Speeding volition

By Dan Neil

Nov. 4, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Except for the eardrum assaults of straight-pipe exhausts at full honk, except for the Ozzfest-worthy clouds of smoke boiling off shrieking tires, except for the adrenaline, the testosterone, the cholesterol (foot-long sausages!), except for the foreboding, the purgatorial twilight of a racetrack launching cars aircraft-carrier style into the night ... except for that, drag racing is the most Zen of sports.

It’s all about the moment: The car. The Christmas tree starting light. The elapsed time. The object is to traverse the distance between the starting line and the finish line as quickly as possible. No puzzling rules (can somebody please explain NASCAR’s “lucky dog” restart provision?), no unfathomable scoring (women’s gymnastics), no loathsome judges (“The Apprentice”).

And -- outside the professional ranks -- no qualifications for participants. Anybody with a car, a driver’s license, $20 and a dream can go racing. Unless your car is extremely fast you don’t even need a helmet.

“We had a lady come in here with a brand-new Saturn sedan,” says Doug Stokes, communications director of the Irwindale Speedway, which stages run-whut-you-brung drag racing on Thursday nights. “She told me she came to the drag strip with her brothers when she was a kid and they would never let her race. She drove that car off the dealer lot and brought it right over here. She told me, ‘I just wanted to go drag racing once in my life.’ ”

When it comes to a lack of qualifications, I am overqualified. So I have come to Irwindale’s Thursday Night Thunder session to test (read: flog) a new Mini Cooper S Convertible, a vehicle I am reviewing for The Times’ Highway 1 section. The ragtop Cooper, powered by a supercharged 1.6-liter motor, is a fervid little onramp racer. Oh sure, when I pull up to the starting line people will laugh, but then I’ll rev that little motor, drop that clutch -- the “fly-monkeys-fly” music from “The Wizard of Oz” will start playing in my head -- and then we will see who’s laughing.

Hey, who’s laughing?

Hot rods to Hondas

Irwindale is one of three area drag strips where the public can bring their cars for “test and tune” sessions -- which are what they sound like -- or bracket racing, where cars are handicapped according to their speed and the slower car given a head start at the starting line (the other two are the Los Angeles County Speedway in Palmdale and the California Speedway in Fontana).

These open-mike nights for the gear-grabbing set have become increasingly popular in the past year, according to Stokes, for two reasons. First, local law enforcement has been putting the smackdown on street racing -- recently, the local constabulary has been crushing some of the highly modified and expensive cars they impound.

“That’s a big incentive for me,” says Raymond (he declines to give his last name), a 22-year-old La Puente resident who has brought his 2004 Dodge Neon SRT-4 to Irwindale. “I used to go to the street races in Ontario. Before you could race all you want. Now there are so many cops you can’t even enjoy it.”

The second reason is the automotive horsepower wars. Raymond’s exquisitely dorky Neon SRT-4 plays host organism to a screamer of an engine, a turbocharged, 230-hp four-cylinder capable of shooting the car to 60 mph in 5.8 seconds. A decade ago, such acceleration was the province of Camaros and Corvettes. Today, station wagons, trucks and bone-stock Asian imports routinely post those kinds of numbers. Welcome to Whiplash Nation.

“Used to be, 200 horsepower was major for a production car,” says Stokes. “Now you have street cars running 400, 500 horsepower. This is a place where you can use that kind of power.”

And so, on this Thursday afternoon, among the expected collection of hot rods -- a ’68 Camaro with huge rear tires (“slicks”) and a voracious hood scoop, a ’66 Chevelle with a gnarly-looking supercharger sticking through the hood -- there are lots of stock-looking street cars making their way through Irwindale’s inspection area.

“We see a lot of kids with their new imports,” says Kathy Hine, one of the technical and safety inspectors. “We get some Lambos, Corvettes and Vipers. We see a lot of Lightnings,” she says, referring to Ford’s limited-production F-150 Lightning pickup, which is fitted with high-performance wheels and tires and a big supercharged engine.

