SUPER CHEVY?
MORE LIKE SEDATE CHEVY

5/5/05

Jeff Burk Photo

t was recently decided at a major meeting of DRO's stockholders that yours truly was a deadbeat and that I ought to get off my lazy ass and make it out to more drag races. You go to maybe five or six a year, and all of a sudden, you're an expert ... c'mon. What's with that? Martin with his stoned tablets coming down from the mountain to lecture us mere mortals.

I countered with a swift decisive intellectual thrust. "Golly, Phil Burgess doesn't even go to that many."

"No whine-os, Martin-o! Hit the bricks. You are to be at the Super Chevy show this coming May 1st at Pomona Raceway. You know International Workers Day, you commie crumbsucker."

Shit. May 1st. Wouldn't you know it. Now I'm NOT gonna find out if Bobby Simone dies on NYPD Blue or if Ernest T. Bass has to pay for all those broken windows on The Andy Griffith Show.

So I went ...

Pal Darr Hawthorne, not to mention DRO major league staffer, came by and picked up this nattering nabob of negativism and we shuffled off to L.A.'s answer to Mayberry, the sleepy San Gabriel Valley. The city closest to our freeway exit en route to Pomona is San Dimas. This is a weird place unlike any city in L.A. County. Apparently, the chief builders and city fathers who conspired on this shipwreck had been in the jimson weed for a week or so before they built it. Ninety-percent of the business section is wooden, both in construction and personality. Even the street signs are done in Wells Fargo-type lettering. Leaving aside the Mexican food, the restaurants are bad enough that Restaurant Magazine recently air-lifted some chefs into town dressed as drugstore cowboys. San Dimas compared to its desired image looked like Roy Rogers posing next to "Billy the Kid," "Nelly-Belle" next to "Trigger." I kept thinking in terms of 'Please Lucifer, don't let this be a harbinger of things to come at the drags.' Death to all planned communities.

It, for the most part, wasn't.

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But enough, Pomona's different. It has most of the signs of classic American culture. A great dragstrip, street gangs, golf courses, porn stores, and meth labs.

When Darr and I got to the track, we were both (I think) surprised at how small Pomona appeared when all those corporate 18-wheel tractor/hospitality bus/race car compounds are gone. Nothing higher than one story. Everything seemed reduced. Goddamn, the San Gabriel mountains aren't a rumor. Pomona as a locale for a Super Chevy would never replace the set of "Lost" for an isolated location shot, but then again it certainly wasn't the bustling metropolis that one would find at an NHRA national event. Which is both a good thing and kind of a bad thing.

The first guy we ran into was Roger Gustin, a favorite of the DRO staff and many others. The guy has fantastic recall and regaled us on stories of how his father, a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Ohio farmer, took to his career decision to become a drag racer. Gustin, the first racer ever to license in a jet Funny Car. Gustin finally got him to go out to Dragway 42 in West Salem where he was running a jet dragster. His plans to impress his dad with a big run backfired as he shot past the finish line and went into the sandtrap, causing his dad to exit the plant as expeditiously possible. But I digress.