A Kiss and a Cup

The first automobile race in history took place almost a century ago in France and was won with an average speed of 10.2 m.p.h.

The winner was offered a cup of wine and then was impulsively kissed by a woman in the audience overwhelmed by his triumph.

I can’t verify that, of course, but because the French love to drink and kiss, it is a logical assumption. They were not allowed to do anything else in public in those days, or God knows what winning might reap today.

As it is, we have been presenting cups and kisses ever since, though the cup has become a trophy and the kiss a perfunctory American peck delivered by a beauty queen programmed especially for that function.

I mention this as an intro to a day at the races in Pomona, where several thousand fans gathered over the weekend to savor the thrill of victory and the possibility of mayhem at speeds considerably greater than 10 m.p.h.

I was there because, like most Southern Californians, I am attracted by noise and speed, a form of dementia created by the chaos of driving L.A. freeways during one’s formative years.

The racetrack at the Pomona Fairgrounds was thus a Mecca for the afflicted during a meet sponsored by the National Hot Rod Assn.

The ear-splitting roar of cars powered by 4,000-horsepower engines and the eye-stinging clouds of smoke billowing up from the drag strip let you know this was no convocation of wimps, but a sport of sweat, spit, fire and speed on a quarter-mile track to hell.

I was fortunate to have been there at the time a driver named Russ Collins looped his $80,000 dragster while rocketing down the strip at 250 m.p.h., leaving bits of it, though not him, scattered across the pavement.

I say fortunate because drag races by their very nature are fairly boring unless you have a stop-clock brain. Cars line up, get the go signal and roar off like weasels in heat. The whole thing is over in 5 seconds.

Unlike the Ventura Freeway, you are not faced with the challenge of fighting your way to the finish line with constant lane changes and horn honking, and there are no drive-by shootings.

Moments of peril, therefore, break the monotony of drag racing by offering the possibility that a human being will be either ripped to shreds or barbecued before one’s admiring eyes.

Collins, I am pleased to say, was neither ripped nor barbecued.

Wind caught the front of his 25-foot-long, pen-pointed dragster and flipped it upright on its back wheels. It did a couple of spectacular loops, brushed a retaining wall and skidded across the finish line backward.

Collins, at 51 no stranger to blood and broken bones, walked away smiling, though somewhat crookedly.

It was noted by an official in the press booth that, despite his unorthodox finish, he had managed to best his previous time by almost a full second.

“If someone figures out his way is faster,” the official added, “everyone will be doing it.”

I caught up with Collins gazing balefully at his battered dragster in the pit area, surrounded by a mixed crowd of crew members, spectators and blonde women in tight clothing, who seemed to be everywhere.

“What a day,” he was saying, shaking his head. He is a weathered man who speaks in a low growl. “Every once in awhile you get bitten.”

Collins has been racing for 35 years, most of it on motorcycles. He took up car racing five years ago.

“How does it feel to crash?” I asked. There is probably a technical term for crashing, as there is for everything else in car racing, but I didn’t know it. Involuntary impact disassembly, perhaps.

“It’s a real mood change,” Collins said. “Control is everything in racing, and when it’s suddenly gone, you can’t do a thing.”

He let go of the wheel so it wouldn’t break his hands and didn’t touch it again until the dragster finished its looping and spinning.

“There still was no control,” he said unhappily. “A car don’t steer good when it’s only got two wheels left.”

This wasn’t his first wreck. Fifteen years ago he crashed a bike doing 175 m.p.h. and broke everything but his spirit. He was out of business for a year, but as soon as he could, he was racing again.

“Hell,” he said, “I’d be back out there this afternoon if I could borrow a car somewhere.”

“What it’s all about, pure and simple, is winning,” another pro, Don Prudhomme, had said earlier. “Everyone needs that. I was a loser in school but I’m a winner out here.”

Collins had a little different cant. “Racing,” he said, “is an effort to convert fear into thrill. There’s nothing else like it.”

Driving the Ventura comes close, but you don’t get a cup and a kiss for crossing the finish line first.