Drive

by Tim Falconer

  5 Indianapolis Road Trips,

  Pilgrimages and Other Journeys

  MY CAR’S ODOMETER, which I’d switched from metric to imperial as soon as I’d crossed into the United States, hit 100,000 about 25 miles north of the Indiana border. As a little kid, I loved to watch when several of the numbers rolled over at the same time, and seeing 99,999 become 100,000 would have been a rare treat. But with the digital readout on today’s cars, most of the charm of that experience is lost.

  Twin racing stripes running through the vast, flat land, Indiana’s part of Interstate 69 is not particularly scenic, so I’m sure many people who often travel it complain of boredom, but it was all new to me and the cornfields, barns and farmhouses, richly lit by the afternoon sun, had a certain bucolic appeal. Having left Detroit and entered the Midwest and a state I’d never been to before, I was starting to feel like I was really on my road trip.

  Just one of many rituals, rites of passage and other momentous events in our lives that take place in cars, the road trip is one we’re likely to repeat again and again. After all, we can only lose our virginity in a car once. Perhaps the best thing about a road trip is that it’s not always clear what’s more important or more fun: the destination or the journey.

  In some ways, that was true of my current trip. I was on my way to Los Angeles, but I wasn’t sure of my exact route or what adventures I’d get into along the way. For now, I was solo, though several friends had promised to join me; in fact, I would be meeting the first one in St. Louis in a few days. But as I sped south, I imagined that many people had travelled this same highway on what were pilgrimages as much as road trips because, for many American race fans, Indianapolis is holy ground.

  ABOUT AN HOUR north of Indianapolis, I passed a billboard that proclaimed, “James Dean Country: Where Cool Was Born.” Dean, who was born in Marion, Indiana, and grew up in nearby Fairmount, was the poster boy for living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. After playing small parts in a few films, he starred in just three—East of Eden, Rebel without a Cause and Giant—before he crashed his Porsche 550 Spyder and died at the age of twenty-four.

  Certainly death by car is not rare, and famous people don’t get any special treatment. Big names who’ve died on the road include author Albert Camus; journalist David Halberstam; painter Jackson Pollock; General George Patton; hockey players Tim Horton, Pelle Lindbergh and Keith Magnuson; musicians Marc Bolan, Eddie Cochran and Harry Chapin; actress Jayne Mansfield; actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly; and the celebrity that our celebrity-obsessed society still mindlessly obsesses over, Princess Diana.

  Rebel Without a Cause hadn’t even hit the theatres when Dean died on his way to Salinas, California, where he planned to race his sports car, nicknamed “Little Bastard.” This was little more than trivia to me when I was younger and going through my James Dean phase, because I was never a race fan. As a thirteen-year-old, I went with a friend and his father to the Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport, where the Flying Scot, Jackie Stewart, won. I enjoyed myself, but watching cars roar around a track was no threat to my love of hockey. In fact, it seemed a bit pointless and I never attended another race. And given that a weekend of stock car racing means burning six thousand gallons of leaded 110 octane racing fuel in machines without emissions controls, hurtling cars around in circles now seems worse than pointless.

  Not everyone feels that way. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (better known as NASCAR) is the top spectator sport in the United States and ranks behind only the National Football League in television ratings, while Formula One is an obsession in Europe and elsewhere (just about everywhere in the developed world, except North America). Auto racing has many fans in Canada—I know a few—but it is really just a subculture, so I had little sense of its seminal role in the love of the car around the globe.

  Humans have always competed to get there first—either on our own (running or swimming or skiing) or in some kind of conveyance (chariot, sled, canoe)—so it was only natural that we would test each other in cars too. Initially, auto races were performance tests to determine who’d come up with the best design, so durability was as important as speed. The first race took place in France in 1894. A year later, Frank Duryea won on a 54-mile course in Chicago. With an average speed of 7.3 miles per hour, he beat three other gas-powered cars and two electrics in ten hours and twenty-three minutes.

