Let me begin by echoing words from the invocation offered by a pastor from Centereach leading off certain Saturday night festivities: “God bless the Riverhead Raceway.”
It’s like this: What, exactly, do you want out of sports? Action? The excitement of unexpected outcomes? Punished bodies of flesh or steel? This place, “the last remaining auto racing venue on Long Island since Westhampton Raceway closed in 2003,” per its website, has it in spades.
Picture a short oval. Then picture drivers, no, not circling repeatedly, but crisscrossing back into traffic as they negotiate a figure 8 as fast as their four or six-cylinder wrecks will take them. After the first lap or two, there’s a hair-raising near-collision on just about every circuit.
And the hits keep on coming, namely in the says-it-all Smash to Pass race, in which a sheetmetal kiss, chassis to chassis, is required before a driver can get ahead of the next car over the course of eight laps. Yes, there are spinouts and there is slamming into the wall.
You’ve seen barrel races at a rodeo, at least on TV? The Flag Pole race had giant earthmover treads stacked at opposite ends of the track, and drivers had to whip their cars around them, tires squealing, before continuing on. Given the speed and tightness of the turns in the close confines, the skills on display can leave you shaking your head.
“Wow,” I said to my somewhat skeptical companion, “that guy drives like a cop.” After a beat, “No, better. Like a Hollywood stunt driver pretending to be a cop.”
Now, we all know what the view from the Fabulous Hamptons would be, so, to be clear: This spectator didn’t see a single political message on a hat or a piece of clothing, though one T-shirt aptly declared its bearer to be “Easily Distracted by Purges and Exhaust Flames.”
If anything, Hamptoners, this was a population looking to unwind with a golden cup of Wisconsin’s finest and, reading between the lines, maybe tired of being lied to and let down, from Milton Friedman’s Reaganomics to NAFTA. In fact, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. rep or a Teamster could’ve parachuted in among all the gearheads for a successful recruiting drive.
The American flags in abundance were not about the government, but rather in this context lead you to think about what really makes our nation great — the country music of George Jones and Wanda Jackson, comic books, Detroit-made muscle cars and the movies that featured them in mind-blowing chase scenes (“Bullitt,” “The French Connection”).
To which could be added the impulse to, as the demolition derby driver Long John Silver put it Saturday, “Man, let’s wreck some stuff.”
Plenty of kids were on hand to glory in the marquee event, the School Bus Demo, which did bring some slow-rolling, pile-driving hits, leviathan to leviathan, but the boom was truly lowered with the first trailer race held at the track, those trailers carrying items ready to fly off, which they did, from Jet Skis to one old wooden boat that subsequently sat on the track relatively unscathed. Until, that is, what looked like a 1980s Buick Estate station wagon deliberately plowed into it, exploding it into pieces, just for fun.
The destruction was insane, and got the fans to their feet, hooting, cheering, laughing.
“Well, I can say I enjoyed every minute of that,” the dude ahead of me said to his girl as we filed out of the packed grandstands.
Same here, big guy. One time, one night, in the real America.
