HOT ROD CHEVY TRACK DAY
Jack R. Nelson
Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson
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Hot Rod Track Day
So…you want a hot rod. Maybe Old-School, cobbled of scavenged parts; something that isn’t afraid of graveled parking lots. But the floorboards leak if you splash a puddle. Or an eight hundred horsepower garage queen that travels in a closed trailer to carpeted shows. But what about the active-obsessed? I want to drive my hot rod every day. Where and how, that’s the question.
My hot rod Nova is unusually agile, lets me dodge fools even more dangerous than myself. Yet, it’s docile enough for grocery shopping and family outings. But I have come down freeway off-ramps with too much steam and done the power-slide left turn through green lights. I’ve screeched around mountain roads where a spin could become a free fall. This is bad stupid.
Maybe I grew up in the wrong neighborhood when I was a kid in Long Beach. We were on a broad residential avenue with superb blacktop. In the early 60s, you can imagine....monster muscle cars raced past our house at two in the morning doing a hundred. In the days of 29¢ high octane leaded gas. And I could hear Lions Drag Strip in my bedroom window. Their motto was “Drive the Highways, Race at Lions” At least I am not a street-racing public menace. But after several near-misadventures, I resolved I should learn better driving habits.
I left the house at four a.m., drove up the San Diego Freeway, over the Sepulveda Pass to the Golden State Highway. Then a long ramble through mountains and desert on the Antelope Valley Freeway. This is the Mojave Desert; rattlesnake and Joshua tree country. Turn left at Edwards Air Force Base (where the first Space Shuttle flight landed), to Rosamond. Into Quick Stuff for a big nineteen ouncer of “No Wimps Caffeine-Plus Coffee”, across the street for McPancakes with McSausage, and to Alltime Racing Track Day at Willow Springs International Raceway, just below barren foothills. East of the raceway are rocky outcrops trenched and pierced by played-out silver mines. Viewed in Google Earth, it looks like Mars with paved roads.
Willow Springs offers at least six tracks. A banked oval, a kart track and a dirt oval. The Horsethief Mile is dangerous hairpins on the hillside, recommended for the most crazed...drifting school is up there, teaching the sporting art of driving sideways. The Streets of Willow is a squiggle of turns and short straights. I did Danny McKeever’s Performance Driving School there. Alltime Racing Track Day is on the Big Track, known as the "Fastest Track in the West". Nine turns in two and a half miles of rolling hills and flats.
Intriguing cars showed up for track day; a ‘67 Mercury Comet with NASCAR-style suspension, the sharky ‘72 Plymouth Satellite, a primitive Triumph TR4, Lotuses (Loti?), a supercharged Ford GT, and two race-prepared Cobra clones bellowing like WW II fighter planes. And my ride, a battered 1962 Chevy Nova, with a ZZ4 Chevy 355 hp motor, major frame modifications, Mustang II front suspension, manual rack & pinion steering, disc brakes, and most trick is the independent rear suspension; cloned Jaguar geometry. In racing trim without the back seat and the trunk empty, it weighs under 3100 pounds. Less than a Corvette of equal power.
Despite the lurid list of desirable machinery, the Compleat Novice doesn’t feel intimidated, not for equipment nor skills. Track Day is run what you brung. Many cars were late-model icons of globalization, styled in California, assembled in perhaps Tennessee with a Mexican wiring harness, sporting a foreign name and technology. Don’t want to flog your family sedan around a track? Does an Avis Charger try harder than a Hertz Mustang? (alternate text; Don’t tell the car rental agent what you’re going to do to that Mustang.)
The whole atmosphere is of collaboration rather than competition. At the 08:30 drivers' meeting we greeted a fellow celebrating his first day of racetrack driving on his 89th birthday because the Federal Aviation Administration had refused to renew his pilot’s license. I had expected myself to be the oldest driver. I told him he stole my glory.
Organizer Tim Herrin divides the twenty-some cars into two separate run groups. Fast...and Faster. I am among the slower of the Fast. There is much emphasis on safety, no aggressive passing, no passing on the corners, etc. Rather ominously however, the track workers insist windows must be open “...to make it easier to drag you out.”
Around nine o’clock we are flagged onto the track one at a time in quick succession. After several frustrating laps I Lost It In Turn Five and spun off the track...very embarrassing, as it raises a billowing great dust cloud visible from afar, and the corner workers flap their cheery yellow flags to make sure everybody knows of your kerfuffle, and then the whole parade slows so the safety truck guys can sweep gravel off the track...and a pit stop is obligatory anyway if you spin. I remembered spending much of the fourth grade standing in the corner of the classroom. At least the track day rules didn’t make me wear a traffic cone dunce cap.
Later in the day one youngster went off Turn Nine so hard that he had to remove the seats and carpets and blow the dust out with the air compressor. A bad spin in the desert can be the kiss of death for a modern car if the dust goes into everything, all the fussy electronics and climate control and yadayada. His dad was there with the Comet, brought in a huge trailer with tools and generator and the compressor. Before the end of the day the Comet's engine had come to grief; a graunched bearing. Their day was not too perfect.
So after my spin I came into the pits and asked an instructor to show me where to do what. He said, "Oh, yeah, I remember you from the Performance School. There was a handling problem with your car." I said, "Yeah, faulty equipment; it had a lousy driver." But I told him about the improved suspension and stiffened frame. I had discovered that just like me, the car was a rank amateur effort.
I bought this Nova on eBay with all the speedy gadgets already installed. But I had to get it "fully sorted", as the British motorheads say. This Nova is no longer the demure little commuter that Chevrolet gave us in 1962; now it rides like an old fashioned English sports car, makes a helluva racket inside and out, and demands concentration. You will not doze off at the wheel.