The Lee Jennings machine coasted feebly, further pursuit seemed pointless. All Mendy could see and hear while peering around the 6-71 blower mounted in her direct field of vision was the driver in the other lane blithely black-tracking towards the finish line, creating his own guiding light by keeping the throttle pedal pushed to the floorboard, the fuel-stream coursing through the engine, and raw nitromethane oxidizing in the ether.

Then the candles went dark.

“Are you shitting me?” she asked rhetorically, into her balaclava and into the darkness. She had been off the throttle for a two full seconds, and her competitor was now almost 900 feet into his run before he clicked it. Offended as much as anything, she jumped back on the accelerator. This time, it took. The tires grabbed the groove like King Kong squeezing a tube of toothpaste. Her fuel dragster spit fire out of the pipes and began making traction, lickety split-like. In other words, it was absolutely hauling ass.

Her opponent was cruising, a round-win seemingly assured. Just at 1320 feet, however, he was passed by a hurricane. Under full power, Fry nipped him at the finish line.

In the shutdown area, during the obligatory driver-to-driver congratulations and handshake, the loser was inconsolable and pissed. “I had you the whole way,” he muttered. “I had you the whole way…”

“Yeah,” Mendy agreed. “You had me the whole way… until you didn’t.”

The meta-meaning? This anecdote wouldn’t have happened on a 1000-foot course. It took 1320 feet for this sort of outrageous action to transpire. By adhering to a shorter racetrack, not only is NHRA short-changing the fans’ and the drivers’ bang-per-buck. It is also creating fewer memories.
 
They sing about the quarter-mile for a reason.

*****

And yes, while leaving the March Meet at Famoso Raceway, the phone rang. On the other end of the connection was Steve Parker, calling from his live show, the aforementioned “World Racing Roundup” on Talk Radio One.

Parker was on the line to get a field interview, and to discuss the day’s historic drag race.

All of which was groovy, but what Steve wasn’t aware of was that at the exact moment he called to do our live-on-the-air race round-up, my ride home pulled up at the pit gate to pick me up and I was hastily thrown into the back seat of my pal Andy’s Mini-Cooper.  As we peeled rubber out of the parking lot and motored away from Famoso Raceway, the occupant of the passenger seat, Cuz’n Roy Gittens, in a futile attempt to make himself comfortable, rammed his seat back like a rocket-sled, jamming all ten of my toes under his ample weight. With absolutely no vertical clearance between the bottom of Roy’s seat and the floorboard of the Mini, it was like my feet were jammed in a vise before getting them dropped on by a bank safe.

It was all I could do not to scream in excruciating pain… As I took the call and attempted to answer Parker’s questions intelligently, if not just coherently, I made furious gestures with my one free hand, pounding on Roy’s seat and pointing forward. The other occupants of the car misinterpreted these gestures of distress — they thought I was giving them directions home. While still on the air, Roy and the driver, Strauber, were whispering for me to relax, “we know the way home, we go east on Famoso Road and then south on Porterville Highway.”

While still talking on the air, I pointed furiously and shook my head as if to say “no, no, no, this isn’t about directions” until my eyes began rolling into the back of my head and I just gave up, feebly trying to speak in a language that resembled English.

This went on for five minutes, the duration of my segment on Parker’s show.

During the interview, if my facts and figures were all wrong, I ask Mr. Parker and his listening audience to please forgive the errors, as I was in so much pain I was lucky to even string a sentence together, much less get my facts straight.

After extricating my toes from its bondage, I hung up the phone and let out a belated scream. I told Roy next time I am catching a ride home from the March Meet in Dave Benjamin’s Plymouth Satellite.

(An mp3 of the “World Racing Round-up” interview can be found here… The part where you get to hear a call-in interviewee answer questions while being toe-tortured begins 16 minutes into the broadcast.)

(Top Fuel Wormhole, the Cole Coonce Drag Strip Reader, Volume 1 is now on bookstore shelves. Peruse a copy at kerosenebomb.com.)