Road Warriors (from Monday Magazine, August 12-18, 1999)

    THE TIRES SHRIEK as I bank into the turn at 60 miles an hour, when just ahead I see disaster: a rusted Chevy Nova and a spray-painted Camaro, two hulking monsters right out of a claims adjuster's nightmare, fighting for the inside lane.
    The Camaro nudges into the lead, and the Nova hits him in the trunk. The Camaro skids sideways, and the Nova T-bones him — BAM! — bashing right into the Camaro driver's door, sending up a cloud of sparks and oily smoke. I swerve right, and hammer the pedal to the floor. Locked in first gear, the '76 Granada guns to 4500 RPM, and I shoot past the carnage and into the straightaway.
    I'd be laughing, if I could breathe. Though there were 21 cars at the start of the main event, the wrecks keep chopping down the numbers, and the track looks clear ahead. But I'm not concentrating now. I'm too fast into the next curve.
    My right leg slams up against a padded brace in the cockpit as I try to battle the force of the turn. I can't hold it. I wrench the wheels harder to the left, and that it puts me into a skid. I step on the gas to try to swing the tail around and I accelerate — towards the grandstand, and the leading edge of a concrete wall. And that wall is coming up fast . . . .

    EVERY SECOND SATURDAY out at Western Speedway is the most bizarre open-air spectacle you'll ever see in these parts: thousands of otherwise-demure Victorians cheering as their neighbours drive heaps of Detroit steel around and around at high speed, and try to run each other off the road.
    This is "hit-to-pass" racing, the lunatic offspring of stock car racing and demolition derbies, combining the best (or worst) elements of both. Stock cars avoid collisions; in hit-to-pass, you're required to smack the car in front of you. And unlike demolition derbies, where vehicles chug around an enclosed ring (often in reverse, to avoid bashing their radiators), hit-to-pass cars run flat out at highway speeds, guaranteeing rollovers, engine fires, spinouts, and plenty of crumpled metal. A hit-to-pass night is a Mad Max movie come to life, or a gladiator scene from the final days of the Roman Empire; at one point in the festivities the promoters even toss loaves of Bunsmaster bread to the hungry crowd. Kids love it.
    Harder to figure out is why the drivers subject themselves to such punishment. It's not the money: drivers take home a $17 plastic trophy and around $300 for winning a main event race, and only about $1,500 for winning the entire season, which winds up in October. No, the appeal is more primal than that.
    "It's the adrenalin rush," says Gerry LaBelle, president of the Lower Island Track Racing Association (LITRA), the club that runs hit-to-pass nights. "If you're not afraid before a race, if you're not nervous, there's something wrong with you. You don't know whether you're going to get hit once, or whether you're going to get hit 30 times."
    Learning how to drive intelligently, how to finesse a vehicle — even a battered old Impala — around a turn is part of the pleasure. So is the thrill of victory. LaBelle owns the Canadian College of Business and Language on Bastion Square, and in his office he has some of the 18 trophies he's won in the nine years he's been racing. Though he and his wife have four young daughters, he can't give it up. "For me, it's an addiction," he says. "After I've raced, I feel on top of the world."
    That kind of fix is easier to get than you think. Along with demo cars, demo trucks, and "mini figure-8"-slamming compacts, LITRA also has a low-contact "claimer" division, which offers a cheap way of getting into the sport. Setting up a real stock car can cost up to $10,000, but if you join LITRA and put $269 in an envelope, when it gets drawn from a hat at the end of a hit-to-pass night, you can pick any one of the claimer cars, tow it home, and drive it in the next race.
    Seeing's how I'm a bicycle-riding cheapskate who barely knows how to change his own oil, I'm hesitant to buy a claimer, and I don't think my landlady wants her lawn looking like a Tijuana scrapyard. So LaBelle puts me in touch with John Cross, a veteran claimer driver, and wise guru of automotive repair.
    There are six cars in various states of dissection on the driveway of Cross's house, just up from Portage Inlet. Coiled hoses, stacks of tires, boxes of tools, whole shelving units full of parts. "You get started with this, and soon you need everything," explains Cross, a big soft-spoken man with glasses and a monkish haircut. He drives a truck for Victoria Shipyards, but he conducts himself with the careful demeanour of a surgeon.
