Auto Gossip

Press, 17 September 1976, Page 6

Auto Gossip

(byJ

Russell Jones)

There are few forms of motor sport I haven’t

watched or tried, in an amateurish way, but one of the few I hadn’t caught up with was drag racing. That changed last Sunday when I went to the “Street Meet” at Ruapuna, organised by the Pegasus Bay Drag-Racing Club. Some purists will be delighted, and the drag fans will moan, when I say that I was bored. Perhaps I’m getting old, but the sight of 20 or so cars being thrashed down a quarter-mile straight did nothing for me at all. I decided that apart from Ron Collett’s rail, which I admit is very fast and very spectacular, I would have no trouble emulating the feats of the daring drag drivers. I’ve got a fairly heavy right foot,

and it seems that’s about all you need.

. I might as well make myself thoroughly unpopular and say that 1 don’t like all the hype and commercialism that seems to ■be an essential part of entertainment we’ve copied from the Americans. I suppose the word entertainment sums up the whole thing, because 1 still think of competitive motoring as motor sport. But drag racing originated when they invented traffic lights and its only because of a strange American desire to legitimise an essentially illegitimate pastime that we have such things as drag strips. Somehow it seems much more interesting to design and build a car that will not only accelerate quickly, but which will also go round corners. The

idea of puring thousands of dollars into a machine so it will cover the standing quarter a tenth of a second more quickly than a rival offends ray sense of proportion. I’ve watched a friend prepare a bike for dragging, and he spent hour after hour perfecting every detail. But now he knows the bike is a second slower than he hoped, and he’s thinking of starting all over again. When 1 think of all the time, effort and money poured into the machines at a drag meeting I feel just a little sad, but who am I to discourage people from doing something they enjoy?