It’s the week before the Lenox Tools 301 at NHMS and they’re advertising raceday tix for $39 on TV!  They’re highlighting the fact that Three-Dog-Night will be playing and that a monster will eat a truck.  Tix for the whole weekend reportedly are $99. Needless to say this doesn’t say much for the appeal of Cup racing these days.

Here are the rules for Bob Webber’s new outlaw division at his crusty old Hudson Speedway. They’re published IN THEIR ENTIRETY!

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?”