The Long Goodbye

11/7/03

his is it. El finito. The final installment of little Chrissie's adventures on the drag racing boards. Boards, of course, meaning the grandstand wood and not, you know, like corporate board. Can you imagine that, me on corporate drag racing boards? Hell, I'd triple the profits in one year's time. Check this out.

"Gentleman," C. Bley intones to the suits gathered around the polished oaken rectangular boardroom table. "There are going to be some changes made this season and it chiefly involves our spectators. Starting with this season's Winternationals, we will be instituting a policy where free beer will be given away between the hours of noon and two in the afternoon every day of the event. The announcer will tell the fans at high noon, "the drinking lamp is lit," and we'll let them charge to the kiosks. Of course, anybody who takes advantage of our good nature, i.e., gets overly loud and obnoxious or violent, will be greeted by the bulls with the truncheons and rendered null and void. And... well, you get the idea. Actually, that might not work given frivolous lawsuits and all that crap. Awww, forget it, I'm just spacing out.

Anyway, this 40th year of my pro spectator-hood has produced a lot of memories in the seats, some of which I've related to you, and others where I just can't, you know, legality and all that miserable schnuss. And to be perfectly frank, there are readers who do not share my penchant for the bizarre, so to write about it might just shut them off and run them over to Bobby Bennett's campsite or worse yet, the two associations' Ouija boards. There are people like that in this world.

So, one final take on this subject, and we'll move on. This misadventure involves leaving the races rather than sitting in the seats and I find it highly apropos given the status of this

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column. My all-time record for time spent leaving an event was set at Seattle International Raceway (SIR) during the first running of NHRA's then Northwest Nationals in 1988.

Seattle had and has been the Northwest's premier dragstrip since the sport began. It's hard to attribute a "heyday" for the place, but certainly the years that Bill Doner and the late Steve Evans had it under their Raceway Parks banner would qualify. Shows like their annual '64 Funny Car show and the NHRA points races filled the stands to the spillover point between (very) roughly 1975 through 1982 or 1983. And "spillover" is putting it kindly. Sometimes the shows got a little out of hand, and the cops got in overtime cleaning up the riff-raff, as did the ground crews who push-broomed broken glass and unconscious drunks into the adjoining pine forest.