    The deal is that if I pay for the towing and the gas, Cross will graciously let me race his '76 Granada. He bought it out of the paper for only $150, but he's done plenty of work on it. He's stripped the car to its essentials, gutting the interior, removing the upholstery and passenger seats and the dash, reducing the starter to a steel box and a switch. He's splayed the right front wheel so that it runs upright when the car's weight's on it in a turn. He's welded the doors shut, put in required safety features like a five-point seat belt and a roll cage made of steel pipe, and bolted a strip of channel iron to the driver's door. As Cross tells me, he feels safer in this Granada than he does in his family car.
    That still doesn't explain why he races, though. And then I find out there's a side to him that's not so careful.
    "On the street we're limited to 50 or 80 kilometres an hour, and that's not really enough. The need for speed is real," he says, mischeviously. "The track is the one place where I can go out and misbehave."

    THE DRIVERS REMOVE their ball caps during the national anthem, and while I look for my girlfriend in the grandstand, a young guy standing beside me yawns, and squints into the setting sun. "I just woke up," he explains. He was sleeping on the grass over by his car. He and his wife just had a baby, and he's trying to get his 40 winks in whenever he can.
    Unlike spoiled zillionaire hockey players, Western Speedway drivers are ordinary guys (and a few gals) who live up the street. Many of them are mechanics or welders or work in body shops or wrecking yards. Another young driver I speak with, Rob Bouchard, is studying to be a Baptist minister.
    When I ask if it is unseemly for a man of the cloth to total thy neighbour's Buick, Bouchard gives me an answer that's pure Ecclesiastes. "There is no contradiction when it comes to God," he says. "There's a time when you have to be aggressive, and there's a time when you have to lay back."
    Bouchard says that after he's finished school, he'd like to start a church among the racers. Certainly, religion or not, there's a fellow feeling, a camaraderie in the pits already. Everyone's a devoted racing fan and loves tinkering with cars; they swap tools and mechanic's advice and gossip about who didn't come out to race this week and why.
    "Really, we're like family," says Adrien Thomas, LITRA's membership coordinator. That doesn't mean they always get along, though. At their pre-race meeting, the drivers are warned that they'll be docked points if they engage in unsportsmanlike conduct, like the fight that happened in the infield the previous Saturday.
    "And remember, claimers," Thomas instructs, "no intentional hitting."
The drivers look back and forth at each other and smirk, like schoolboys with plans of their own.
We head out for our timing laps. The idea on an oval like Western is to swing wide on the straight stretches, right up next to the wall, and then dive tight into the turns, making your course as circular as possible. Easier said than done. Even though I've done practice laps in the Granada earlier in the day, I overpower one turn and fishtail the back end, losing valuable time.
    I come in at 23 seconds flat. On a 4/10ths of a mile track, that puts my average speed at about 63 miles per hour. Good demo drivers can do it in 20 seconds (72 MPH average), but sometimes they'll "balloon foot" the timing lap and drive intentionally slow, to put them at the front of the starting grid in the actual races. Though I didn't intend it, that's where I'll be. On hit-to-pass nights the fastest cars start last, and have to fight their way through the pack. There's more wreckage that way.
    Back in the pits, Cross advises me to ease up heading into the turns; when you're driving in first gear, the engine is its own brake.
    Then he takes a paint marker, he writes my name above the driver's door. "That's so when the ambulance drivers come and you don't know who you are, they'll be able to tell you," Cross says.
    I look up and see a large bird, riding the thermal that's lifting off the hot asphalt. A turkey vulture. And it's circling overhead.

    LEGEND HAS IT that stock car racing grew out of Dixie moonshining, out of races that good ol' boys in hot rods had with the law. According to Tom Wolfe, in his book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, demolition derbies got started on Long Island in 1958, but some claim they began earlier in Ohio, after a promoter saw the huge crowd that gathered at an intersection when two enraged drivers started ramming into each other.
    No one knows exactly who first put the two together and came up with hit-to-pass demo racing. Len Pease, the president of the U.S.-based National Demolition Derby Association, says in some places in the early 1970s there was an event called "roundy round", in which drivers were required to smack another car on the home stretch of each lap. He doesn't know who invented the rule that you could hit anywhere on the track.
    Some say hit-to-pass first appeared at Western Speedway when visiting drivers from Washington State came to town and showed it off in the mid-'70s. Others claim the concept was first developed right here in Victoria. Jamie Peakman, who now drives "total destruction" derbies across Canada and the U.S., says the hit-to-pass rules really evolved back when he was driving at Western around 1977. In classic total destruction, the event ends when only one vehicle is left moving. But a lot of Victoria drivers couldn't afford to lose a car every night out, says Peakman, so to save money and give their cars a fighting chance, they ran hit-to-pass laps instead.
