Way Off the Road by Bill Geist

Author:Bill Geist
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780767927765
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

School bus racing captures some of the free spirit of the old auto racing days, before there were pretty boys who’d attended public speaking classes driving the cars on major networks; before there was a line of NASCAR Harlequin romance novels and NASCAR Elizabeth Arden cologne! (Do you smell burnt rubber?)

This Friday in Bithlo seems a lot like a Friday night I spent at the stock car races in Asheville, North Carolina, where a hotshot from another town had come to challenge the local champ in a dramatic showdown. The local champ’s father, also a driver, got right in front of the out of towner during the race and jammed on his brakes, causing the challenger to crash into him. As the local boy cruised past the “accident” to win the race, the out of towner and the father engaged in a fistfight. When this happened we were standing on the roof of the grandstand trying to get a good shot of the track and our veteran producer, Joan Snyder, yelled to the cameraperson: “Shoot that! Roll!” When the cameraperson didn’t respond quickly enough, the aging but spry producer grabbed the cameraperson, some thirty-five to forty years her junior, by the arm and shouted, “Shoot that now or I’ll throw you off this goddamned roof!”

I liked the Friday night races, especially the fight and the Run What You Brung race, which anybody could enter. A young man raced his father’s pristine Lincoln Town Car, which was sideswiped several times and hit from behind. Imagine Dad’s surprise the next morning.

School bus racing also has a bit of the feel of the monster truck races we attended over in Tampa, where legendary cameraman Izzy Bleckman was having a tough evening. First he was hit by hard, line-drive dirt balls that fly off the big wheels. He came to me looking quite concerned and said, “We’ve got a problem. We’re shooting the crowd and nobody’s got teeth.” I liked the intermission when Spanky Spangler was dropped in a car from a seven-story crane onto a van. His chosen profession. And I liked that we ran into him after the races at a nearby Denny’s and saw him being hounded for autographs.

And there is much the same feeling here in Bithlo that there was in Naples, Florida, at the Swamp Buggy Races, where a fan told me, “This is as redneck as it gets!” May be. Naples is now a swanky boomtown, but every so often the old Naples rears its head and roars. Deafening, streamlined, 1,000-horsepower racers with large, thin racing tires blast through a course of muddy water a foot deep—except for the menacing “sippi hole,” where the brown water comes up to the driver’s chin. Whose big idea was this? Unlike school bus racing, this event actually has historical roots. Hunters used to outfit old trucks with fat, oversize tires and drive them into the muck of the Everglades when they went after deer, wild hogs, and turkeys. This being America,

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