  Early on, just finishing was an accomplishment, but before long that wasn’t enough. From 1900 to 1905, national teams vied for the Gordon Bennett Cup in races between European cities. France won four times and auto racing became a popular spectator sport in that country. So popular that in 1906 the Automobile Club de France held a Grand Prix race at Le Mans. Today, many countries—including the United States—host Formula One races (F1 is the designation of the class of open-wheeled cars in Grand Prix racing) and the cars exceed two hundred miles per hour. Stateside, the first major trophy for auto racing was the Vanderbilt Cup. The inaugural race, held on the dirt roads of Long Island in 1904, attracted a large crowd. The Indianapolis 500, which started in 1911, is a two-hundred-lap race held every Memorial Day. It became a phenomenon of American culture and one of the most popular sporting events in the world, with more than 250,000 fans in the stands on race day and millions more watching on television. Despite that heritage, infighting led to a split within the racing class, and the subsequent dilution of competition means the Indy 500 is no longer the biggest spectacle on the racing calendar.

  While many auto sports—ranging from road racing to drag racing to demolition derbies—have their fans in the United States today, none can touch NASCAR. The roots of stock car racing can be found in the bootlegging business that flourished during Prohibition. The moonshine runners tuned their cars so they’d go faster and handle better on the winding Appalachian mountain roads and, if need be, to outrun the cops (and after Prohibition, the tax agents). Inevitably, they started racing these cars. By the early 1950s, stock car racing was catching on with Southern spectators. In “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” a 1964 Esquire story about the legendary whiskey runner turned racer, Tom Wolfe writes: “Here was a sport not using any abstract devices, any bat and ball, but the same automobile that was changing a man’s own life, his own symbol of liberation, and it didn’t require size, strength and all that, all it required was a taste for speed, and the guts.”

  At first, the rest of America paid little attention to country boys wildly racing old cars on dirt tracks. “It was immediately regarded as some kind of animal irresponsibility of the lower orders,” observes Wolfe. “It had a truly terrible reputation. It was—well, it looked rowdy or something.” But once Detroit automakers saw an opportunity to build brand loyalty with this crowd and started pumping money into the sport, stock car racing took off nationally.

  Formula One, with its European roots, is all about the glamour, but NASCAR still maintains its rebellious “good old boy” image. Of course, that belies the amount of money involved: in addition to millions of dollars in prize money, the best drivers sign lucrative endorsement deals. The sponsors aren’t just autorelated companies either. Despite the Bubba reputation, the sport has a huge following in New York and Los Angeles and about 40 percent of the fans are women, so even the marketers of packaged goods such as Tide want in on the action. Meanwhile, NASCAR merchandise is a multibillion-dollar business.

  As the name suggests, the cars used in this class of racing were originally stock: they were the same Chevys, Fords and Dodges anyone could buy, except that the racers had souped them up so they’d go faster. Today, for reasons of both performance and safety, only cars—some of them (gasp) from Japanese manufacturers—that have been specially designed and built for racing and feature little or nothing in the way of production parts run in NASCAR races. But they do carry the names of models regular folk might check out in showrooms.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE leaving Detroit, I’d gone to the New Hudson offices of Pratt
& Miller, an engineering firm that’s home to the Corvette Racing team. Steven Wesoloski, GM’s road racing manager, wore khakis and a blue button-down-collar shirt, his hair and goatee were going grey prematurely and he looked a bit like Tim Robbins. Armed with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, he’d spent ten years as part of the Corvette production staff, working on projects such as how to make the car stiffer. But after a decade sitting at a computer, he wanted a change. Although he was only a casual racing fan and didn’t know that much about it, he was prepared to learn. Soon, he was hooked; in fact, he told me, “There aren’t many jobs inside GM that are as fun as mine.”

