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Since I\u2019ve pretty much given up on cranking out content for paper magazines, I find myself wanting to enjoy the story in real time. I want to live the story, absorb all the sounds, sights and smells, and then write about it later. Events may not be recorded exactly as they happened but they record what happened to me. At least I imagine it happened to me. Memories are funny things; each of us views the world looking out from different eyes.<\/p>\n
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Still, websites are a visual medium and photos do make the page look better. They also attract readers. For the Vado races I brought along the little Canon S100, a higher-end point and shoot camera not much bigger than a cell phone. I thought I could get a few photos good enough to use for this story but the shutter lag was hard to plan for. I\u2019d press the release and a second later the camera would take the photo. In racing things move a long way in a second. Annoyingly, the auto focus kept locking on the barrier fence instead of the cars behind the fence. I have a bunch of really sharp shots of the fence<\/p>\n
My first attempts were a mess. The S100 needed the shutter sped up and to do that it needed a higher ISO setting. And then the auto focus had to be disabled in the menu. All these settings required scrolling through the various menu pages or pushing buttons and turning dials, which I had forgotten how to do. Switching the S100 from regular stabilization to panning stabilization took twenty-three keystrokes to accomplish. For the same task on the Canon 5D you just flip a switch.<\/p>\n
A man\u2019s got to know his camera and the seductive lure of the cell phone has caused my camera skills to atrophy. While I was staring down into the S100\u2019s tiny screen life was happening all around me. I turned off the camera, put it in my pocket and decided to watch the races.<\/p>\n
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The whole reason we were at the races in the first place was because of the Sylings. The Sylings are friends of ours who live in Alamogordo. They are forever going on fun outings then putting cheerful, Team Syling posts on Facebook. CT and I decided it would be a good thing to be more like Team Syling so we are making an effort to do fun things around New Mexico. The trip to Vado Speedway was CT\u2019s birthday present\/Team Syling adventure. I don\u2019t want you to get the idea I\u2019m not romantic; I also bought her a 12-gauge Mossberg pump shotgun.<\/p>\n
Vado Speedway is a fairly new track about 15 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. You can see it from Interstate 10. The track looks small but they claim it\u2019s 3\/8th of a mile. Maybe the outside is 3\/8 mile. It\u2019s a dirt track, like God intended us to race on, and the corners are banked. The straights are short but the track is wide enough to allow plenty of passing. There are two lines at Vado: the high line and the low line. Both have their advantages but late in the evening the low line became very bumpy at the apex of the corner. Cars were bouncing up on two wheels in the rough. Most of the fast guys stayed up high where it was smooth, only dropping down to block a rival. As the evening wore on cars started to use the outside wall as a contact point like a slot car dragging the rails.<\/p>\n
Stock car racing has changed a lot since the seemingly unlimited supply of Chevelles dried up. The night we went all the classes looked like Super Modified. There were no stock bodied cars. The lowest class cars are beat up sheet metal concoctions that look like something a child of three would draw when asked to draw a car. They resemble station wagons with large panels of metal aft to act as air dams. Think of the last outlaw sprint car race you went to with those giant billboard wings on top. It\u2019s the same idea. The front wheels ran exposed on some of the cars. I don\u2019t remember what they were named but in my day this class would be called the Sportsman class except for the homemade bodies.<\/p>\n
The next step up from the flapping, crashing station wagon class was more station wagons. For all I could tell it was the same class, maybe \u201cA\u201d to the previous \u201cB.\u201d This class would have been called Late Models when I was going to stock car races back in the days when the planet Mars could still support life. These cars looked like the ratty-class cars but were built much better. The sheet metal was straighter and it didn\u2019t flap around or fall off. The paint jobs and lettering were nicer and they crashed less. Besides being uglier than old style stock cars the Late Models’ engines sounded crisper and revved faster than the other, looser station wagons.<\/p>\n
The top-tier division, known to me as Super Modifieds, were really nice cars. You could tell the owners had a ton of money in them, probably as much or more than a NASCAR stock car. They were fast and didn\u2019t crash very often. The Super Modified cars didn\u2019t look like station wagons but they still had acres of sheet metal on the side to assist with corners. All the wheels were covered by bodywork. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson was racing in the Super Modifieds with a Hendricks car and he did fairly well. He got a Main Event second place finish against drivers that spend their entire career in this specialized form of competition.<\/p>\n
The racing was very close and heats were frequent. All the classes had several heat races to determine which cars made the main event and the grids were well populated. Driver\/teams from Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois, California and other states attended. The stands were another story. When CT bought our tickets she was told they were sold out of general admission so she bought reserved seats. After everyone was seated the grandstands looked about 60% full. Maybe the cold, night air kept spectators away.<\/p>\n
When the racing was over the announcers thanked the track owner for keeping stock car racing alive. Whenever you hear that sort of talk it\u2019s not a good sign. South-Central New Mexico used to have a stock car track in Tularosa, another a few miles away near Alamogordo, one on Highway 9 west of Sunland Park near the border with Mexico, and I think Deming might still have a track and maybe El Paso.<\/p>\n
Stock car tracks used to be everywhere. Where I grew up there was a track in Medly and one just across the Miami River in Hialeah. Those tracks are gone now. I wonder if dirt oval tracks are disappearing all over America. I believe part of the reason for grass roots oval racing\u2019s decline is that none of the cars racing are related in any way to the cars found in the parking lot. That is if you can find a car in the parking lot.\u00a0 \u00a0Today everyone drives bloated SUVs or pickup trucks.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the high bar of entry into the sport.\u00a0 Even those ratty station wagons require a lot of work to build. Maybe the demise of cheap, rear-wheel drive sedans is part of the problem. The class structure never adapted to new realities in the marketplace. Look how NASCAR\u2019s rigid rules have created a situation where you can buy a box stock Dodge, Chevy or Ford off the showroom floor with more horsepower than a NASCAR contender. I know the old time stock cars shared few common parts with the cars they resembled but at least they resembled them and had engines you could check off on the dealer\u2019s option page.<\/p>\n
Finally, the \u201cCar of Tomorrow\u201d eliminated the last tentacles connecting the cars on the track and the car you drove to the track. Now all the bodywork is the same and only paint creates the illusion of several brands. The situation is probably not as bad as I\u2019m making it sound. I\u2019ve gotten grumpy as I got old. I liked it when stock car racing was the most exciting thing happening on a Saturday night.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be back to Vado Park Speedway. Later in the year they are hosting USRA Modifieds, which look a lot like old style stock cars. Then there are the winged and un-winged Sprint cars along with Super Trucks. We all need to do our part to keep this uniquely American form of racing alive. Hopefully a new generation will get interested in stock cars and start racing cheap, two liter, front-wheel drive sedans around those well groomed dirt ovals. I know a couple unused tracks nearb.\u00a0 Just add drivers.<\/p>\n
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