Ralph Nader, to name one motor-vehicle-safety prig, would have been appalled.
Granted, the guys driving the distressed automobiles wore helmets, safety belts and homemade shin protectors, and, granted, the clay track they drove on was purposely damp, functioning as God`s, or at least the track owner`s, speed trap.
But the point of this whole exercise was, at any speed, something far removed from concepts such as safety and even common sense. It was to purposely cause one crumbling monument to 1970s engineering (and the bulkier the better) to run vigorously into another, producing the kind of grinding noises and fiery special effects that inspire driver`s-ed teachers to scan the help-wanted ads.
These accidents-and they came with more frequency than on Boston streets in the first hour of a new year-were, in the phrase that absolutely must appear this early in this story, no accident.
Over the course of three hours last Friday night, at the Santa Fe Speedway in the southwest suburbs, teams of drivers took turns ramming each other, vying, mostly, for bragging rights within the tight circle of people who follow this sort of thing: fellow drivers, friends, family members, junkyard owners.
The rules of this road are simple, although different from those of the demolition derbies you may remember from 1970s Wide World of Sports broadcasts. In those, if memory functions properly, the last car capable of motion claimed victory.
This was, instead, a team competition, run, as driver ”Crazy” Art Scarbro put it, ”exactly like roller derby,” except with roomier skates and a few thousand dollars in prize money at stake. Known as the Tournament of Destruction, it sees eight teams go head-to-head in a single-elimination tourney until one team comes out on top. To win a round, one among your team of four cars must complete five laps around the track before any of your opponent`s cars can do so.
Within these guidelines, almost anything goes (although, by the end of a match, it is not unusual for almost nothing to be going). Drivers can race backward across the center of the track to take out opponents or putter about aimlessly in cars barely running.
The one thing they cannot do is purposely collide head on. This, at least, is what the rules say. In practice, though, the drivers say it is an acceptable technique. ”That`s what it`s about. You race demos, you know,”
said Scarbro, 26, a mechanic by trade and a driver for the Mean Green Machine team that won this year`s summer-long tournament, which ended Friday.
Driving demolition cars, he said, ”is like getting in a pit and fighting. It`s like a video game, except you can get hurt and you don`t put a quarter in. It`s like chariots, except we`ve got 460 horses.”
As he spoke, teammate Paul ”Polar Bear” Pilarski was sitting on the folded-down back gate of Scarbro`s pickup truck, offering irrefutable proof that drivers do get in head-ons. Dangling his damaged and shoeless left leg off the edge, his jeans split open below the knee to accommodate the bandage around his calf, he alternated between wobbling with his thumb and forefinger two newly loosened teeth and taking contemplative drags of a cigarette.
Someone handed him his cap, and he wondered aloud if his head was swollen too: He had to loosen it (the cap) a couple of notches to make it fit.
The crash in question happened in the competition`s final race, as Pilarski tried to zip around the track while his teammates ran interference for him. But John Fencl, driver of the opposing Sting team, broke through, and suddenly Pilarski saw Fencl coming straight at him.
”I saw that I couldn`t get by him,” Pilarski said afterward. ”So I just took him head on.”
It was an extraordinary crash, ”what we call a death hit,” said Scarbro, whose brother Steven, 17, drove for the first time this year, under the nickname Scarbro gave him: ”The Human Sacrifice.”
”That was about 50, man,” said Pilarski, referring to the number of miles per hour he estimated both cars were going.
”You duck, and you just hope that you live through it,” said Fencl, owner of an auto-repair shop.
In terms of strategy, Fencl got the best of it. Although his team was penalized one lap for the rules violation, the collision took out Mean Green`s best-running car, and Sting driver Matt Torphy went on to finish out the necessary five laps virtually without incident, making Sting the evening`s champ.
In terms of injuries, though, Pilarski was the winner. Described by his dad, Ed, as ”a hard-headed Polack like me,” he declined to go to the hospital that evening, saying he`d get a checkup the next day.
Fencl, meanwhile, emerged from the crash muttering, ”I broke my (pound sign)$(at) nose. I broke my (pound sign) $(at) nose, and my lip and my face.” He almost fell several times and took turns saying, ”I`m all right” and,
”I`m not all right.” Asked if he`d be heading to the hospital, he said,
”Hell, no. I`m gonna go out and party now.”
But minutes later Fencl would pass out for about 30 seconds. He was carted off the grounds in an ambulance, heading to La Grange Memorial Hospital with a tube in his arm feeding 9 percent saline solution into his blood. He had a probable broken nose and probable concussion, said paramedic Chuck Niemeier, who does standby duty during events at the track.
