Drag Racing Online - Off the Track

ROAD TRIPS, HEAD TRIPS, AND OTHER
CAR-CRAZED WRITINGS

Edited by Jean Lindamood Jennings.
Published by The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

Reviewed by Kay Burk

roadtrips.jpg (53519 bytes) Jean Lindamood Jennings, deputy editor of Automobile Magazine, has selected a veritable smorgasbord of car related writings, some truth, some fiction, even a couple of poems thrown into the mix. If you can’t find something you like among the 35 entries, then there is just no pleasing you. I mean, just look at that cover! How could this not be good?

Let me tell you right up front that there is nothing about drag racing per se but Hunter S. Thompson’s street race in his white Cadillac convertible down the strip in Las Vegas against the Okies, with his Samoan attorney trying to sell heroin to the…. Well, I don’t want to ruin it for you.

Jean Lindamood Jennings began her career with cars as a taxi driver in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She then moved to The Chrysler Proving Ground, becoming a mechanic in the Impact Lab, where they crashed cars into walls. She was later hired to write for Car and Driver magazine and then moved on to Automobile Magazine. Her preface sets the tone for the book when she states her personal motto, "If you have a shitty time, nobody cares and you’re still having a shitty time. So you might as well have a good time." Let the good times roll.

I never appreciated European-style road racing until I read Dan Gerber’s "Out of Control!" We all know that actually driving a race car is best, but after reading this, I think that a well-written article may beat out television race coverage for second place. This article puts you in the driver’s seat.

Denise McCluggage’s profile of Juan Manuel Fangio shows the fragility of a small human being against a large metal object and the laws of physics. Perhaps Americans can expand their understanding of racing that isn’t done on a straight quarter-mile or a closed circle track. All automobile racing is dangerous, scary stuff.

And speaking of Americans and "other" kinds of racing…Bob Ottum takes us to Le Mans in 1981 when Cale Yarborough tried to race a Chevy Camaro(!!) in the Twenty-four Hour marathon. He was doing pretty well, too, until the brakes went away. "So I just aimed her toward the guardrail and slammed her in," he explained. The culture shock of North Carolina meets France is almost better than the race descriptions.

Cover of 1998 Edition

Ernest Hemingway wrote a satire on car one-upsmanship back in the thirties. Hemingway, funny. Who knew he had a sense of humor. He was always going to wars and traveling around Africa shooting things (and even himself eventually). But he is funny and right on the money. It seems like some things relating to cars have been there right from the beginning. Wonder what a Delusion-Demountable or Complex Collapsible is today?

There are writings by several authors whose names you will recognize—John Steinbeck, S.J. Perelman, P.J. O’Rourke, Jack Kerouac, Calvin Trillin, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Barry—and writings by authors whose names you may not recognize. But they all love cars and they all write well. They will make you laugh, they will make you think, and you just might learn something, too.

Published back in 1996, this book may take some looking around to find. It’s worth the effort.