rant2a

Big Egos, Big Wallets, And Ever-Lower E.T.s

(or: Perhaps You Were Wondering What It Takes To Completely Eliminate Class Racing?)

(note to the uninitiated: it usually takes me a while to get rolling; you want brevity, read a USA Today. You hate reading, period? Use the "back" button. Otherwise, it's 'gonna be a while.)

Every so often, feeling like all hope is lost, I wander over to Cyberchat to see how the other guys are doing. You know, the successful ones, the road and oval racers, the people the slot car magazines fill their pages with, the wing car guys, the USRA and its ilk? All that attention, all those manufacturers, all that stuff available. Must be nice, I think, to have most everything going your way.

Ah, yes. It actually refreshes me and boosts my spirits to visit that Forum. Much as, I'm sure, the people in the last chopper off the American Embassy roof in Saigon felt a bizarre inner calm while looking down and counting themselves lucky. Carnage, death, destruction, egotism, area rivalries, flames, spam by the carload, idiots, morons, perverts, and a teensie-weensie little bit of honest-to-God slot car racing stuff. Not so much, mind you, that it gets in the way of the flying invectives. Formerly the province of two, count 'em, two chat boards, one "technical," one "political," Cyberchat's essentially unmoderated political board took repeated hits from some tactical spam nukes until the overwhelmed webmaster administered the anesthetic, rebuilt, and reopened a "moderated" board. So once again, the Lost Boys of slot car racing have a place to call home.

So now the uninitiated wanderer can mosey on in, innocently click on a topic, and be in a no-man's-land of normally anonymous, frequently misrepresented, and often wildly puerile spam crossfire in mere seconds. H.O. and 1/32nd scale racers, the Basement Brigade, versus the rest of the world. The Track Owners are Avaricious Idiots folk versus The Track Owners are The Salvation of Our Hobby dudes (assisted and/or ghosted, I'm sure, by Slot Car Distributors, Magnanimous Friends to All). Cobalt 12, I-15, Chinese Junk Merchants, manufacturers, rebuilders, blueprinters (a.k.a. "turd polishers"), flexi-bendums, and plenty of the normal atrocious spelling errors and hideous grammar that computers in the hands of the Very Righteous or prepubescent somehow engender. All the morbid fascination of watching a multi-car pileup on a freeway without the guilt! Blood on the braid! Yee Haw!

So... what, you might be wondering, does this have to do with the title of the page? Ah! The point or points, huh? Well, several. Try these:

First, slot car drag racing somehow managed - to this point, at least - to avoid the terminal (or even initial) stages of internal or external Class warfare. Second, any bitching and moaning you may have encountered during whatever and wherever your slot car drag racing interests may have led you pales into insignificance compared to Playing Hardball With The Big Guys. Trust me on this, gang; if what I've seen over the last 4 to 5 years is as nasty as it gets, well, sorry - it ain't that nasty.

Last, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, it’s occasionally good to see printed proof that our little itsy-bitsy corner of the hobby universe is governed by the same universal Rules of Engagement that apply to every other similarly-structured relationship between all members of our species. In anything labeled or dealt with as a competition (where one or a group get to say "I/we won!" and the rest don’t), the first thing on the table at the very start is not skill or knowledge or ability or wherewithal, but good old unrefined ego (which, despite what Phil Knight and the gang at Nike would have you believe, is a little more complicated than a small voice whispering "I can." in the back of your mind).

Which, directly or otherwise, leads to some additional points. We seem to be doing a pretty good job of devouring our young, so to speak, and while sitting down to enjoy the meal, making it ever-more difficult for others to join us at the table.

To many (not, as it turns out, most) of us, the point of this drill is to end up going faster and quicker than our little friends, or at least developing the potential to do so. The point of the faster/quicker part is the desired goal: winning races. Anything that assists in accomplishing those ends and that goal must therefore be desirable, and anything that doesn’t – well, we don’t bother with that stuff.

I’ve figured for more than a few years that only two basic ingredients were necessary to successfully run Class cars in slot car drag racing: an ego (that little voice, remember?) that says "You can beat these wimps." and a wallet capable of buying what’s needed to back up the ego. Face it; you certainly don’t need to be a rocket scientist to participate in this hobby. Building, engineering, making, tuning, testing? If you can’t or don’t know how, someone else will be more than happy to do it for you – at a price.

So when you combine the acceleration curves of dueling egos with the ramp-up of "better" technology (translation: "more expensive." See Dead Squirrel/Toothless Eskimo Women section of this site for additional details), you end up with really neat stuff that is quicker and faster than ever before. New and Improved! You also, as it turns out, end up with far fewer people doing it to begin with.

(No, this isn’t ‘gonna be one of those "Geeze, back in the Olden Days, we used to have nine zillion entries in Factory Mod" kind of things. How would I know how many there were? Was I in charge of counting entries?)

What brought this to mind was a conversation I had not all that long ago with an acquaintance who is very successful at racing his chosen Classes, probably among the best in the country at what he does. We were talking about the escalation of costs to a level where, if not that fewer and fewer people could afford to compete at his level (many can), that certainly fewer and fewer would simply choose to do so. Discretionary income may be discretionary income, but most family members who had a vote would probably think a new VCR was a better deal than a new Top Sportsman car. ****! I probably think so too!

He didn’t see this as a problem. I projected this out to a logical string, and asked "So what happens when there are six people in the country racing $2500 cars?"

"I’ll beat them, too." he replied.

Well, he probably will, and more power to him. But this all strikes me as something that might – just might, mind you - be indicative of our normal tendency to ask the dance band on the Titanic to play a slightly more uptempo number while they still have time.

That, or "Amarillo Slim’s Full-Contact Slot Car Drag Racing & Hold-‘Em Poker Party."

Wherein, you race/spend/bet your *** off until your pile of chips is exhausted, then push back from the table, thank all for a hospitable time, and slink off to do something else. Which, oddly, sounds exactly like the normal course of events for many competitors, doesn’t it? That could lead one to ask a number of meaningful questions. To wit:

In the long run, is Class racing really worth preserving? What, precisely, are the generally-accepted standards of success in this hobby? Does one necessarily have to partake of Class racing to achieve them? What are we trying to prove here?

I’ve always appreciated the slogan, "If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem." I keep my "Part of the Problem" button in plain sight at most Races. But I suppose that now that I have put forth the proposition, you also expect me to answer it so you know what, specifically, to ridicule.

Fair enough. Next time.

Unca Frank

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