In the Predawn Realm of the Race Car Crazies

Over the years, I’ve closed more bars than I care to remember. I opened my first a few Sundays ago, sleepwalking into the Speedway bistro in Newport Beach at 4:30 in the morning. Yes, 4:30 a.m. Not because I wanted a drink. Not because I was desperate for companionship. Because I wanted to watch a race on television. Or, more to the point, to watch it live.

As the first European event of the 1998 Formula One season, the Grand Prix of San Marino marked the year’s inaugural meeting of what a friend calls the Wide-Awake Club. West Coast members crawl out of bed before sunrise every other Sunday from April through September for live F1 broadcasts from Monza, Spa-Francorchamps, the Nurburgring and other historic continental racetracks. Magnificent obsession or clinical dementia? You make the call.

This particular Sunday, I was blasting down the deserted Golden State Freeway by 3:15 a.m. It was still pitch-black when I reached the Speedway International Racing Bistro & Bar, a motor-sports-theme restaurant-cum-memorabilia-palace with a pair of race cars on its roof and several more displayed inside along with grease-stained driving suits, autographed photos, you name it. Picture a Hard Rock Cafe for the sort of motor heads who think of James Dean as a failed Porsche driver and you’ll have the general idea.

I sat in a sunken area of the bar known appropriately as the pit and focused my bleary eyes on 14 of the place’s 80 television screens. Even though the race hadn’t started yet, the tifosi--rabid Italian race fans--were already chanting “Schumacher! Schumacher!” in support of the German prima donna driving one of their beloved Ferraris. (Italians would cheer for Jeffrey Dahmer if he drove a Ferrari.) Surveying the cacophonous scene from a bar stool fashioned out of a giant automotive spring, a local architect grinned. “I could have watched this at home,” he confided. “But I had to see how many racing crazies would come out.”

Personally, at 4:30 in the morning, I could’ve used a little modulation in the sensory-overload department. The only reason I was in Newport Beach at this ridiculous hour was because, unlike years past, I couldn’t watch the race at home. Seven weeks earlier, the day before the season was about to begin, ESPN had lost the F1 contract to the upstart Speedvision network. When I got the news, I suddenly understood the impulse behind murder-suicide.

Not that I had anything against Speedvision. On the contrary, people like me--Wide-Awake Club members in good standing--are its core audience. Unfortunately, my cable company, like most local cable providers, doesn’t offer the network. FOX Sports Net, a sister cable network of Speedvision, promised to televise the race on a tape-delay basis. But anybody committed (read: deluded) enough to watch a Grand Prix at 4:30 in the morning isn’t going to fall for that is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex? nonsense. I dug frantically through Rolodexes and databases for friends, friends of friends, nodding acquaintances, hell, complete strangers--anybody with access to Speedvision or a satellite dish able to snag the feed for the race. Thankfully, I live in the right place.

Though better known as the home of the movie industry and bad mall syntax, Southern California is also the cradle of hot rod civilization. Harry Miller, racing’s preeminent prewar figure, was based here. During the ‘50s, virtually every car that raced in the Indianapolis 500 was built either in Los Angeles or the famed Kurtis Kraft shop in Glendale. Carroll Shelby’s Cobras were built here. Dan Gurney’s Eagles still are built here, as are a vast assortment of stock cars, sprinters, midgets, even off-road vehicles.

Southern California was the perfect location for the Speedway, which opened last year as a shrine to the area’s racing heritage. Filling the void left by ESPN, the restaurant cut a deal with Speedvision and advertised its intention to broadcast F1 events in all their predawn glory. Five minutes before the start of the San Marino Grand Prix, the grand experiment looked like a fiasco. But latecomers kept straggling in--red-eyed, unshaven junkies desperate for their F1 fix. And by the time Scotsman David Coulthard launched his sleek silver McLaren-Mercedes into the lead at the start of the race, there were 65 customers in the house.

Like me, most of them were white, male, middle-age, middle-class. Two seats to my left was a transplanted Brit who’d been following Formula One since 1951. Another guy, in his 30s, had attended every Long Beach Grand Prix since he was 10. As for me, I carry the names of Grand Prix champions in my head like most people remember their multiplication tables. If there were a “Jeopardy” for motor sports, I’d be rich enough to run for governor. (“I’ll take ‘Centrifugal Superchargers’ for $2 million, Alex.”)

I can’t remember a time when racing didn’t excite me. I’m jazzed by the splashy colors, the molar-rattling sounds, the acrid aromas, the omnipresent sense that something magical is about to transpire. I’ve stood next to the cars on starting grids, wincing as their engines shrieked like caged beasts, and I’ve felt my stomach tighten, felt my heart rate quicken, as if I were the one strapped so tightly inside the cockpit that it was hard to breathe.

On a more cerebral plane, I’m also passionate about the technical challenges, the epic contest between man and machine, the naked competitiveness demanded of its participants. No sport forces athletes to confront their weaknesses more ruthlessly; none exacts a more merciless penalty for failure. Dramatists talk about “raising the stakes” to produce compelling theater. In racing, the stakes are always no-limit.

But maybe, I mused as the race unfolded, I was just rationalizing. Maybe I was a race fan for the same reason some people are born with green eyes and others prefer Clifford Brown to Miles Davis. On the 14 screens in front of me, as Michael Schumacher slid his bright-red Ferrari into second place, the tifosi responded with spastic imitations of his usual clenched-fist victory salute. (Every time he wins a race, you’d think he’d just taken Stalingrad.) And seeing their unrestrained joy, I realized that the pleasure we derive from racing is so visceral, so elemental, that maybe it can’t be articulated.

Of course, most Americans wouldn’t recognize this impulse if it hit them on the head with a cast-iron cylinder block. And of those who would--race fans, that is--fewer still give a damn about Formula One. The arguments pro and con are too arcane to detail here. Suffice it to say that attendance at the last F1 event held in this country--the lamentable U.S. Grand Prix at Phoenix in 1990--was so abysmal that, according to racing lore, it was outdrawn by a nearby ostrich race. F1 continues to enjoy a cult following in the States. But then, so did Hale-Bopp.

The San Marino race epitomized everything Americans dislike most about Formula One. After some electricity at the start, the race turned processional, with Coulthard leading effortlessly. There was a spike of excitement at 6 o’clock, when a voice boomed over the Speedway PA: “Ladies and gentlemen, the bar is open!” But other than that, we passed the morning whining about the lack of passing, whining about the ineptitude of the broadcasters and whining about dictatorial F1 supremo (as the British pundits call him) Bernie Ecclestone. Coulthard won easily, and we whined about that, too.

But hope springs eternal. As soon as the post-mortems were over, I hustled back home. The CART race from Nazareth was coming on at 9:30, the Winston Cup race at Talledega at noon. All of which would give me just enough time to settle in for the rebroadcast of San Marino at 5 p.m. Because who knows? Maybe I missed something good the first time around.