With only the authority of the Mars light on its roof, Race way Park’s jam car-a misshapen, smashed and trashed wreck of what used to be a station wagon- slips, slides and bludgeons its way through what originally was a pack of 54 stampeding, inches-apart stock cars to get the first disabled vehicle of the race off the track.
With tires and wheels careening across the track, bumpers and shards of metal flying into the night, the auto mortality stats continue to rise over the course of this two-hour, aptly named Enduro race. Time after time, the jam car plows through the melee to wherever a car is in trouble and not-so-gently pushes it off the track into the pits.
Not that far above it all, the seedy, bleacher-style stands evoke a high school that’s fallen on hard times. The spectators who come to revel in this modern version of a back-alley chariot race are mostly white and an ethnographer’s dream-young families with small children, lone high school girls looking like they’re looking for love, disaffected-looking teenage guys, twenty-something couples on dates and pockets of menacing bikers.
Somewhere up there, there’s usually an extended family of 60 or so who turn out to see the Gray brothers race. Happily, not that many show up tonight, because the night starts badly.
The jam car hasn’t been out all that many times before John Gray, who’s driving for the family tonight, is in trouble and comes in for his first pit stop of the evening. His brothers, Keith and Tom, fiddle around with the distributor for a moment or two; then John roars back onto the track.
Tom Gray was the first of the brothers to drive at Raceway, located at 130th and Ashland Avenue in Blue Island, back in March 1995. “I was very nervous,” he says. “Couldn’t get my seat belt fastened.” John had to help him get his helmet on. “But when the flag flew, my nervousness was out the window.”
Tom drove well for the first 40 laps, but then it fell apart, he recalls. “The guy ahead of me shot out of the way and right in front of me there was a guy trying to get into the pits who’d hit the wall and stalled. I hit him hard. My engine came flyin’ out.”
Speed, competition and danger are, of course, what it’s all about. Riding in the jam car gives you a sense of that. The sensory overload is overpowering. The noise is like the heavy metal rock concert from hell, the roar of the engines shaking the ground. Adding to the aural assault is the unending squeal of tires skidding into and out of the 1,500 or so wrenching turns that comprise this grueling 350-plus lap contest.
It takes jam car driver Gary Raven, who was last year’s top-of-the-line Late Model champion (there are four divisions of racing at Raceway: Enduro, Street Stock, Semi-Pro and Late Model), a couple of laps to get from the infield to the two cars locked together in a twisted coupling right out of David Cronenberg’s film “Crash.” To get there, Raven must go faster than the drivers actually racing.
Reaching the cars, Raven tries to push them apart from behind. Failing that, he spins the jam car around 270 degrees and hits them where they’re joined, separating them in a frenzy of smoke, brutal power and metallic shriek. All the while the remaining entrants are hurtling by as if obsessed.
`We feel the need for speed’
Many are. This is what they do every weekend of the season, which runs from Mother’s Day through September. Some have been doing it most of their lives.
As far as Joy Barrett, one of several women who regularly race in this division, is concerned, auto racing has it all over other excitements. “Roller coasters, they’re great, adrenaline and all that stuff, but racing’s a whole other ballpark,” she says. “It’s something you can’t explain. It’s a rush. We feel the need for speed”
Barrett, a 19-year-old from Hickory Hills, has been racing for three years. “You can be 16 and get in with your parents’ consent. My dad used to drag race out at U.S. 30 Dragstrip (near Schererville, Ind.) all the time, so he was `OK, OK.’ He signed for me.”
Tom Gray’s story is similar. “For my high school graduation, Mom gave me money to buy a car, so I bought a race car,” says the Worth resident. “I don’t play baseball, don’t play golf. This is the last sport left. Drivers don’t whine about their salaries. These guys do it for fun. I do it for fun. It gets into you.”
Tom’s brother, Keith, who lives in Oak Lawn,, says, “Racing’s like being bitten by something” Keith, whose 13th-place finish on May 26th this year is the Gray brothers’ best race to date, adds, “I’ve always enjoyed driving. Always drove fast. Got my first speeding ticket a week after I got my license.”
At first, John Gray just helped out as a member of the pit crew. But one night as a reward, Tom let him drive. “After that,” John, a Burbank resident, said, “I had to do it again and again and again.”
Trouble in the pits
Not too much race time has elapsed before John pulls in for his next pit stop. Keith and Tom do more of their motor mumbo jumbo, then lash down the hood and send him roaring back. A level of grimness is beginning to set in, however, because it’s beginning to look as if this is a repeat of the problem that plagued Tom at the last Enduro.
