Sunday's race
was a sweep for Brazil: Gil de Ferran, Roberto Moreno
and Christian Fittipaldi (son of the great Emerson) finished
first, second and third. Five of the first seven places
went to Brazilians. Third place went to a German.
De Ferran's
average speed was 117 mph.
CART stands
for Championship Auto Racing Teams.
When 60,000 race fans can waddle around before an auto
race, with nothing more troubling on their minds than
sunstroke and the relative merits of Honda and Ford-Cosworth
power, it says much about these Clintonian years of ease.
But the religious carnival feeling out at Portland International
Raceway last Sunday also speaks to how far the American
social and economic order has come in 100 years.
At the last turn of the century the upper class fretted
itself with buying mansions, grand pianos and stemware--icons
to act as a psychic hedge against plunging into poverty.
"Conspicuous consumption," Thorstein Veblen named it in
his 1899 classic The Theory of the Leisure Class.
For the other 74 million Americans, though, life was
14-hour days, salted meat for dinner, no birth control
and death by 50.
Nowdays, even a mullet-head--as sweaty as a quarter horse
after riding up I-5 on his Harley--can afford to drop
$75 for one day of watching CART "Champ" cars swarm like
angry hornets around a 1.96-mile series of straightaways
and switchbacks. And that's just the price of admission.
As only the rich could 100 years ago, the middle class
at PIR acquired icons like madmen last weekend, staving
off the day all those dot-coms and software companies
sink the economy.
Everything out at PIR screamed religious festival. And,
as at many religious festivals, a flea market sprang up
along the track's
south side.
$7 for yakitori with rice, $4.50 for a Fat Schlag's Sausage
with "Coney Sauce." Free Pick 4 tickets from the Oregon
Lottery.
But for truly saintly icons, you'd need to visit Team
Penske's merch trailer. Penske has been the dominant force
in open-wheel racing in the United States for 30 years--and
he has the Marlboro sponsorship to prove it.
There were the T-shirts: $21 apiece for shirts emblazoned
with the names of Penske's newest acolytes, Brazilian
drivers Helio Castro-Neves and Gil de Ferran. Or you could
make a more generalized statement with a $35 embroidered
Team Penske polo shirt.
If you shelled out another $20 you could cross the Goodyear
bridge to the north side, walk the paddock where the cars
are wrenched into race readiness and gawk. Here, the experience
was visual and emotional, like standing around a town
square in Mexico and watching a procession of the saints.
You could see race tires prepped with heat guns, listen
to engine idle speeds being set, breath in blue smoke
from an over-rich mix, and watch technicians holding laptops
commune with their cars' electronic hearts. And as if
that weren't plenty, there were the catering spreads--each
one outdoing the next--set out by Kool, Motorola, Players
and eight other corporations bent on impressing whatever
influential people in Portland needed an ego massage last
weekend.
To understand all of this as a reliquary--a Guadalupe
of speed--and retain your gaping innocence, you have to
accept certain realities.
This is a sport controlled by rich men and the corporations,
such as Phillip Morris, that sponsor "teams" like Penske's.
But for all that distance, it's tangible in ways that
baseball cannot be. Most folks don't play baseball beyond
high school, if that. But everyone knows the simple rush
of acceleration, and can hit the loud pedal far past the
time they're fitted for dentures.
Besides, you actually get close to the people who make
the sport go. You can drive back to Burley, Idaho, with
snapshots of Team Penske's 15 mechanics in their Marlboro
uniforms working on the two Day-Glo orange cars before
the race. Walk right up to where they're probing the electronic
hearts of the team cars under a broad awning, point and
shoot. No one will shoo you off.
Stick around long enough and you can rub up against the
stars of this sub-Formula One orbit--de Ferran, Castro-Neves,
Juan Montoya--walking the pavement like toreadors. Point
and shoot; ask and get a signature.
The CART circuit, the second-highest expression of auto
racing in the world, is town-square, meet-and-greet-the-saints
democracy.
That's what makes all of this matter to so many people--desperately
so.
Gone, to be sure, are the days when rangy men with names
like Bobby, Al, Rick, Mario and A.J. signed autographs
under a hot sun. Out of the 25 starters last Sunday, two
were American (the veteran Michael Andretti and Jimmy
Vasser). These days, better drivers are grown in South
America, where children of their leisure classes race
go-karts before they hit grade school.
But the global shift has had no effect on race fans.
At 2 pm, when the Honda pace car pulled into the pits,
everyone got to their feet with the same urgency they'd
had for old A.J. and Mario.
But Lap One was a crash scene before turn two, when 25
cars tried to thread through a space meant for 15. Each
car costs $1 million and pumps out 900 horsepower. And
there was half the field tangled up in blue smoke. There
was a pop, pop, popping--backfiring engines--as drivers
tried to accelerate away and slammed into the next car.
It was a Mad Max bumper-car scene.
The crowd cheered. Beer cups and water bottles fell from
the bleachers.
After that, the racing was very good. Even when the three
lead cars melted the pack, it was impossible not to watch
the technical marvels. They touch 240 mph, can decelerate
to 40 mph inside 100 yards and can do it for 112 laps.
But by 3 pm the sun chased thousands of people from the
bleachers. As they padded down bleacher stairs, none of
them looked disappointed.
They had their T-shirts, their greasy food; they'd seen
the saints in action.
A Microsoft employee, who didn't want to give his name,
expressed it best.
"These people aren't like pro athletes," said the man,
who goes to all the West Coast CART races. "You can go
right up to Roger Penske and after his team wins a race,
say, 'Good for you.' And he'll look at you and shake your
hand."
Ordinarily, such sentiments are easy to disregard. But,
sitting there with his face looking like it had been dipped
in beet juice, he said it with such longing that you swore
what he was saying to old Roger was something he longed
for in his own life--someone at the Redmond, Wash., campus
to give him a verbal kiss when he done good.
It's not the most unusual hope in the world, but it's
not one most major leaguers will ever fill.
