The other race place we lost was a street legal strip at Perris Auto Speedway. That’s southeast of Lake Dough-be-gone, if you are keeping score like Mary Moore likes to do. You might ask, why do I care about losing a street legal strip? I’m starting to think that our new generation of pretty-boy Funny Car ride stealers will come from the thousands of street legal racers that have been hitting the tracks around Southern California. Well. . .WERE hitting the tracks. The speedway said they will analyze the last two years and decide if they will resume running again next year or something to that effect. Baloney. 

Just last week our sister station KFWB news radio, one of the most acclaimed news radio stations in our area (except for Earl Rasmussen’s KRUD’s Sunday night Bass Count) ran a week long expose on Street Racing. I applaud this media outlet for calling it Street Racing and not Drag Racing. Finally! What I find questionable is how Perris can shut down when an officer with the Inland Empire Street Racing Task Force said they were exploring every avenue to eliminate illegal street racing. Can we insert the double-secret probation hearing scene from Animal House here? This same officer said they get upwards of 400 cars at a street race. Hmm, I guess we need fewer tracks. Yeah, that’ll do it. The state of California just spent $4.4 million to educate law enforcement on how to spot a hot rod. Hello? It would be better to spend the funds on finding another legal race place. The news report did mention that there were three race tracks in the area to race legally. Uh, scratch two of those!

Next, I had a chance to visit with a friend of mine down the street. Went to admire his rock garden. Of course the discourse going on in the Nostalgia scene came up. We beat a few dead horses and then some more and we decided that racers are bad at running things. I helpfully pointed out that we need to take a lesson from the PRO group that the big city racers follow and get a non-racer on the board of all of our little dysfunctional associations and maybe a CPA or some little old lady bookkeeper to run numbers and let the membership know what’s going on with the cash and…he interrupted to tell me the non-racer guy at PRO quit because he got mad at a racer. So it’s all racers again just like the nostalgia associations. Great. He also starting using big words like “Business Plan,” “Fiscal Responsibility to the Membership,” “External Management Resources to set up an Advisory Board”...and his voice tapered off while I looked at the pretty rocks in his garden and couldn’t help but think that yes, we are screwed…

And that’s the news from Lake Dough-be-gone, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children are all street racing…(More applause)…. 

Thanks for hanging out and spending time listening to our favorite radio show. I mentioned earlier that I was going to share my take on how to steer the West Coast nostalgia scene back on the right track. Looks like I got a little distracted. That's what happens when you start Getting Nostalgic - you get off track! Maybe next time.  

 

 

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