It has become somewhat of a yearly ritual for Chad and I to get together down in West Palm Beach, Florida for the live broadcast of the PRO Winter Warm Up. Then, we both head back to his place outside of LA to attend a media conference put on by SEMA. While Chad and I are constantly on the phone and emailing with one another all day and night, we probably spend less time physically together than the vast majority of business partners in the world. This is exceedingly good news for rental car companies, fast food purveyors, and innocent bystanders from coast to coast. When we are together it is always a good time and this year was no exception. As with any trip, there are always fun stories, some which I can actually publish and a bunch of others that I’ll gladly share over a beer after checking you for recording devices. This column will be a collection of those stories and some observations on recent events in the world of motorsports –

Welcome to south Florida situation one – Chad had let me know that his flight was arriving in West Palm Beach at 11:30pm. I went and made my reservation on a flight that would arrive at 9:21. A couple of days before the flight I was checking my stuff and I realized that my flight landed at 9:21…AM. Eff. In an effort to make lemonade out of lemons, I decided to drive down to the Dezer collection museum in Miami, about an hour south of where we were. I was driving the tiny Nissan shitbox rental car like a normal human being when I heard a sport bike with no exhaust coming like a freight train behind me. That bike went past me doing well, and I mean WELL over 100mph. My immediate reaction was to curse the idiot, but before I finished doing that, an even bigger jack ass in a Cummins powered Dodge pickup came chasing the jerk on the sport bike. The truck made several four lane changes at 100+ and shockingly killed no one in my immediate view before disappearing on the horizon.

The sad ham rental car actually WILL smoke the tires! – You’ve all roundly made you opinions known about the wanton abuse of rental cars and it isn’t favorable. We respect your opinion but in the end, simply can’t help ourselves. We spent a solid four days doing unspeakable things to this junk pile of a car, including an awesome e-brake locked burnout for the length of a red light in traffic. It was difficult to discern the looks of terror, confusion, delight, and anger from the surrounding drivers. The car was well into a third gear burn by the time the light changed. On green we left with the right front ensconced in smoke and then 6ft later the tire hooked and bogged the engine to where the rest of traffic passed us. Chad and I laughed so hard we peed a little.

FACT: A fuel funny car WILL run on nitro and lacquer thinner: How is this for a wild story you aren’t going to get anywhere else? An unnamed funny car driver who was lamenting the team’s tough week in testing shared a story from earlier in the week when the car made a run which felt, sounded, and looked strange to the driver. As it turns out, the team gets barrels of lacquer thinner delivered to the shop and they are basically identical to the barrels of alcohol the team uses to dilute their nitro with. Well, one barrel got mixed into the bunch of akly drums and believe it or not, this nitro funny car actually made a lap with a fuel tank containing nitromethane and lacquer thinner. The car ran like a dog and the driver said that in the hundreds of runs he has made in a nitro funny car, he’s never looked out at the flames, but this time he did because the motor sounded weird and the flames looked strange. We’re thinking someone may have gotten a pink slip over that one.

We nailed that one: During our live broadcast of the race we discussed at length the change NHRA made to its testing policy, which no longer restricts nitro teams to only six testing dates in a year. Previously this had choked off the supply of nitro cars to run match races or even in the IHRA because those were all considered “testing” by the NHRA. With the change, both of us suspected that match racing will become and option for smaller teams that need the money and that the IHRA may be able to get back into the top fuel business. The next day after our conversation, the IHRA announced that they will have top fuelers (in varying quantities) at all of their events. Boom goes the dynamite.

Cheap beer = Haterade  – While I may certainly come off as a complete vagrant dumbass sometimes, I consider myself a decently worldly guy. I have eaten lots of food, teaveled a fair amount of places, and imbibed on a couple of different continents. In West Palm we stopped one night at a gas station for snacks and junk and I grabbed a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon “pounders” (16oz cans). Why? Firstly because PBR is dirt cheap and secondly because it’s a good beer to slug down when you’re just hanging out bull-you-know-whatting. Same goes for Miller High Life. (see photo below). I stuck a photo of a can up on my Facebook page and boy did the beer critics pour out of the woodwork. I love a good micro-brew, stout, IPA, or porter as much as the next guy but some situations just call for good old American yellow water beer. This is BangShift not Food and Wine.

Hookers in the hallway: So Chad and I got our work done one of the nights on the trip and decided we needed to eat something. We walked out of the room and headed up the hall to the elevator. I saw two girls walking down the hall and at first glance just thought, “hey, there’s two girls in the hallway,” then about a millisecond later I looked up at them again, shot Chad an immediate look, and we both did the math at the same time. When they stopped at a room two doors up from ours (AVOID ROOM 224 AT THE WEST PALM HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS UNLESS YOU HAVE A BLACK LIGHT) and exchanged an uncomfortable “Heyyyy” with the disembodied voice of the guy in the room, we knew that our math was correct. Hookers and on our hall even! I have been to Las Vegas several times where, “guess who’s the hooker” is a game I consider a pastime so it isn’t like I am a rube who has never seen this situation before but frankly, I had never actually seen them knocking on the random door and heading into a hotel room with some guy they’ve got to pray isn’t planning on chopping them up in the tub. After an initial giggle, reality set in and I felt pretty bad for them. Obviously something has gone way wrong to put them in that place. Upon returning to our room, we did the mature thing and listened to see if we could hear anything in the hall. Like I said above, we can’t help ourselves.

Racing to remind themselves why they love it: I love nostalgia drag racing and Chad does, too. One of the most interesting things we came across during our time at PBIR with all the professional racers was their love of nostalgia drag racing and their even more passionate love of participating in it. Many of the top tier crew chief and drivers either own nostalgia funny cars or drive them for others at events like the March Meet or California Hot Rod Reunion. Before you get all sour grapes and pee on my shoes about these “mega buck” guys racing with the nostalgia teams, take a deep breath and understand DSR isn’t spending money for Capps to go race a nostalgia flopper, nor is Kalitta, etc. These guys are showing up with equipment 100% on the level with everyone else. They are there to race as regular people like everyone else. They are there to do the thing they do for a living in another setting to reinforce to themselves why they actually do the thing they do for a living. As bizarre as that sounds, every one of us is chasing that feeling we got the very first time we went to the drag strip. We’ll never get there but we can come damned close. These guys get so far removed from it, they need to remind themselves what it is like to just be “a guy” racing a car at the track without ESPN, corporate handlers, throngs of fans, and all of the other “trappings” of being a top tier professional. All this does for me is to reinforce the fact that these guys love the sport, respect its history, and will race every god damned chance they get. Why is that a bad thing?

We only like the idea of controversy…not actual controversy: A great conversation with a pro driver yielded an interesting perspective on how we as fans and media view the drivers and what they actually deal with. The driver said that after hearing years of complaints that he was too mechanical like all pro drivers are these days, he decided to stir the pot up a little last year. The onslaught of hate mail, anger, confusion, and other issues it caused made him throw his hands up and say, “screw it”. We want our pro racers to be the salty guys of the past but largely those guys were salty behind closed doors or at least when they were salty the reporters passed the stories along as vague accounts or side bars as opposed to breathless headline news. That’s the difference. If you socked your teammate in the mouth in ’64 the report would probably be buried deep in a journalists notebook column and sound something like, “the boys had a tussle after practice.” The same incident today would involve Facebook. Twittter, live blogs, and television camera. We (the media hungry society that we are) have driven these guys to have virtually no personality on cameras. Fact.

THAT’S ENOUGH FOR THIS WEEK. WE’LL CONTINUE THIS DISCUSSION NEXT WEEK!