  Launched in 1999, the Corvette Racing team competes in the American Le Mans Series as well as at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans. Held annually since 1923, the endurance race takes place on the streets of the French town. Each car has three drivers, who take two-hour shifts behind the wheel. For GM, which aims to go global with its brands, it’s a high-profile showcase, especially on a continent where the top two sports are soccer and auto racing. Close to a quarter of a million fans show up to the event, which is broadcast on television around the world. In 2006, the Corvette Racing team won in the GT1 class for the fifth time in six years.

  For 24 Hours of Le Mans, the team sent over forty-seven crates with everything from engine parts to peanut butter, Mountain Dew and Pop Tarts. “The three things you can’t find in France,” Wesoloski noted. The bulk of the crew stayed for twenty-three days. “So we took a little bit of America with us.” An executive chef from a top Detroit restaurant cooked in return for a free hotel room and at each race, roughly thirty people, including management and public relations, support the two cars. Wesoloski and I chatted in one of the team’s two tractor-trailers for a while. It had a little office with chairs, a flat-screen TV and desk space for the chassis engineers to set up laptops allowing them to monitor data, plan for the next practice session and decide what to change on the car. The other truck had a similar room where the powertrain guys looked at their data. Each truck also carries one car and every spare part for it, including an engine and a gearbox. Wesoloski was a little coy about the team’s annual budget, though he allowed it was in the sixteen- to twenty-million-dollar range.

  The racing team program represents the bulk of the marketing for the brand. At one American Le Mans Series race, four hundred Corvettes showed up at the fan corral. That response—and the success on the track—means that unlike some other factory teams, who’ve pumped a lot of money into a racing program only to pull out a few years later, GM remains committed: “If we cancelled, I think the Ren Centre would be ringed with Corvettes in protest. That’s the following we have.” Of course, the Vette has long been a revered ride in the United States, so the program’s biggest challenge is in Europe, where many people once saw it as an obnoxious car favoured by pimps and drug dealers. “We’ve turned it around in just the six years I’ve gone,” Wesoloski said. “In 2001 it was still kinda touchy how we were going to be treated. Now we draw the biggest crowd around our pit stall.”

  On a tour of the Pratt & Miller facility, we stopped in the machine shop, where a yellow Corvette and a red Cadillac were under repair. (GM added the Caddy to the program in hopes of attracting younger people to the brand.) Wanting to control its own destiny, the team makes 90 percent of its own parts, from wheel nuts on up. A Cadillac starts with a piece of the production car, but custom suspension and components go on it; a Corvette C6.R starts with just the frame rails and includes just a couple of dozen production parts. If everything goes well, it usually takes about four months, without too much overtime, to go from an empty bedplate to a completed car.

  The team builds two C6.Rs a year, then auctions them off to private racing teams for about $750,000 each, approximately what it costs to build them. In the Race Shop, a man sat on the floor working on a skeletal frame of one of next year’s Vettes. Even though the place was clean and tidy, the employees all wore black T-shirts and black pants. “You could do khaki and white,” said Wesoloski, “but it would be ugly by the end of the day.”

  For all the marketing success, the biggest benefit of the program may be the trickle down of technology. Initially, the company had wanted to show off the performance of the Corvette by taking a production car, modifying it and taking it racing. But its competitors—notably the Dodge Viper, at the time—weren’t using production models. And once the team took the leap into technology development, it quickly saw the advantages. In the same way that the space program gave us advances in computer technology and medical equipment (not to mention the popularization of Tang), some of what GM learns from racing eventually ends up in the cars the rest of us drive. Carbon fibre has started to show up in production bodies, for example, and the racing team shares what it has learned about aerodynamics from wind tunnel tests as well as the ability to get more horsepower without moving to a bigger engine. “That’s why we chose the American Le Mans series—it allows the teams to explore the technology,” Wesoloski explained. “We can start with very few parts that are Corvette, expand on it and build on it. You’ve got to maintain a few key components and a few key measurements, but from there, as long as its intent is Corvette, it’s good.”