Peter Delgatto and his wife, Mirna, wait in line in their blacker-than-hell 2004 Chevrolet Corvette Z06. A Glendora dry cleaner by day, Delgatto becomes, on Thursday nights, King Swinging Corvette. “I like to watch him do it,” says Mirna, laughing and abashed.

Torrance resident Danny Jack sits on a 2002 Suzuki GSX1300 Hayabusa, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s fastest production motorcycle (zero to 60 in about 3 seconds and a top speed of more than 200 mph). “I don’t really know a lot about it,” says Jack, who owns a go-kart track in Carson. “They just told me it was fast. I’m an absolute impulse buyer.”

How does his wife feel about him racing his new toy? “All she said was, ‘Just don’t wreck.’ ”

Start your engines

Me and Mini-Me pass through tech inspection without a hitch. The main thing is to be sure the car isn’t leaking fluids. Once I sign the waiver and release (“Motorsports are inherently dangerous ... “) I am issued my competitor’s wristband. One of the stewards writes a number on the windshield with a soap stick.

It takes about 10 minutes to move through the queue with the other cars. Ahead of me is a white Camaro SS, also a convertible, with orange stripes and a silver parachute package on the rear. Behind me, two kids in a primer-black Acura Integra.

Irwindale is a good track for beginners. It is, first of all, an eighth-mile track, not a typical quarter-mile track. The shorter distance is easier on the equipment, safer (only the quickest cars can exceed top speeds typically found on Los Angeles freeways) and less demanding on beginning drivers. “And the turnaround time is quicker,” Stokes says. In fact, on this night -- cold with rain threatening -- there aren’t that many cars racing so a driver can take a pass every 15 minutes or so.

I am waved into the staging area behind the starting line. The track workers -- generally large men lacking in necks, with headset radios clamped to their noggins -- are brisk and efficient. But they are not patient. The starter gestures for me to stop when my front wheels are in the “water box,” a puddle of water where drivers spin their tires to heat and clean them for better traction off the line.

The Mini is a front-drive car. I pull up the handbrake, rev the motor and slip the clutch. The car sounds like it’s making daiquiris. The tires spin and smoke and as the revs fall off I release the handbrake, surging forward, grateful that I didn’t stall in front of the gathering crowd.

I pull up to the starting line. There are two small yellow lights on top of the Christmas tree, corresponding to two infrared beams across the track. When the front tires are between these two light beams, the car is staged and both yellow lights come on.

I look over in the other lane. It’s Delgatto and his Corvette Z06. Technically, it’s not a race. We’re just running together. Even so, I feel I have brought a knife to a gunfight.

“Hey, how come the little guy has to race with the Corvette?” Irwindale’s veteran announcer John Partridge asks over the PA system. “That don’t seem right.... OK, Mini Cooper versus Corvette ... who likes the Mini?”

A smattering of sympathetic applause.

“Who likes the Corvette?”

The crowd cheers.

I think I hear: Who likes Christians? Who likes lions?

Yellow-yellow-yellow-green! I drop the clutch at about 5,000 rpm and the Cooper spins its wheels in all its electric-toothbrush rage. I feather the clutch and the car gains some traction. The landscape starts to pick up speed. The billboards flash past: ClaySmithCamsPerformancePlusK&NfiltersIn-n-OutLucasOil; ... Oh, I’m so slow! Each tick of the second-hand sounds like a temple gong in my head. Six ... Seven ... Eight....

Delgatto’s Corvette has already reached the return lane by the time I cross the finish line. I stop to pick up the paper printout of my run. My reaction time -- the instant between when the light turns green and the car moves off the line -- is a stuporous .778 (.500, or five-tenths of a second, is considered a perfect “R/T”). My elapsed time (E.T.), 12 seconds. My top speed, 64.15 mph. Thanks for coming out, Grandpa.

“Leeeeettt’s hear it for the world’s quickest Mini,” Partridge intones as I drive by the grandstand.

