Mood:
incredulousNow Playing: MTX: Love Is Dead
Topic: Auto Racing
To a large extent, my life has been in limbo since we stopped racing. I've written before - here and elsewhere - that stopping racing cold turkey has been a difficult adjustment for me. Figuring out a way to reinvent myself has been a major struggle. I recently got some news that has the potential to clarify things considerably.
I've learned that a race track south of Tulsa called Creek County Speedway is planning on having a limited non-wing sprint car class in 2007. Outside of mini-sprints, there hasn't been any weekly non-wing open wheel class in the state of Oklahoma in the five years since I retired. The fact that a limited, relatively affordable class is apparently being started is not something I expected to happen. I figured my only realistic choice was between starting over from scratch with an IMCA Modified or staying out of racing altogether.
I'm still a little bit in shock, but I know I'm going to have to give this a shot. Even though the rules package sounds good, it's still going to be expensive to put a car together (racing is never not expensive). There's no guarantee that they'll get enough cars to keep the class going all year. My dad won't be physically able to help much. There are some significant technical differences between sprint cars and our old supermodified - coping with those differences will be an additional challenge. But even with all the potential pitfalls, I can't turn my back on this opportunity. So much of racing revolves around practicality and the specific details of the rules packages. Slight differences in the wording of the rules can make the difference between having to spend $3000 vs. $15,000 vs. $30,000 on a motor to be competitive. Truly limited non-wing sprint car classes are very uncommon, nationwide. I was very fortunate to have the chance to participate in the old 100" wheelbase open wheel limited supermodified class for 11+ years, and when it ended I figured my time in racing probably went with it.
Racing helps me understand my life, if that makes any sense at all. There's going to be a huge amount of work involved in getting our old sprint chassis assembled - we've done some of the work, but we bought it as a bare chassis and there's still a ton of stuff left to be done. Unless we buy a lot of new lightweight parts, the car will probably be at somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of weight. There may even be some issues we haven't anticipated, since we never ran a sprint chassis before. But the idea of strapping into a car and dropping the throttle and pitching that sucker sideways - it's really difficult to explain to someone who's never had that feeling. Let's just say that there's now there's an urgency to getting the thing rolling that didn't exist a few weeks ago. 
