8.31.2009

Saturday Night at the Races!

Saturday night at the races. Yep, that’s what I did. I spent Saturday at the Spokane Racetrack and watched several drag races with lots of Mopars, funny cars, nitro cars, alcohol cars, and one jet car.

It’s totally exciting and heart thrumming. You can feel the engines all the way through the cement bleachers to the top row, which is where I sat from noon to midnight. Twelve hours of muscle cars! Hours of hearing-loss thundering engines, burning rubber, pungent smells of gas, nitro, fuel – smoke filling the air. What a day!

And you ain’t seen nothing until you see a jet car. It’s almost frightening in a kid-in-a-cemetery-on-Halloween-night kind of way. You can’t get enough and you want to hide and you want to get really close and you want to duck, all at the same time. It sounds like a jet is standing right in front of you, powering up. The whine is powerful and mesmerizing. And once it has your attention fully focused on it, it BANGS with flames spewing out. Even the ambulance that is waiting by, backs up 100 feet away from the jet car. It bangs and pops and whines and slowly inches to the lights and then, WHAM, it screams off in front of you and goes 290 miles an hour, RIGHT.NOW. Amazing!!!! It’s a wonder it doesn’t fly.

I think I’m addicted. It’s the most awesome, exciting thing I’ve seen in forever. Can you imagine 290 miles an hour – and it was mere seconds to go a quarter of a mile.

Then we went back to piddly little race cars that went a pokey 100 miles an hour. Kid’s stuff.

.

1 comment:

MarmiteToasty said...

oh it sounds WONDERFUL..... at first when you wrote.... Saturday night at the races, I presumed you mean at the dogs or the horses.... :) - the cars sounds sooooooo much more fun.

x