    Whatever its origins, demolition racing remains unique to the Pacific Northwest, found only on tracks in B.C., Washington and Oregon. The publisher of the U.S.-based National Speedway Directory told me that hit-to-pass isn't anywhere else on the continent--the only place there's something like it is in Britain, where the class is called "bangers", and drivers race outrageous machines like old hearses and mail delivery vans. When I called the secretary of the Canadian Automobile Sports Club in Downsview, Ontario, to ask if they had anything similar to hit-to-pass back east, he was horrified. "We don't have any such thing here," he sniffed. "At least, not legally."
    One thing everyone agrees on, though: on the track, Victoria's drivers are meaner than junkyard dogs. "They hit very hard compared to anywhere else," says Butch Behn, who was the promoter at Western Speedway from 1983 to 1995 and now runs a track in Tenino, Washington. "That is not up for discussion, it's the truth. These guys down here, they can hit too, but not many guys want to go home without a car."
    Why would drivers from sleepy Victoria be so aggressive? Oddly enough, Behn attributes it to state-run health care. "You gotta remember, in Canada everybody's got B.C. Medical, so you just run down, the doc fixes you up, and away you go. Down here it's altogether different. You gotta have the big insurance because most people here don't have any insurance at all."
    Keith Cahill, who's won several hit-to-pass championships, says Victoria drivers hit harder mainly because everyone keeps dropping bigger and bigger engines into their cars. Twenty years ago the rule was "run what you brung"; now hardcore demo drivers will invest up to $5,000 in an engine, just to be faster than anyone else.
    Cahill certainly knows the impact those engines can have. He entered his first demo race the day after he got his driver's licence in 1979, and after that, entered any event where cars got wrecked —doing crash-dive stunts, and running total destructions twice daily for 17 days straight at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition. ("You just didn't have time to heal," says Cahill.) Now he's Western Speedway's starter and flagman, and though he holds a job at a pulp mill, he also has to rely on disability insurance and deal with constant migraines. "I'm only 36," Cahill says, "but I feel like I'm in my 70s in the morning."

    THE CARS BEHIND me in the warm-up lap weave like slalom skiers, trying to heat up their tires so they'll stick to the turns. I keep my eye on other lead car to my left and try to match his speed. When we get into the grandstand turn, he floors it.
    I try to keep up, but Cahill's waving the green start flag, and almost immediately I'm passed by two, three, four cars. In no time at all I'm at the back of the pack. There's only eight laps in a heat race, and when you fall behind it's nearly impossible to catch up.
One car overheats, another blows a tire. I manage to pass another, and end up finishing ninth out of a field of 12.
    "Nice clean racing," Cross tells me, "but you need to be more aggressive going into the turns, and much more aggressive coming out." Plug up the holes in the pack in front of you before someone else does. Hold your position, and make the others go around you. And don't be afraid to hit, or get hit back. The cars are built to take it.
    There's no Lady Byng trophy around here, that's for sure. As I wait for the main events, I walk over to the gallery to watch the heats for the demo cars, the stars of the show.
    Near as I can figure it, the fan appeal of hit-to-pass is schadenfreude without the guilt: you get to munch burgers watching one terrible car crash after another, but don't you don't have to help or worry about sleepless nights because the drivers (almost always) walk away from the scene. Whatever the reason, it draws a crowd. Sometimes there's as few as 500 people in the audience for Western Speedway's regular stock car nights; hit-to-pass routinely does four or five times that number.
    A Pontiac goes into a dusty double rollover on the berm at the back of turn three, and promoter Matt Sahlstrom runs out to the wreck — followed by an ambulance with its siren blaring — and interviews the dazed driver with a radio microphone, right on the spot. Another two cars pile into the grandstand wall; one ends up right on top of the other and has to be pulled off by a tow truck.
    "These guys are athletes, no matter what people say," Barry Goodwin, a track photographer, tells me. "You've got to be able to take the pounding."
    In that sense demo drivers are a lot like pro wrestlers, something they play up by creating larger-than-life characters for themselves. The good guy among them is "Smokin'" Joe Liberatore, who got his nickname because he used to light off smoke bombs when his orange '74 Monte Carlo was introduced at the "prettiest car" contest at the start of the evening. "It's not about just being a good driver, it's about putting on a good show," admits Liberatore, although he was skilled enough to win a demo championship in 1996. "Even if you're smashed up and really upset, you've got to be able to say hi to people and be willing to give something to the fans."
