Walkabout – Rockingham IHRA SpringNationals
When “Jeffe” Burk called and said that “Berserko” Bob Doerrer was writing the main story about this event, I was enthusiastic. Doerrer has forgotten more about drag racing than I’ll ever know, and the guy can bring tears of fearful joy to your eyes from his antics. Plus, he can write a complete sentence. My “work” at the track was going to be a cakewalk.
I thought, “Cool I’ll hang out in the
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I soon discovered that Burk had other ideas about my “vacation” at the Rock strip. “Get out of the A/C’d press box and roam the track grounds and get up in the stands and in the pits and on the midway and pretend you are a fan at a drag race!” he bellowed in a voicemail. “Write me up what it’s like to attend an IHRA event in 2007 and quit whining!” Or some such inspirational speech. Perry White Burk ain’t – more like Patton with a keyboard and cellphone.
It was a novel idea – I haven’t attended a racing event as a fan in 25-plus years. Your perspective eventually gets warped when you’re at a race looking to complete a story line, keeping your eyes and ears open for what news is going on, standing at the line taking photos, or hunting down someone for a soundbite/quote, or griping about another oil-down and track clean-up. You start to think of racing as work. Bitchin’ work yes, but work nonetheless after you do it for years.
To cut to the point of this article: in my walking all over Rockingham on a fantastically sunny but cool NC spring day I re-found the basic appeal of attending a drag race. It’s fun. This might not sound revelatory, but I’m talking about getting together with 20,000 people whose main goal of the day (and night) is to have a good time, and if a drag race breaks out while they’re doing it, well alrighty then!
Even on Friday when the track wasn’t at its finest – “there wasn’t much racing” as a clutch of fans in the stands put it about all the oil downs and tire smoke and no real crazy fast times of the first day, people were tolerant and forgiving. One point that drag racing has over other motorized sports – if you didn’t care for one pairing of cars, there’s another coming soon. Perfect for today’s short-attention-span way of life. This clan was coming back the next day, and the next, with optimism and ready for excitement.
They declared they come every year and camp out in their motorhomes and “have one helluva time eatin’ too much, drinkin’ a little, and BS’en about everything.” As one of this veteran crew summed up the ground-level atmosphere, “you can stay in one of these campgrounds and get everything from a chicken salad sandwich to an ass-whuppin – take your pick.”
You can see a lot roaming around a drag race track. Rockingham’s Sportsman pits are among stands of Carolina pine trees and they seem more like a family campground than a collection area of racers and cars. The size of the towing rigs did surprise me – both in these pits and in the spectator overnight camping areas.
