Pilot's Log

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I do this every so often, of course.

Christmas Dinner was a few hours ago, and my brother is probably back at his place in Asheville by now. I'm actually wearing the better portion of my gifts: a pair of dungaree slacks (from my parents), a golf shirt (from a family friend), and the aforementioned Hoodie of Elemental Stevil. Bro gave me a mini-poster of The Blues Brothers. I usually play Elwood to his Joliet Jake, but he drives more like Elwood than I do.

You should have seen him when we went to NASCAR Speedpark the other day. It was too dismal weatherwise to go to the kart tracks, but we used their driving arcade games and he drove the simulator car. (As I'd had such bad luck when I drove the sim at Mall of America, I opted to just spectate this time.) He chose the Indianapolis track--and let's just be kind to him and say it wasn't pretty driving.

Three DVDs to choose from for tonight's watching. Gosh...how will we decide?

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

This image was doctored from an offical photo from a NASCAR press kit. Doctored in that I removed the marque's logo and decals from the front of the car. I'll be using this image to doodle out ideas for elsemarque cars, machines that are possible but unlikely.

My list, so far:
* Buick LaCrosse
* Pontiac G6
* Saturn Aura
* Nissan Altima
* Mitsubishi Galant
* Honda Accord
* Hyundai Sonata
* Kia Optima (tho' the Amati is better as a style choice--the combination of the rounded headlamps and the eggcrate grill...)

I could also theoretically add Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and other European marques too, but those are a little harder to justify. Besides, I doubt many of the marques I've listed have "normally-aspirated" V8 engines in the 5.7~5.9 Liter displacement range, which is the requirement for Nextel Cup cars. The size and mechanics of the engine is another anachronism in NASCAR. You have engines that are more often seen in pickup trucks and SUVs than in passenger cars. *shrug* Such is tradition.

FP

1) "Pit Boys". A high school football team (from a school in a poor neighborhood where few graduates ever get to higher education) loses their try at the playoffs. On the way back home, their bus comes upon an RV broken down on the side of the road, so the boys decide to help the RV out. When they get the RV back running, they find out that the RV is owned by a friend of an up-and-coming race car driver. The driver shows up at the school and tells the Senior boys "keep your grades up, graduate--and then spend a season as my pit crew. Do that and I'll pay for college or tech school!" And so the rest is them learning their jobs on the box, dealing with life on the circuit and the hassles from rival teams, and the heartbreak of mistakes and changes in fortune. But the Pit Boys eventually become hometown heroes--and the driver rewards their faith and effort more ways than one.

2) "Regularly Scheduled Programming". It's a small TV station in a small market. So small that the station doesn't have a news department and 99% of the programming is syndicated or infomercials. The central characters are the techies who keep the station operating 24/7.

Finally found what I was seeking. Took me long enough.

Hey.

In my pursuit of info about non-Legends quasi-jalopy motorsports, I got an education this weekend on the various flavors of "Late Model" race cars, which are basically NASCAR clone-oids and very popular around North America. Some of the leagues running these cars specify "perimeter" chassis (the same as all of NASCAR's three main circuits [Nextel Cup, Busch Grand Nat and Supertrucks]) or "offset" chassis (which have a lower center of gravity...but aren't all that great on courses that happen to have RIGHT turns) but most have the same size engines. Well, "Super" Late Model allows bigger motors than NASCAR, but I haven't seen too many leagues for those.

And of course, another determining characteristic on these cars is the material from which the bodies are constructed: Steel, or Aluminum, or Fiberglass, or "Downforce" (a combination of Aluminum and Fiberglass parts--which has been outlawed by many leagues).

Calling these things "Stock Cars" has lost all meaning. Back when I was born, the sport was already moving away from using street-legal cars that had minimal safety modifications done to them. In the Seventies, when I began following NASCAR as a kid, it had gotten to the procedure of taking a body and chassis from a production car factory and building a race car from that.

By the mid-Eighties, the standard perimeter chassis had emerged, and the bodies were now coming from companies that had nothing to do with Detroit's Big Three, with designs that only give lip service to the vehicles of the same names on the road. Now, only the engines are theoretically the same as those found on production cars...and I'm sure the ones made for NASCAR and ASALM have features that aren't street-legal and lack features meant FOR street-legal cars too.

Used to be that a manufacturer would be forced to build a thousand or so street-legal cars of a design for that design to be kosher for the racetrack. Could a street-legal car even be built from a steel NASCAR racer body now? Maybe I should ask Monster Garage.

FP

Hey.

I'm keeping this one short as it smells like there is a horrid combination of temperature inversion and grass fire in this neighborhood. (What is it about nicotine that keeps people smoking? All smoke does for me is give me a headache.)

As anybody who is a fan of American auto racing is aware, this is the last season of the NASCAR Nextel (ex-Windsor) Cup in which driver Rusty Wallace will be competing. He's "retiring" by buying up new car dealerships in the East Tennessee area (and perhaps in the Carolinas as well) and he's already appearing as a pitchman in the advertisements for them.

And so at the dinner table (where we almost always have the TV on as we eat) we commented on the clothes he wore in the latest ad: a big loud tropical print shirt. Mom asked (sarcastically), "Where do you think he got that?"

"What would you rather see him wear? A nice business suit and tie?" I rhetorically asked. "His race car driver jumpsuit?"

"The jumpsuit would probably look better on him."

"Fat chance seeing it," I told her. "He's sponsored by Miller Lite Beer and if he wore that, he'd be advertising the beer too. It's probably not allowed."

"Maybe they could dummy up one, with just his name on it...?"

I know, this is thinking too much about the issue. At least he isn't singing a jingle or pounding on the hoods of the cars like other TV hucksters I've known. I'm sure he's a really nice guy too. (And having him on there beats the silly stuff the dealership had been doing before--magic tricks!)

FP