Drive (12 page)

Formula One, with its European roots, is all about the glamour, but NASCAR still maintains its rebellious “good old boy” image. Of course, that belies the amount of money involved: in addition to millions of dollars in prize money, the best drivers sign lucrative endorsement deals. The sponsors aren't just autorelated companies either. Despite the Bubba reputation, the sport
has a huge following in New York and Los Angeles and about 40 percent of the fans are women, so even the marketers of packaged goods such as Tide want in on the action. Meanwhile, NASCAR merchandise is a multibillion-dollar business.

As the name suggests, the cars used in this class of racing were originally stock: they were the same Chevys, Fords and Dodges anyone could buy, except that the racers had souped them up so they'd go faster. Today, for reasons of both performance and safety, only cars—some of them (gasp) from Japanese manufacturers—that have been specially designed and built for racing and feature little or nothing in the way of production parts run in NASCAR races. But they do carry the names of models regular folk might check out in showrooms.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE
leaving Detroit, I'd gone to the New Hudson offices of Pratt & Miller, an engineering firm that's home to the Corvette Racing team. Steven Wesoloski, GM's road racing manager, wore khakis and a blue button-down-collar shirt, his hair and goatee were going grey prematurely and he looked a bit like Tim Robbins. Armed with a master's degree in mechanical engineering, he'd spent ten years as part of the Corvette production staff, working on projects such as how to make the car stiffer. But after a decade sitting at a computer, he wanted a change. Although he was only a casual racing fan and didn't know that much about it, he was prepared to learn. Soon, he was hooked; in fact, he told me, “There aren't many jobs inside GM that are as fun as mine.”

Launched in 1999, the Corvette Racing team competes in the American Le Mans Series as well as at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans. Held annually since 1923, the endurance race takes place on the streets of the French town. Each car has three drivers, who take two-hour shifts behind the wheel. For GM, which aims to go global with its brands, it's a high-profile showcase, especially on a continent where the top two sports are soccer and auto racing.
Close to a quarter of a million fans show up to the event, which is broadcast on television around the world. In 2006, the Corvette Racing team won in the GT1 class for the fifth time in six years.

For 24 Hours of Le Mans, the team sent over forty-seven crates with everything from engine parts to peanut butter, Mountain Dew and Pop Tarts. “The three things you can't find in France,” Wesoloski noted. The bulk of the crew stayed for twenty-three days. “So we took a little bit of America with us.” An executive chef from a top Detroit restaurant cooked in return for a free hotel room and at each race, roughly thirty people, including management and public relations, support the two cars. Wesoloski and I chatted in one of the team's two tractor-trailers for a while. It had a little office with chairs, a flat-screen TV and desk space for the chassis engineers to set up laptops allowing them to monitor data, plan for the next practice session and decide what to change on the car. The other truck had a similar room where the powertrain guys looked at their data. Each truck also carries one car and every spare part for it, including an engine and a gearbox. Wesoloski was a little coy about the team's annual budget, though he allowed it was in the sixteen- to twenty-million-dollar range.

The racing team program represents the bulk of the marketing for the brand. At one American Le Mans Series race, four hundred Corvettes showed up at the fan corral. That response—and the success on the track—means that unlike some other factory teams, who've pumped a lot of money into a racing program only to pull out a few years later, GM remains committed: “If we cancelled, I think the Ren Centre would be ringed with Corvettes in protest. That's the following we have.” Of course, the Vette has long been a revered ride in the United States, so the program's biggest challenge is in Europe, where many people once saw it as an obnoxious car favoured by pimps and drug dealers. “We've turned it around in just the six years I've gone,” Wesoloski said. “In 2001 it was still kinda touchy how we were going to be treated. Now we draw the biggest crowd around our pit stall.”

On a tour of the Pratt & Miller facility, we stopped in the machine shop, where a yellow Corvette and a red Cadillac were under repair. (GM added the Caddy to the program in hopes of attracting younger people to the brand.) Wanting to control its own destiny, the team makes 90 percent of its own parts, from wheel nuts on up. A Cadillac starts with a piece of the production car, but custom suspension and components go on it; a Corvette C6.R starts with just the frame rails and includes just a couple of dozen production parts. If everything goes well, it usually takes about four months, without too much overtime, to go from an empty bedplate to a completed car.