Although track officials say no one has been killed, Niemeier noted that Fencl is ”by far not the worst we`ve had.”
The event is a recipe for automotive stew. By the time each match would end, the course looked like a vision from a Detroit apocalypse: cars from that city`s glory days painted in cartoon colors and strewn randomly about the track, separated from incidental parts such as tailpipes and bumpers, and spewing steam or smoke or sitting silently, all of it infused with a sort of grim lyricism by the powerful overhead lights and the banks of cheering spectators.
Among the several thousand in the crowd: a Downer`s Grove assistant gas station manager; a father-son church group from Highland, Ind.; and a man wearing a sweatshirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead and blood dripping down. About eight of Scarbro`s sisters were on hand, too, cheering violently.
Although the event, an annual occurrence at Santa Fe since 1972, sounds, in the abstract, vaguely horrific, it is, in fact, thrilling, as visceral in its way as a bullfight. (Indeed, just as at a bullring a team of horses comes out and drags off the dead bull, at the Tournament of Destruction teams of tractors and utility vehicles come out and haul off the dead cars.)
In this laboratory for demonstrations of the principles of mechanical Darwinism, it is important to have experienced drivers, but it is almost more important to just be able to find enough cars. En route to winning the year`s championship, Mean Green went through about 90 autos in the eight nights of competition: Ford LTDs, Mercury Marquis, old station wagons, ”big cars with big strong front ends,” in the words of one driver.
”We just find them in people`s yards, or dead on the street,” said driver Pete Ryan.
”It helps to have a junkyard sponsor,” Torphy added.
They try to buy them for less than $100, and then put in as much as 24 hours per car and an additional $150 or so fixing them up. This involves not only, in many cases, getting them running again, but also taking out any parts that could drain the car`s power or disable it. You remove the radiator, the power steering and the alternator, move the gas tank and battery into the back seat, and expose the ignition wires so that all you have to do to start the car is twist them together.
”You don`t know how hard it is to do this and earn a living,” Scarbro said. ”It`ll burn you out.”
You tie the doors and hoods shut, knock out all the windows, and sometimes, as Scarbro did before the last race on the muddy Friday night, you put your feet up against the windshield and give a good hard shove, the better to actually see what`s going on.
”Anything that can put the car out, we take it out,” said John Ryan, 22, a welder and veteran driver for the Rude Awakening team.
They paint the cars in team colors, giving them numbers and, often, personal flourishes such as nicknames (on one car, ”Ivan the Terrible”), girlfriends` names (”Valerie”), belligerent sayings (”Impact This” and
”Young to Die, Man!,” the ”Too” having been crumpled to the point of illegibility), and fatalistic graphics (a bull`s-eye).
It helps to have good mechanics, and it really helps to have good sponsors so you`re not spending too much of your own money on the zero-sum game of fixing cars to wreck them. In Mario DiPaolo, the 42-year-old owner of Chicago`s Mario`s Italian Lemonade, Mean Green has one of the best.
”I don`t want to buy a boat. I don`t want to buy a Ferrarri. I just want to buy demo cars for these guys,” said DiPaolo, who said he drove demo cars in his youth. ”These are the greatest guys in the world with the greatest sport in the world.”
Asked how much he spends, he said, ”I don`t keep track. If I did, everybody in my family would think I`m really crazy.”
Crazy is a word that comes up often in discussion of this field of human endeavor. Niemeier, the paramedic, said, ”I ask them all the time why they do this. I haven`t got a good answer yet.”
”It`s a mystery to everyone,” said Torphy, who owns a towing company.
”It really is.” He did say, though, that ”it`s the best feeling in the world when you know you`ve got a guy” lined up for a hit.
Scarbro said he gets nervous to the point of vomiting before a race.
”You get that scared feeling like, `Why am I doing this, man?` And you do it anyway. You`re like two people: the guy that gets in the car and the guy that`s driving. As soon as that flag goes down, you`re a demon.”
Once on the track, he said: ”It`s like going down the wrong side of the interstate. That`s what it is, man. Things are a blur. You don`t think about getting hurt. You just think about going faster.”
There is strategy involved, everything from assigning people to play the opponents man to man, to a sort of zone defense. ”It`s like a chess game,”
said John Ryan. ”You know, take out this guy, take out that guy. You gotta click as a team, though.”
There is even strategy in where you hit a car. ”Hit him on the wheel, he`s not gonna go anywhere,” said Torphy. ”Hit him in the firewall, you can put out the steering. Notoriously, Fords and Mercs are weak in the trunk area.”
But, said Torphy: ”At the end of the year, you kind of run short of strategy. Run short of cars too.”
