Here’s a link:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/travel/escapes/24super.html?dpc

Here are the first two sentences of the race report on the Formula Atlantic race at Lime Rock Park July 18, 09. Of course, as you’ll see, it ain’t “Formula Atlantic” anymore.

The italics are mine:

“2009 Cooper Tires Presents The Atlantic Championship Powered by Mazda points leader Simona De Silvestro became the winningest woman driver in the 36-year of the series with another dominating performance at Lime Rock Park.

“Driving the No. 78 Stargate Worlds/Maakoa/Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment/FireSky/Cardinal Technologies machine for Team Stargate Worlds, De Silvestro started from the pole position and led every lap en route to a 10.004-second victory over John Edwards.”

And all for exposure in a series that barely garners coverage in oval-crazed America.  Impressive job by Simona, though.

Leaders of the group claim the word is as offensive as a racial slur.  Evidently the word was used during an episode of Celebrity Aprrentice, which, of course, is a TV show offensive to all people.

“Historically, the word ‘midget’ has been used to objectify people, like in the circus,” Clinton Brown III, co-chair of the National Conference of Little People of America, stated.  “We’re in the 21st century. We’re beyond that.”

“This is not just a complaint,” said the father of one little person, “but a kickoff to educate American that the ‘M-word’ is offensive to little people.”

It’s only a matter of time…

As my frience Craig Murto of Late Model Racer always says, “If you control the tires you don’t have to worrry about anything else.”

“OUTLAW” SPORTSMAN RULES

1. The intent of this division is to provide a fun experience, allowing a wide variety of race cars to run without making a great amount of changes to be eligible.The basic rules shown below are limited, by design, to keep things simple. If necessary adjustments or additions will be made to ensure competitive racing and maintain the objectives of the “Outlaw” division.

1. Maximum 8 inch steel wheels.

2. Only tires allowed are American Racer 8 inch 704 or 705. NO tire softener allowed.

3. Minimum right side weight, after race, is 1250 lbs ( full chassis ) or 1350 lbs for tube chassis with stock front clip ( big spring ). NO full tubular, coil-over fronts allowed. NO quick changes or wide fives allowed.

4. Only carburetor allowed is stock 4412 Holley.

Any decisions regarding interpretation of rules is at the sole discretion of track officials and are not subject to protest.

I’ve dropped the ball on adding posts to this blog as I’ve worked on putting the words into the computer the old-fashioned way.  The plan is to release the story as a book – the memoirs of an ill-advised adventure that already has proven interesting.

With that in mind we’re sharing with you excerpts from the onging manuscript both to provide updates to interested bloggers and to give everyone a taste of what the book will be.

With the suspension of Shorttrack Magazine , the story has morphed from a tech series to – well – a “human-interest” story.  Blecchhh!  But seriously, the best part of this adventure IS the people involved.  We think you’ll agree.

You can be sure I was thinking the same thing about Don I’d thought about the guys with the Granite State Mini-Sprints, the Boisverts, and Walt, but at least I knew he was trying to publicize his deal. Yet, as with Armand’s first offer of seat-time, I hesitated. I guess I figured it was only fair to give Don time to reconsider, and I did give him some time. A year later, again at the Swap N’ Sell, he again made the offer. This time I was not about to question his sanity. If I hesitated again, he’d be questioning mine.

So this time when he says, “Give me a call before Whip City opens,” and I say, “Okay,” I resolve to mean it. And when I call him, there’s not a hint of a second thought in his voice when he says, “You ready to go?”

How do you get ready to drive a midget for the first time? By now I realized that you don’t. All you can do is strap yourself in and drive the thing. Once I’d decided to do that there was no turning back, even after Don informed me that, despite the possibility of at least two drivers signing on to race for him over the course of the upcoming season, he hadn’t gotten a commitment from anyone. One of the people who expressed interest wasn’t even sure he could fit in the Ellis machine that would carry the famed Douville-number 7X for the year. Simply put, I was the only guy committed to driving the car during Whip City’s annual pre-season practice day.

That was okay with me. Now I’d have a chance at more than a couple of runs on the dirt at Whip City, and it was sounding like I wouldn’t have to watch while some real racer showed me how the car really went. By practice day I was genuinely eager to get out there.