The team builds two C6.Rs a year, then auctions them off to private racing teams for about $750,000 each, approximately what it costs to build them. In the Race Shop, a man sat on the floor working on a skeletal frame of one of next year's Vettes. Even though the place was clean and tidy, the employees all wore black T-shirts and black pants. “You could do khaki and white,” said Wesoloski, “but it would be ugly by the end of the day.”

For all the marketing success, the biggest benefit of the program may be the trickle down of technology. Initially, the company had wanted to show off the performance of the Corvette by taking a production car, modifying it and taking it racing. But its competitors—notably the Dodge Viper, at the time—weren't using production models. And once the team took the leap into technology development, it quickly saw the advantages. In the same way that the space program gave us advances in computer technology and medical equipment (not to mention the popularization of Tang), some of what GM learns from racing eventually ends up in the cars the rest of us drive. Carbon fibre has started to show up in production bodies, for example, and the racing team shares what it has learned about aerodynamics from wind tunnel tests as well as the ability to get more horsepower without moving to a bigger engine. “That's why we chose the American Le Mans series—it allows the teams to explore the technology,” Wesoloski
explained. “We can start with very few parts that are Corvette, expand on it and build on it. You've got to maintain a few key components and a few key measurements, but from there, as long as its intent is Corvette, it's good.”

After the tour, we popped into the office of Corvette Racing program manager Doug Fehan, which was full of memorabilia, including several photographs. Wesoloski pointed out one taken at Le Mans that showed, from the back, the Corvette team on the winners' podium facing a mass of cheering fans. He has been on that podium and said it was an “unbelievable” experience. “There are almost a hundred thousand people down below and every one of them is yelling, ‘Throw your hat,'” he remembered. But there was no chance of that: “Winner's Circle from Le Mans? Forget it. That hat is going on my shelf.”

IN THE CLASSIC
American film
Animal House
, the fraternity pledge Flounder shows up at Delta House in his brother's car. It's a gleaming black Lincoln Continental with the back doors hinged at the rear (suicide doors, as they were called). Before long, the frat boys declare, “Road trip!”

Properly done, these journeys involve either family or friends. Family excursions tend to produce as many bad memories as good ones. For one thing, there's all that dysfunction to deal with: kids fighting over primo spots in the car; “Are we there yet?”; nagging and odd or fascistic parental tendencies. One friend of mine and his brothers had to pee in a pickle jar because their dad never wanted to stop. Since I was doing an autumn trip, I didn't see many families on long road trips, but Bill Bryson did when he drove around the country for his book
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
, and found them easy to spot because they looked as though they'd been in their car so long that they'd turned it into a home, even hanging their wash in the back. “There's always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the
back,” he writes. “You and the father exchange dull but not unsympathetic looks as the two cars slide past.”

Once we get older, we get to leave the family behind and do road trips with our friends: to go skiing, to see a band, just to visit another town—the excuse doesn't matter. When I was younger, I had nothing but some easy-to-blow-off classes to worry about. Now, at a more advanced age, I need a reason to pile into a car with pals and go someplace just for fun. But, as my wife regularly reminds me, it doesn't take much.

A road trip is a dangerous experiment in interpersonal relations. At every turn, it seems, dissension looms. There are uncomfortable hours in a car, shared hotel rooms and decisions to make on what to do and where to eat and drink. Throw in obnoxious tics and habits, differing political views and clashing personalities, and a road trip is a donnybrook waiting to happen.

Against all odds, however, most go smoothly. And the ones that don't usually fall into the “someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny” category. When I was at McGill, a Montreal car rental outlet advertised a sweet twenty-four-hour deal, so my friends and I picked up a car at six o'clock in the morning and drove to Boston intending to be back by six o'clock the next morning. As soon as we crossed the border, we stopped to buy beer—please, please, don't try this at home—and by the time we got to Beantown we were drunk and in rancorous moods.