Old and new school

Drag racing -- once one of the most exclusionary of motorsports -- is becoming far more newcomer friendly. It has to. The sport is struggling to hang onto fans and participants, as the first generations of hot-rodders are, in increasing numbers, parking their cars in the big paddock in the sky, shall we say. The craze in modified Asian imports -- sport compact “tuners” a la “The Fast and the Furious” -- has brought fresh blood to the sport but it has been an open question whether the old-school racers with their big-block Chevys and Mo-par Dodges would play nice with the kids. The nature of the divide is generational, cultural and mechanical.

“People in drag racing are saying, ‘Where are the crowds going?’ ” says Partridge, whose auburn pompadour is a wonder to behold. “That’s because they got a bunch of old farts running the tracks who didn’t change. The kids are interested in drag racing but they are intimidated because the people running the tracks treat it like it’s a professional sport.” Partridge dabs quote marks in the air around the word “professional.”

For the record, both the National Hot Rod Assn. (NHRA) and the International Hot Rod Assn. (IHRA) have started popular import and front-wheel-drive competition programs.

At Irwindale, the old guard and the avant-garde get along just fine. “I’m glad they’re here,” says Walt Brandt, standing beside a heartbreaker ’67 Olds 442 with a lustrous orange paint job. “Their money is as good as anybody’s. For us to have this situation here in Irwindale, they need as many customers as possible to come through the gate.”

By 7 p.m. the sun has taken a swan dive into the pool of red pollution that hangs over the track. There are about 75 cars lined up in the four lanes leading to the staging area. There is plenty of drop-forged Detroit iron like Camaros and Mustangs, all wheels and traction bars and open exhausts snapping and crackling like Satan’s own breakfast cereal. But there is also a showroom-stock Dodge Viper, a Toyota Celica GT-S, a Ford Lightning pickup truck, and -- most improbable of all -- a Chevy 2500HD Duramax Diesel 4x4 pickup that, when it takes off from the line, belches black smoke like an Iraqi oil-well fire.

What’s that doing here? Eric, the truck’s driver, would rather not say. He is testing some secret components for one of the automakers. The laptop sitting on the passenger seat is running a dynamometer program.

For a drag strip, where deafening burnouts fill the air and the smell of roasting tires will gag you, Irwindale is a fairly intimate setting.

One reason is Partridge’s well-practiced, if loopy, patter on the PA system. When a competitor performs a particularly noxious burnout: “Burnnnn them balonies!” When a motorcycle nicknamed “Divine Wind” lines up to race a buzzy two-stroke bike: “It’s the Divine Wind versus the Annoying Wind.”

“It’s kind of a breakthrough style,” Partridge says from the track’s timing and scoring office. “It’s the way we talk to people. If they mess up we dog them, and if they get a good pass down we slap hands. It makes them feel welcome.”

For beginners, Partridge offers real-time coaching. Competitors can tune their car radios to hear the PA announcements, and Partridge will talk them through their passes. He has written a primer, “Drag Racing 101,” on the company website, www.irwindalespeedway.com.

By 8 p.m., dozens of cars -- some full-on racers, others suburban grocery getters -- circulate between track and paddock, a strange, smoggy Cirque du Soleil. The crowd is sparse tonight because of the weather, only a hundred or so, but on a warm summer night the crowd can have as many as 1,500 people in the bleachers, Stokes says.

Which means that only a handful witness the Mini’s triumphant pass. I line up -- by a strange quirk of fate -- again against Delgatto’s Corvette. But this time I’m ready. The night swims away. Yellow-yellow-yellow-green! I feather the clutch just right. The radials bite and the little car leans into the wind. HHUNNNNNNN! I snatch second gear. Third gear. The lights flash. An E.T. of 10.179 seconds and a top speed of 70 mph. Delgatto beats me by a mere 1.79 seconds.

Partridge comes over the radio. “Ten-seventeen in a Mini Cooper? Now that’s gettin’ it done.”

There it is. My moment of Zen.

Southland strips

Open drag racing around Southern California:

Irwindale Speedway

What: “Thursday Night Thunder”

When: 4-10 p.m. Thursdays

Where: 500 Speedway Drive, Irwindale

Cost: $20 per competitor,

$10 spectator

Info: (626) 358-1100, www.irwindalespeedway.com

L.A. County Raceway