    Liberatore, who used to drive a bus full of handicapped kids for Queen Alexandra School, does a lot of charity work and fundraising by touring around with his car. In return, he's got 15 corporate sponsors, including 100.3 "The Q" FM and a sushi hut ("I go to all-you-can-eat Saturdays to build up that left-side weight," Joe chuckles). He needs the money. There are three guys in his crew, and it takes a couple of hundred dollars and 20 hours of work after each race, repairing his car.
    The ones who wear the black hats on demo nights, Liberatore's sworn enemies, are (I kid you not) the Hansen brothers, Marty "McFly" and Keith "Dr. Death" Hansen. Like their hockey-thug namesakes from the movie Slap Shot, they like to win — but almost as much, they like to hit.
    "You're always trying to chase down that next guy," says Marty, who races a '69 Grand Prix and works as a salesman for a stationery company. "Some guys you like more than others. Some guys you just try to spin 'em out and let 'em keep going, other guys you try to take 'em out for the night and bounce them down in points. That's the name of the game: try to break the other guy before he breaks you."
    The Hansens break lots of other guys, and nearly every time they pull into the pit someone has to fire up a welding torch or hoist a logging peavey (an instrument that looks like a giant can opener) to tear off their mangled quarterpanels so they can keep driving. Marty's also done plenty of damage to himself--he's dislocated his knee, busted an ankle, a shoulder, all the fingers in one hand, and his toes. "Nothing's ever made me not want to come back, though," he says. "It's part of the game. With the adrenalin, you don't feel nothin' — you feel it the next day."
    Whenever a car is knocked out of a race, drivers say it's been "killed". But car accidents really kill hundreds of people in British Columbia every year, and injure thousands more; it seems insane that anyone would go into an arena to intentionally smash into someone else. But I'm beginning to realize that's the dark thrill of driving hit-to-pass, and one that goes beyond victory, or speed. Every time you walk away, it's as if you've cheated death.

    GERRY LaBELLE WAS right: the waiting is the hardest part. I keep drumming the steering wheel as I'm sitting in a line of claimers, waiting for the 30-lap main event. Out on the straightaway the figure-8ers are squealing in loops around giant truck tires, bashing their little Hondas and Datsuns into each other like meth-crazed pizza drivers in a Domino's parking lot.
    The moon rises over the arbutus trees. I see a flickering in the stands as someone lights a cigarette, calmly regarding the mayhem. It's a strange sensation, knowing that somebody out there might be quietly hoping that you're going to eat a piece of the wall.
    We're on. Twenty-one claimers rumble out to the home stretch. The announcer calls out each of our names to the crowd, but I can't hear a thing. Then we follow the shiny new pace car around the track once, twice. The pace car peels off. We gun to racing speed, bumper to bumper, and Cahill waves the green flag.
    Although there are countless books on the psychology of winning tennis or the inner game of golf, there are precious few about driving race cars, and it's not hard to understand why. Battling your way through the chaos of a claimer race is like flying a fighter plane in a dogfight, or swimming in a feeding frenzy of sharks. You don't worry much about "finding the flow" or being "in the zone" when you're trying to keep from getting killed.
    As the man said, there's a time to lay back, and a time to be aggressive. I hold the lead out of the start this time, and going into one turn I get banged again and again by cars trying to force their way up front. Two turns later, I fishtail and slam my back end into someone taking the outside. Fighting with another car to make a turn on the inside, I cut it too short, run across the grass, crash back onto the asphalt, and sock him a good one, right in the chops.
    There are crackups and blown engines all over the track. While the caution lights flash, I lose my position in line and fall behind. Then the race picks up again, the Nova takes out the Camaro, and I overdrive the turn and nearly lose it into the grandstand wall--but when I ease up the gas like John told me, the car decelerates quickly and I shudder to a stop on the warning track, a few feet short of becoming a dummy in a crash test.
    I back out, throw the Granada into first again, and rejoin the race. It isn't pretty, but somehow I survive. Out of 21 cars, only 14 finish. I come in 10th.
    I pull into the pits, and see Cross grinning at me. "Well, did you have fun?"
    "John," I tell him, "I think I finally understand."
    I don't know whether I'll race again; I don't want to push my luck. But right now, I'm juiced. The back of my shirt is drenched with sweat, and as I walk around, I realize that all my senses are wired. I'm alive.
    John and I get a cup of coffee from the concession stand, and I swear I can taste the roasted oils of every single blessed coffee bean. The klieg lights illuminating the track are as bright as flaring magnesium. And when my girlfriend comes over and hugs me, I feel her warmth through my fire suit, and the back of her neck is as soft as velvet. I won't be able to fall asleep for hours.