingsdale
videos, you'll notice that the cars are running clockwise, not
counter-clockwise, as is the case with NASCAR ovals.
This is because the junk cars
had no roll cages, only a piece of guardrail bolted onto the driver's door, and
the logic was that running clockwise was less likely to have a spinning car's
driver's side facing oncoming and the possibility of a hard impact at that
vulnerable spot. Thoughtful.
[Editorial comment: The video shown here is but one of many. Just put “Kingsdale races” into the Search option on YouTube and
you’ll find pages of them. Sure looks like a fun time to us!]