Drag Racing Online - "Martin Chronicles"

THE TRANSITION

Dragracingonline.com celebrates its first anniversary this coming August 25. We plan on doing a special section in the September issue noting this dubious achievement, and you can look forward to some colorful prose chronicling how the bones of the competition snapped like dry reeds as the DRO steamroller flattened everything on its way to the No.1 spot in net and print media.

In that year's span, a lot has happened in this corner. A 1,800-mile move from Los Angeles to the St. Louis area has led to lifestyle changes of bewildering frequency and intensity. Food provides a good example. When it comes to steaks, chops, ham, barbeque, and bratwurst, this region is most aptly referred to as "the country's midsection." Those staples are dialed in to perfection here and much better than those offerings on the left coast. Consequently, it's not surprising that a lot of my new neighbors are really fat. However, if one had to survive on the ethnic foods here as they do in L.A., i.e. pizza, tacos, sushi, whatever, St. Louis-more properly the suburbs such as O'Fallon-would look like a concentration camp. They are, with one or two exceptions, uniformly awful. In general, pizza here is a can of tomato sauce poured on a giant saltine cracker. To the locals, "garlic" is "Big Daddy's" last name. Anyway…

Since I've made the above move and become a DRO regular, I've had the chance to digest the world from a different perspective, lining me up perfectly with our magazine's motto. Living in St. Louis and being a drag race fan is different than living in L.A. and being one, and that division filters down through a lot of my life's interests.

For one thing, there is much more racing out here than there is in L.A., all kinds of racing ranging from sprints and modifieds to drag races. Racing in L.A. is confined to a few drag races, carjackings, and high-speed police chases. For instance, two weekends from now, the Burkster and I plan on hitting the famed World Series of Drag Racing at Cordova Dragway. If we lived in L.A., our next drag race would be the Winston World Finals at Pomona in November. No discernible similarities there.

Another big difference, and this affects the races, is the weather. In Southern California, the weather can stay the same for five years; here in St. Louis, it DOES change every 15 minutes. I used to think that the "if you don't like the weather, stick around, it'll change" adage was some cornball regionalism, but that ain't so. In one four-day span this year, it snowed, it sunny-ed, it rained, and then flooded. I've never seen anything like that. To hell with the drags, let's go where the action is and watch the Weather Channel.

And speaking of the drags, whether living in L.A. or St. Louis, one thing has become painfully clear to this fan, who has occupied a seat both inside and outside the castle walls of the big hot rod association. 'Tis my opinion that never has there been a greater dearth of leadership at the top than currently for both groups. If there ever was a time for an emergency call to Don King or Vince McMahon on how to hustle up the act, now is the time to head for the Bat-phones. Both NHRA and IHRA give off the uneasy vibe that neither one of them really has a solid grip on what's going on. They both could probably organize a picnic, but a sport as diversified and as troubled as drag racing ... I dunno.

Neither organization would get much help from the local press in St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a "home-r" newspaper (way, way, way too much Cards, Rams, Blues, River City Rascals coverage) that only gets in any meaningful drag race results when Gateway Int'l has a show. If there is no racing in town, the reader drowns under a million column inches of whatever sport is in season.

A daily L.A. Times had diversified content that rivaled a big circulation magazine and usually had complete stats coverage. The St. Louis sports section does shed its small-town "booster" image with a weak stats page and that's where you get golf coverage, but drag racing…forget it. Now in the case of NHRA, that might be the association's fault, because when Steve Earwood ran the NHRA press department they had qualifying and results in everything from the New York Times to the Fort Picayune Crawdaddy.

As for IHRA coverage, it's as rare as an 1804 type 2 silver dollar in any paper. It seems they killed their carrier pigeon years ago, and have no use for outside media.

Leaving aside drag racing, there are many other divergencies for little Chrissie. In the bad column for St. Louis is the literacy problem. There are almost no book stores or big newstands anywhere in the suburbs (there is a Border's in St. Charles), forcing the locals to the supermarkets for their reading. There they find the usual glossy covered, mind-numbing, Elvis-sighting, crotch-oriented, star-worshipping, body-building, and youth-slanted swill that has contributed so mightily to stupefying America for a presidential election like the current one where the two candidates show all the depth of a birdbath.

(Aside: If word gets back to me that any of you have taken the bait and voted for either of these dressed-for-the-stage, air-headed, pampered, coached, hand puppets, god help you. I mean how transparently phony do things have to get before you stamp your ballot 'No Confidence.')

To the good, though, are the people and prices in St. Louis. In St. Louis, it is not at all impossible to find $1 or $1.50-a-glass beer, $1.00 hot dogs and $2.00 cheeseburgers. In L.A., you get to look at the labels for those prices.

The folks here are straight-forward and have as much character as any group of people I've met. I lunch at a place called the Living Room Lounge, right across the street from the Jeff & Kay Burk Memorial Building for Condemned Journalists where our magazine originates, and never fail to hear some wild tale of local origin. It's sort of like Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" in coveralls. Absolutely love it.

All in all, it's been quite a transition this past year. It's been a real hardship, but given the fact that we at DRO have taken over, it should only be a matter of days before we're banking the millions we so richly deserve.

photo by Jeff Burk