seeming hypocrisies

I ride bicycles to get where I'm going more often than not. I do so for a variety of reasons, but one perceived reason runs counter to a long-time interest of mine. On a semi-related-for-the-purposes-of-this-blog-entry note, I've long said that we are defined by our apparent double-standards and how we deal with them.

I have enjoyed watching auto racing since I could understand the concept, about the time I entered second grade (if not before). A not-so-brief list of tracks I've visited after the jump.



When I was in the 8-11 age range, we lived in Staunton, Virginia. There is a track in nearby Waynesboro called East Side Speedway, and my father took me there on a regular basis when the "roundy-pounders" were in season. Like many other folks (although not as many of my friends at the time), I was a Richard Petty fan. I liked the driving I saw from a number of the local guys at the weekly dirt-track events, too. My heroes were race car drivers, not football or basketball players. Race car drivers wore seat belts. I was not willing to NOT wear seat belts...

By this time, my father's father, also a racing fan, started taking me to Langley Speedway when I was visiting them on a race day.

When we moved to Louisville in 1972, we found that there was a popular track here, the much-missed Fairgrounds Motor Speedway (closed at the end of the 1980 or 1981 season, so no web site).

When I was in high school, I nearly got a chance to be on a pit crew for a team entered in a Winston Cup (then the premier NASCAR division) race, but the car, owned by someone my father knew, was withdrawn from competition due to lack of funding. A few months later, my grandfather took me with him to the Southern 500 at Darlington South Carolina. I didn't get to meet any of the drivers, but a walk through the pit area after the race netted me a spark plug souvenir that I carried with me for some years afterward. 

A year or two later, I became friends with a group of guys who enjoyed watching the races, and we started going to the then-newly-paved Charlestown Speedway (no longer there) and the older Sportsdrome Speedway. It was during those years that I finally figured out that Louisville was not such a rotten place to live, as there were something like nine oval tracks within a two-hour drive. I heard of, but never got to visit, places like Queen City Speedway, a half-mile track in the Cincinnati area and Brownstown Speedway, although the latter is still open and has some special events this coming weekend. I learned of Salem Speedway, but didn't attend any events there until the late 1980s.

Over the years, I've also enjoyed racing held at Bluegrass Speedway near Bardstown, Kentucky Motor Speedway in Whitesville, and Kentucky Speedway up I-71 from Louisville, near Sparta. There are several more (and more storied) tracks in the Indianapolis area, as well, although I've not visited any of them. Nor have I visited the various tracks in eastern Kentucky (Corbin Speedway, Lake Cumberland Speedway, and probably others).

At one time, I wanted to own and drive a race car. That is one very expensive dream to bring to fruition, and it has never happened for me. There was a cheap race car (well, relatively speaking) on offer as a raffle recently, and it didn't take me long to decide not to buy any tickets. A race car is well-described as a bottomless hole in the garage floor into which one pours money by the bucketful.