Memory loss
This column earlier this week from Charlotte's Tom Sorenson cracked me up.
He starts off by declaring his love for the Toyota Camry - it's dependable, reliable, etc. etc. And then this: "The Camry is many things, but a race car is not among them."
My first response was: Dude, have you ever heard of the Ford Taurus?
The Ford Taurus might have been the most boring car ever built. Just look at this picture ... look at it ... you're getting sleepy ... zzzzzzzzzz ...
Huh? What? Oh, yeah. There are more Taurus pictures here if you're really hopped up on caffeine. The Fusion, meanwhile, is only marginally better despite all of that cheap chrome-y-looking plastic glued to the front.
Then comes this howler: "This is not what NASCAR's founders had in mind. The sport began in the mountains, all ingenuity, tinkered-up engines and homemade speed."
Actually, that's exactly what NASCAR had in mind, at least way back in the beginning. Bootleggers drove the 1920s and '30s equivalent of the Taurus and the Camry -- namely, the Model T and the Model A. Sure, bootleggers had to be fast, and those V8 engines, super-strong struts and shocks and other modifications helped those cars outrun the law.
But those were all things you couldn't see unless you popped open the hood or crawled underneath. From the outside, the bootlegger cars had to look exactly like everything else on the road. How better to hide in plain sight? And on Sundays, they hauled the cars down to the track and raced 'em.
Sorenson wishes he could see a race with some American muscle cars. There's one series I can think of where the drivers race something that looks vaguely like a Trans Am, but we all know what just happened to IROC.
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