Don’s hunch that I’d be the day’s only driver was confirmed early in the day when the car indeed proved too small for another potential pilot. That wasn’t a surprise. The guy didn’t have to be the size of a linebacker to be too big to drive a midget. These things can be as tight a fit as jeans from high school, as you put one on as much as you get in one. Years before, when I first drove Walt’s self-built midget, he’d told me that his method for designing one was to put a milk crate on the floor of his shop, have his driver sit on it, and tell him to pull his feet in until his heels hit the crate. Thus was defined the cockpit of the new car. If his feet were small then that just meant fewer drivers could could fit in the car.

Fortunately for me, I was able to squeeze myself into Don’s orange Ellis, dropping myself down through the top of the rollcage and squirming between the seat’s side-bolsters. There proved to be enough room for my duck-flipper feet, but operating the car’s throttle and brake pedals was a real problem. Both required me to hover my feet over the pedal and use my entire leg to depress them. I simply wasn’t comfortable doing that. Don set me up with wooden blocks taped to the floor so that I could rest my heels and operate the pedals by pivoting each foot at the ankle, and that solved my primary fit-problem.

Don then went through the starting procedure for the car. It was simple enough. Once the car was out on the track and the fuel-feed was turned on, I was to simply flip an on-switch for the ignition and press the starter button. Yes, the starter button. While midgets traditionally, invariably and defiantly have required push-starting at tracks across the country forever, the Quad-4s retained their factory-starters. Even if there might remain functional reasons to prohibit starters on most midgets, Don wisely realized that at a track where every other car in every division utilized self-starters, expecting them to tolerate push-trucks was pushing his luck as well.

It was no big deal. These weren’t exotic race-motors. Some competitors pulled motors from wrecks and didn’t even bother freshening them up before going out and winning races. Not that there weren’t race-parts available; they’d just been proven unnecessary – at least on the quarter-mile of The Whip. So there was no reason a stock starter couldn’t get the job done. Of course, these still were midgets. There weren’t any clutches, so you made sure no one was in your way before you fired your car up, the starter driving you forward even before the motor could.

Don offered up more good advice.

“Don’t put your tongue between your teeth” he offered. “And breathe.”

He assured me he wasn’t kidding, but he didn’t have to. I wasn’t worried about biting my tongue, but I knew at some point I would indeed have to remind myself to stop holding my breath. Hey – bad habit.

“Mostly, have fun,” he said.

The first thing I did once motoring under yellow was thank my lucky stars I was actually in a midget once again. A real, actual midget. A real, actual, full-size midget. A real, actual, full-size midget – on dirt. There was no better place to be. Of course, then I had to drive the thing. It was time to pay attention. I now was well aware that in a racecar you had to boot it. This was serious business for the other folks on the track. These were veterans of the division unwinding from the off-season and getting things together to race another year or rookies taking their first laps in cars they planned to be racing all year. They were working. At the least I needed to stay the hell out of their way.

Not that I was out here to play movable chicane. Of course I was going to give this everything I had. Still, I was not about to go flying into a corner hoping I could find my way out of it. That wasn’t my style, even if the car under me had been my own. There’s a certain amount of simple craziness required for that approach, a craziness to which many successful racers can make a claim. But my approach is more one of gradually pushing the envelope with a little more respect for the edge of the cliff that always looms just to the outside of a full-speed lap. Dare to be careful, I guess, but there are successful racers who subscribe to this approach as well. I swear.

A big problem was that I still was thinking like a pavement racer. When the car would start to slip sideways my instinct was to correct it rather than driving it sideways with the throttle and a healthy level of counter-steer. This was a mistake I kept making over the course of three sessions on the track. I knew in my head it was wrong, but it didn’t matter once I was in the car. So while I was getting the car moving like a racecar, I still wasn’t getting close to what it could do on dirt.

Still, I evidently wasn’t embarrassing myself (You have to be aware of how foolish you look to be embarrassed by it, but anyway…). I evidently wasn’t embarrassing Don, either. About halfway through the afternoon, he surprised me yet again with a new question.

“I still don’t have a driver,” he began. “You want to drive it opening night?”

Hey, even a pro has to race for fun every once in a while. I KNOW he enjoy’s driving in the Chili Bowl more than he does in any Sprint Cup race. Even Martinsville is producing snooze-fests these days.

In a similar vein, I look forward to seeing ACT at NHMS in September. What I REALLY look forward to is more open-wheel racing at NH. I know that’s not what the place was made for, but it IS what the place is best for. I keep hoping.