  After the tour, we popped into the office of Corvette Racing program manager Doug Fehan, which was full of memorabilia, including several photographs. Wesoloski pointed out one taken at Le Mans that showed, from the back, the Corvette team on the winners’ podium facing a mass of cheering fans. He has been on that podium and said it was an “unbelievable” experience. “There are almost a hundred thousand people down below and every one of them is yelling, ‘Throw your hat,’” he remembered. But there was no chance of that: “Winner’s Circle from Le Mans? Forget it. That hat is going on my shelf.”

  IN THE CLASSIC American film Animal House, the fraternity pledge Flounder shows up at Delta House in his brother’s car. It’s a gleaming black Lincoln Continental with the back doors hinged at the rear (suicide doors, as they were called). Before long, the frat boys declare, “Road trip!”

  Properly done, these journeys involve either family or friends. Family excursions tend to produce as many bad memories as good ones. For one thing, there’s all that dysfunction to deal with: kids fighting over primo spots in the car; “Are we there yet?”; nagging and odd or fascistic parental tendencies. One friend of mine and his brothers had to pee in a pickle jar because their dad never wanted to stop. Since I was doing an autumn trip, I didn’t see many families on long road trips, but Bill Bryson did when he drove around the country for his book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, and found them easy to spot because they looked as though they’d been in their car so long that they’d turned it into a home, even hanging their wash in the back. “There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back,” he writes. “You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past.”

  Once we get older, we get to leave the family behind and do road trips with our friends: to go skiing, to see a band, just to visit another town—the excuse doesn’t matter. When I was younger, I had nothing but some easy-to-blow-off classes to worry about. Now, at a more advanced age, I need a reason to pile into a car with pals and go someplace just for fun. But, as my wife regularly reminds me, it doesn’t take much.

  A road trip is a dangerous experiment in interpersonal relations. At every turn, it seems, dissension looms. There are uncomfortable hours in a car, shared hotel rooms and decisions to make on what to do and where to eat and drink. Throw in obnoxious tics and habits, differing political views and clashing personalities, and a road trip is a donnybrook waiting to happen.

  Against all odds, however, most go smoothly. And the ones that don’t usually fall into the “someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny” category. When I was at McGill, a Montreal car rental outlet advertised a sweet twenty-four-hour deal,
so my friends and I picked up a car at six o’clock in the morning and drove to Boston intending to be back by six o’clock the next morning. As soon as we crossed the border, we stopped to buy beer—please, please, don’t try this at home—and by the time we got to Beantown we were drunk and in rancorous moods.

  We managed to stumble out of a bar not too long after midnight and headed back to Canada. But with his passengers passed out, our designated driver missed a turn and ran out of gas somewhere in the mountains of New Hampshire. The only house with lights on was filled with other college kids on a ski trip. We played cards with them until they served breakfast and sent us on our way. Needless to say, we’d blown the cheap deal on the car.

  I’m older now, so the logistics aren’t as much of a problem. Getting along isn’t necessarily easier, though. On a trip to Cleveland, one guy decided that Saturday dinner was a good time to tell me what he really thought of me. It made for a chilly ride home. Fortunately, inane humour usually comes to the rescue when people are cooped up in a car. In the summer of 2000, four of us squeezed into an old Toyota and drove to Detroit. The excuse: to catch a couple of baseball games at Tiger Stadium before it closed.

  The driver was a crazed labour lawyer. He put a tape in the player, but then turned down the volume, preferring to rant against internet porn, dish scurrilous gossip and crow about his sexual prowess. Every now and then, for no particular reason, he’d bellow, “Heeeee struck him out.” His blue 1990 Toyota had, until a few months ago, belonged to his mother. Despite its four doors, there wasn’t much room in the back, where I, on account of my stubby little legs, sat. But the car did have a handicap-parking sticker. He insisted on its legitimacy because he’d had seven knee operations—the same number, he made sure to remind us, as Bobby Orr. Whenever we swung into a premium parking spot, we broke into gleeful laughter.