For BangShift.com, the 2009 Holley NHRA National Hot Rod Reunion at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky, will hopefully be remembered as a watershed weekend where we got ourselves out to a killer event, broke our asses covering it, and set the stage for bigger and better things to come down the road.
If not, it’ll go down for Chad and I as the weekend that we never stopped laughing. We had a blast, and I thought it would be fun to share some of the stories from behind the story of our weekend in Bowling Green. Rather than write them as a traditional column, I’ll share this stuff as little vignettes.
Discovery one was that neither Chad nor I have lots of love for CVT transmissions. Our miniscule imported rental car was equipped with one and it’s too weird. The no-shifting thing meant that we could only inflict so much abuse on the car. Hell, it doesn’t even violently smash into low gear when jammed into it at far too high a speed. On another note, we did discover that the car would go 112 mph.
The weather was the worst. It was just about 100 degrees each day and the humidity was somewhere in the range of 146 percent. Adding to the hellacious nature of these conditions was the fact that there wasn’t enough of a breeze to blow a gnat off course. You may as well have been sitting in a stew pot. It’s amazing to me that the drivers, especially those in nitro-powered entries, were not dropping like flies in their fire suits. The heat did not keep the crowd or the cars away as the place was jam packed all weekend, aside from Sunday when lots of people hit the road early to get home.
Chad’s sunburn line perfectly splits his head like the freaking equator. Meanwhile, my Ray Bans melted into my giant noggin. I’ve got a total raccoon burn happening. I even said to myself, walking out of the hotel on day one, “Get sun screen.” I then said to myself, “Screw it, racing starts in like 30 minutes.”
The Cacklefest, the first one I’ve experienced in person, is a tremendously cool thing. With 40 cars, mostly powered by nitro and running all at the same time, it is impossible to describe the noise. It’s also impossible to describe how weird it is when the entire crowd starts pouring over the fence towards the wall and you have to break out the Kung Fu moves to bust through the crowd to get video and still photos of the action. I think Chad used his beard as a weapon at one point.
Is it a smart move to wear a BangShift.com through the airport when the word Bang is highlighted in red? They didn’t search me so it must have been cool.
Chad and I got nine hours sleep in three days…total. At one point both of us fell asleep, basically face first into our laptops while he was editing video and I was building galleries. I woke up at 3 AM, saw him drooling and snoring at his computer (wearing his editing headphones) and called time out. We agreed to take a break and get some sleep. We picked up where we left off a 6:15 AM fresh as the morning dew.
Lots of trips have a recurring theme and this one did too. Unfortunately, it’s unprintable. The phrase involves my Boston accent and a one liner that your father may have thrown at you after you did something dumb as a kid.
If you are ever wondering what happened to all the old Hemis, they were at Beech Bend last weekend. For a time it seemed like they out numbered small-block Chevy engines.
Rat rod people get all up on the tire about the street rod guys with their billet stuff and paint schemes among other topics, but those guys do the same things, just at the opposite end of the spectrum. There were lots of cool traditional rods on one side of the scale and lots of “rat rods” on the other that really seemed to be people trying way too hard to make decent stuff look like junk. I’ll take fake patina over real butchery any day of the week.
We spent a few hours with some of the honored racers and significant cars that were at the event and heard some of the most awesome stories of how their cars were built, how drag racing was back in the day, and the sacrifices many of these guys have made to preserve the history of the sport. One of those guys dropped the ultimate line on us. He was telling us that his now long gone ex-girlfriend told him that if he started work on building a Top Fuel dragster that she would up and leave him. He said he weighed the decision and then thought, “There are lots of girls in the world, but very few Top Fuel dragsters.” He’s got the dragster.
Chad’s not a pain in the ass, but here’s an example of how he rolls. The man changed hotel rooms three times in 24 hours. We were at the Econo Lodge, FYI.
Because we’re both health nuts it will not surprise anyone that we got on a “bacon hot streak.” We had bacon with three straight meals. It came with breakfast, we skipped lunch, had bacon pizza for dinner, and managed to scarf down the remains of the pork pies for breakfast. Pray for us.
The ’32 Ford with an Ford Indy Car engine in it was freaking awesome and people were walking by it and missing one of the coolest, if not the coolest mill in the entire expanse of Beech Bend raceway.
It was a great weekend of horsing around with a buddy, and we got to share with everyone. I don’t think it gets much better than that.