We managed to stumble out of a bar not too long after midnight and headed back to Canada. But with his passengers passed out, our designated driver missed a turn and ran out of gas somewhere in the mountains of New Hampshire. The only house with lights on was filled with other college kids on a ski trip. We played cards with them until they served breakfast and sent us on our way. Needless to say, we'd blown the cheap deal on the car.

I'm older now, so the logistics aren't as much of a problem. Getting along isn't necessarily easier, though. On a trip to Cleveland, one guy decided that Saturday dinner was a good time
to tell me what he really thought of me. It made for a chilly ride home. Fortunately, inane humour usually comes to the rescue when people are cooped up in a car. In the summer of 2000, four of us squeezed into an old Toyota and drove to Detroit. The excuse: to catch a couple of baseball games at Tiger Stadium before it closed.

The driver was a crazed labour lawyer. He put a tape in the player, but then turned down the volume, preferring to rant against internet porn, dish scurrilous gossip and crow about his sexual prowess. Every now and then, for no particular reason, he'd bellow, “Heeeee struck him out.” His blue 1990 Toyota had, until a few months ago, belonged to his mother. Despite its four doors, there wasn't much room in the back, where I, on account of my stubby little legs, sat. But the car did have a handicap-parking sticker. He insisted on its legitimacy because he'd had seven knee operations—the same number, he made sure to remind us, as Bobby Orr. Whenever we swung into a premium parking spot, we broke into gleeful laughter.

I'd travelled with him once before and I was apprehensive about doing it again. Fifteen years earlier, on a trip to Ottawa, he'd driven at unwise speeds in a snowstorm and stopped every hour or so to get something to eat and play video games. But we made it to Detroit with just two stops. The others on the trip were a bond guy with a Henry Fonda–ish demeanour and an eccentric writer with a knack for accents. The bond guy and I had done many trips together, so we shared a room. Since the other two barely knew each other and the lawyer was a compulsive neat freak (his dowdy clothes notwithstanding), while the writer was an absent-minded slob, we eagerly awaited the fireworks. Somehow, though, they bonded quickly.

And so did we all. While looking for the Henry Ford Museum, we ended up at the Henry Ford Estate, where a wedding reception was underway. After the lawyer disappeared into the mansion, we went looking for him, and twice a woman who seemed to be
guarding two entrances at once kicked us out. It was the classic road trip moment: three guys standing in the stifling heat waiting for a fourth. We imagined him sipping champagne and chomping canapés—or having his way with one of the bridesmaids.

When he finally showed up, I berated him with a line he'd used so often on me: “There's no I in Team.”

“That's right,” he barked at me, “There's no I in Tim.”

That completely meaningless response became the running joke of our weekend. Something always does. And every time there was a threat of strife, someone said, “There's no I in Tim” and we ended up in giggles. That's the magic of a middle-aged road trip: by driving away from our everyday lives, we are free to act like kids again. And there's nothing a guy likes better than a chance to act like a kid.

INDIANAPOLIS CONSIDERS
itself the “Crossroads of America” because four major interstate highways intersect here and half of the population of the country is within a day's drive. I reached the outskirts just before five o'clock on Friday afternoon, but the traffic wasn't too bad, at least in the direction I was going. There were lots of pickups, as I expected, and fewer foreign cars than around Detroit. The city is the twelfth largest in America by population, but the nearly 800,000 residents take up a lot of space; Indianapolis has a density under 2,200 people per square mile (compared to nearly 16,000 people per square mile in San Francisco, which has almost the same number of people). A car-dependent community that last saw streetcars and trolley buses in the 1950s, Indianapolis—unlike many American cities, even smaller ones—isn't investing in light rail. So the only option for transit users is a lacklustre bus system. And anyone wanting a taxi had better not count on being able to flag one down. On the other hand, while even some of the inner suburbs don't have sidewalks, the city is starting to show a born again commitment to cyclists and pedestrians. The Monon Trail, which runs for 15.2 miles from central Indianapolis to
suburban Carmel along an old railway belt line, is now a well-used paved path for cyclists, bladers, joggers and walkers. In addition, the city plans to create the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, a 7.5-mile bike and pedestrian path that will connect several downtown districts as well as the Monon Trail.