Banger Racing

The Raceway turned out to be hidden in the middle of an abandoned industrial area, behind a power plant. I would never have found it on my own, nor dared to venture down the uninviting road if I had stumbled across it. It was rundown and remote, like driving into a '70s horror flick. Zombies or violent street gangs were bound to appear from behind every pile of tires.

We drove in at a crawl. The road itself was nothing more than a dirt track, bordered by disintegrating warehouses and long crumbling factory spaces, red brick with corrugated metal roofs bleeding rust. Hard-packed dirt worn down to gravel-filled ruts seemed designed to either warm you up for the races or facilitate an ambush, with muddy potholes large enough to swallow a car or at least break an axle and bend the frame should you choose your path unwisely.

Grateful to be in a rental, I followed my buddy as he drove up the road, meandering from side to side to avoid the pondments. Signs had been hand lettered on the brick in white paint, "Drivers -- Teams: Do Take Your Tyres and Wheels."

The entrance fee was five pounds, about nine dollars, which seemed steep considering the setting and even more so when I got to the track and discovered that there were no bleachers or even much of anywhere for people to sit except on the rocky dirt path around the track. Wise with prior experience, my friend had brought a couple of folding chairs, which we carried in with us.

Race fans were forced to walk to the track from the gate, on more of the same rutted dirt road as the parking lot and driveway. There were more huge mud puddles, along with scattered pieces of unidentifiable auto parts. We passed through the race teams' pit area, where men and teenage boys in oil-stained coveralls with grimy faces and black hands gathered around their cars.

Some of the men had a factory logo on the front of their coveralls from the now-defunct company that used to own the factory where I was currently consulting. They were former employees, victims of an economic downturn and the mass layoffs that came with it. I hoped that when they realized I was a foreigner, they didn't make a connection to their old jobs. After all, I’d come there, a foreigner, to work at the factory under the new management, the management that had 'right sized' their jobs not so long ago. These men could tell an American at the turn of an athletic shoe, I was sure of it.

The drivers and their teams appeared hostile. They were hard, angry men, scowling at us as we passed. I tried not to look any of them in the face, focusing instead on the cars with their gaudy hand-painted stripes and the slogans in big bright letters; Techno Burn, Dodgy, Banjo, The Wrecking Crew. There were women’s names, though those were in much smaller script and were usually located on a rear fender panel.

A fat guy in a white jumpsuit clambering out of an empty windshield with a wrench in his hand. He climbed over the hood and stood in front of his car, looking at us as we went by. His glare was heavy and dark, underlined in grease. It clearly said "you're not welcome here."

We kept moving around the track to the back of turn three, well away from the pit area, towards the spot where we had arranged to meet up with a group of our fellow Americans. I could feel angry eyes following us the whole way, but we managed not to cause a riot with our presence and found the area where we intended to sit.

Tiny chairs, the kind you might find in an elementary school classroom, were scattered in the verge outside the track. The were rusting and dirty, bent, thrown into the narrow, trash filled strip between the fences that circled the racecourse. We set up our folding chairs as close to the outer fence as we could, which put us within feet of the track. We could see the entire raceway.

The track itself was a small oval depressed into the ground by a few feet, barely an eighth of a mile in circumference and less than 50 feet wide. Screeching techno blasted from tinny PA megaphones mounted around raceway. Cars howled and backfired as they warmed up.

"Yeah, you’d never be able to get this close in the States," was my friend's shouted response when I remarked on the apparent lack of concern for viewer safety. This thought was reinforced in the first lap of the first race, when an early heat banger crashed and flipped into the rail right in front of us. There was a tremendous bang and we ducked for cover. Small bits of rubber and metal zinged through the fence, over our heads.

I suddenly realized the reason for the child sized seats: to keep our bodies low behind the fences and the mound of dirt that separated us from the track and its flying debris.

A race official in a yellow coat with fluorescent tape on it ran over to the crash, fire extinguisher in hand. I observed to my friend that the coat looked suspiciously similar to the ones used by our employer's fire department. He pretended not to hear me.

"Woo, good one ... look, he's pinching off the fuel line," my friend said, pointing. The official was just in time, as the fuel line had split and was running gas all over the track. He operated the fire extinguisher with one hand, firing short bursts in to the still growing pool of gasoline while he pinched off the leaking fuel line with his other hand. The shaken driver climbed out from under his car, unhurt. When he got to his feet, he kicked the door of the car. He said, "Bloody crap, it's the bone yard for you."

While men with shovels and brooms cleaned up the mess on the track, I looked around at the crowd. They were an amazingly dirty assortment of working-class families. Drivers looked no dirtier than the friends and family they joined on the sidelines after each heat. People were filthy, covered in the racecars oily exhaust, freckled with bits of carbon, but it was more than that -- their hair was lank and greasy, their clothes were stained and worn. They looked comfortable with their condition, as if such filth was a normal state.

There were scabby-kneed boys playing in the rubbish piles of construction material mounded up next to the factory buildings. They were using sheets of splintered plywood as sleds to ride down the piles of trash. No adult chided them for this or for running in and out of the gutted buildings. Most of boys were wearing soccer gear, which consisted of Umbro shorts, leather sneakers with huge lolling tongues and a down-filled nylon coat flapping open to expose their team jerseys. Their families stood drinking tea and watching the races while the boys played behind them.

Some cars had been allowed to drive up close to the track and there were tailgate cookouts going on. Despite the relatively nice weather, (it wasn't raining) heavy waterproof winter coats and leather boots were the uniform of the day.

A sour looking teenage girl in dirty white parka with a fur-lined hood was walking around the track with her boyfriend. They ran into a group of boys that began to joke and spar with him. Suddenly marginalized, the girl leaned against a parked car and lit a cigarette. One of the boys had a rugby ball and the boyfriend began to toss the ball back and forth with his friends.

The girl crossed her arms and smoked. Her foot tapped. She looked disgusted. Every few minutes she would say, "Come on, then!" in a whiny voice.

Each time, her boyfriend would laugh and wave his hand at her. He said, "Half a sec, I'm with me mates."

A few feet down from us, a man sat with a boy at the edge of the track. They were having a kind of arm wrestle, with the man twisting the boy's fingers and wrist backwards until he turned a pirouette. The boy was laughing as he shouted, "Ow ow, stop!" and it seemed to be a family affair, so I was inclined to stay out of it. I buried my nose in the program.

I was not encouraged by a Very Important Notice in bold print, calling for an end to Violent, Threatening or Abusive Behavior on race day.

The races were sponsored by the Chuck Wagon, a food stand on wheels serving burgers, hot dogs, drinks and sweets. Despite my disparaging comments about the name, which is the name of a dog food in the US, I was assured that the food was edible. At the interval, I braved the long line and tried a hot dog with cheese.

Given that the temperature felt to have dropped forty degrees once the cloud cover moved in, I also went for a hot tea. I was thinking that, given the country I was in, tea was probably a safer choice than coffee, However, after I watched the grill man make my drink with the same tea bag he used for the previous customer, I could only imagine what kind of horrors swam in the coffee urn.

Before the end of the Mini Stox final, which was the first race after the break, my rumbling gut made me aware of what an unfortunate decision a hot dog from a mobile stand could be. I followed up with a Mars bar in an attempt to placate my violated stomach and it seemed somewhat mollified. I managed to sit through to the finals.

[Continue to Banger Racing, Part 3]