Tom had been in the pits over and over again that night. He would come in and they’d try something. The car would start as if in its prime and Tom would hit the track again, but he’d be back in the pits a couple of laps later.
None of the people in the stands knew of the Grays’ agony at this point. Their focus, as always, was on having a good time.
For everyone other than the racers and their pit crews, Raceway Park is “family oriented,” according to race director Roger Smith, who has spent much of his life here.
He says it probably was a bit rowdier in the early days (the track opened in 1938, originally for midget racing) and cites as evidence the fact that his father, who raced here in the early ’50s, drove under an assumed name.
Eventually, his father became Raceway’s starter. Says Roger, “When I came of age, I started working here, pushin’ a broom. When Dad retired, I took over his job. I’m still basically the starter and director of competition.”
The first stock car race at Raceway was held on Oct. 1,1948. “It was a 300-lap race, with only 12 cars,” track announcer and historian George Rowlette says. “The winner, Danny Kladis, drove an Army Jeep. The story I got from him was that he and some guys got onto an Army base, took a Jeep, whitewashed it, brought it to Raceway. After the race, Kladis says he washed it, took it back in and never got caught.”
Safety considerations
To enter an Enduro race today, a car has to have a reinforced driver’s-side door and a fuel cell rather than the usual gas tank. Under the hood, everything has to be basically stock, other than the distributor and spark plug harness, which can be upgraded. And you have to wear a helmet.
That, a driver’s license and a $20 entrance fee, and you’re in.
In order to run faster, most Enduro drivers do much more to their cars. With their current car, a `77 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the Grays gutted the interior.
All in all, they lightened the car by roughly 400 pounds, which gives it a lot more power and speed.
Unlike the magnificent machines you see at Daytona or LeMans, or even in the Late Model races at Raceway, at the Enduro level the form of these cars doesn’t follow function. There is, really, no form, only function. “The car’s put together with duct tape, zip straps and bolts everywhere,” Tom Gray says. “If you need it, you bolt it right on.”
But there is sophistication here as well. Everything on the car, according to Tom Gray, is biased to the left, because the cars are always turning that direction. They’ve put a l,000-pound spring on the right front, a 350-pound spring on the left and lightweight truck springs on the rear. Even at the relatively slow speeds they go because of the small size of the track–typically they run between 50 and 60 miles an hour–“the right wheels can lift off the ground,” Tom says. “So we have a long bar welded into place to keep the right front and rear down.”
In his 41st lap, John’s car starts to lose power again, a repetition of the problem that has been going on all night. Rather than continue the maddening cycle, he drops out.
After all the preparation for this night’s Enduro–from Tom taking a couple of days off work to labor on the car to their stopping at a gas station on the way to the track to fill the fuel cell with premium–the nightmare from the previous race still lives. It is a major disappointment.
For another hour and a half they are just spectators.
They had thought the problem was electrical and had replaced the distributor and sparkplug harness. Now they think it’s the carburetor, which they will replace before the next Enduro on Aug. 10.
Tom will drive. It will be his last chance to race this season. “I felt so bad about my brother in the last race,” Tom says a few days after their most recent breakdown, “that I was gonna give him my race. Then I came to my senses. I’m gonna start.”
Crash course
Raceway racing is surprisingly safe. According to Rowlette, “Of the 2,790 programs since 1938, multiplied by the number of different races per program, times the number of guys that have been out there, there have been only three fatalities. And only one of those was in stock cars, in 1969.”
But there certainly have been some near misses. In Tom Gray’s fifth race last season, he stalled out. “I had just spun out of the fourth turn.” he says, “when I heard a guy comin’ behind me on the left. He was flyin’. That’s when he hit me. “The impact knocked my helmet forward, so the visor was at my chin.”
There was another accident during the most recent Enduro, a half-hour after the Grays were forced out. Barrett “T-boned” another car, hitting it broadside. Then as the jam car pushed her into the pits, her car ran over a piece of wreckage, flew into the air, came down hard and she blacked out.
Barrett was placed in an ambulance, a tiny figure strapped down and in a neck brace. Before the vehicle sped off, lights flashing, one of the paramedics lifted her arm, then let it go. It flopped back down, lifeless.
Sometimes, happily, things aren’t as bad as they seem. Barrett was released from the emergency room at 3:30 the next morning with injuries no more serious than a painful back and bruises from the seat belt.
That evening she was asked if she was going to race in the Aug. 10 Enduro. She started laughing, saying she’d race that night if there was a race.
“It’s a love you just can’t describe. When you have the blood for it, nothing will stop you. You have to do it.”