I won’t even get started about “Digger…”

Have you noticed times are kind of tough? Have you noticed my talent for stating the bleedingly obvious?

Every one of us involved in motor racing is worried about the future of our sport. We realize that even at its lowest levels it’s a cost-intensive pursuit. Almost invariably the amount of success a racer experiences is directly influenced by how much the racer spends.

It goes without saying that racers are looking to tighten their belts. So are tracks and promoters. Fans, too, even if that means packing a lunch instead of hitting the concessions. But it’s worrisome that many of us simply will pack it in. How far might car-counts drop? And attendance? And how many racetracks might simply lock their gates if the answers to these two questions become too depressing?

We all have to do our part to sustain racing through these difficult times (Now, there’s a couple of cliches packed into one sentence, eh?). At Shorttrack we’re doing what we can. We’ve offered a couple of deals to advertisers who might find it difficult to maintain their traditional ad budgets. Indeed, some advertisers have begun to realize that high-value in advertising increasingly is being found not in racing’s stratosphere but down here close to the roots of racing. Good for them, and good for us.

We also, with this issue, have lowered our standard subscription-rate to 14 bucks. We think that’s a pretty good deal and an inexpensive way to keep up with racing around the region. Hey, we’re committed to racing in New England and the Northeast, and we want to help you maintain your commitment, too.

Editorially we’re offering plenty of examples of how expense can be controlled. Walt Scadden offers some insightful suggestions in his column in this issue. Bill DeButler provides a forward-thinking example of what two Maine tracks are doing in his. And our Dirt, Cheap midget project is all about having a great racing experience for – well – dirt cheap.

It’s frustrating that Congress is falling all over itself to bail out the rich greedy fools who got us into this mess but have dragged their feet to assist folks of more modest means. C’mon, how can money from that humongous bailout go to NASCAR for track-development? Give me a break. Those who know have said for years that the Cup Series was growing way too fast. Now NASCAR sees the well drying out, with teams booting workers faster than GM. We’re just trying to have a little fun. Your guys probably work for free. They just want to make their mortgage payments. The nerve.

I do worry that NASCAR-style short-sightedness among shorttrack racing’s “haves” could hurt the efforts of shorttracks and promoters trying to make racing more affordable for the have-nots. For years I’ve witnessed race-teams with big budgets fight tooth-and-nail to maintain their right to outspend competitors or undermine any creative tinkerer who came up with a cheap way to be even almost competitive. Heaven help the guy who comes up with cheap power in a group where the top teams spend more for one motor than they make in a season of winning. That guy risks being run out of town on rails. Or maybe the back of his flatbed “transporter.”

Yet these are the guys who can do the most to sustain shorttrack racing. They’re the ones who stick around through thick and thin. No one would devote so much time and energy to such a hopeless pursuit if they could be scared away by economic concerns. Besides, there are five, maybe ten have-nots for every have in any division. The same is true of the country, by the way.

And yet in racing as in America, it’s the haves who have the power.

So here’s an appeal to all you haves. Have a heart. Take a look at your own operation, and compare it to the guys who fill your fields. If one of your motors costs more than everything the guy next to you just towed into the pits behind his clapped-out pick-up, maybe it’s time to write some more equality into the rules. If guys line up to buy tires you just peeled off your chrome rims, maybe the playing field is a bit tilted.

A level playing field is supposed to be the point, ain’t it? You can outspend your competition, but is that really what winning is about? Maybe, in these times, it could become the very definition of losing, for your whole club.

Who will you beat then?

Terry Eames has now put himself back at the helm of the track he bought only a few years ago. That by itself creates a real uphill climb. It’s hard to justify (or afford) a modern mortgage on a shorttrack. The ones that seem to hang in there are the ones that have been in the family (whether personal or corporate) long enough to pay off their own notes. But Eames bought in at a particularly rough time – both for shorttrack racing and for the mortgage market.

Multiply all that with the mess he’s been left with after leasing the place off the last couple of years. There may not be a shovel big enough to pick up the garbage he’s left with.

I’ll give Terry the benefit of the doubt – he means well, even if he has promoter’s miopia when viewing the challenges he faces. So he better have a big benefactor up his sleeve, because the business will hit the fan in about five minutes, as measured when you don’t have enough time.  Believe me, I know of what I speak, and I won’t ever criticize anyone for not keeping a going concern going these days – not with my track record.

But I wish him well.