Sitting on their ice chests, beer in hand Terry!!
No, Martin, you are just a bit confused--those are the DRIVERS in the staging lanes!!!
Actually Wildcat looks like a kinda fun place to race in a dangerous kinda way...back in the day, I've done my fair share of barreling down tracks that I probably wouldn't run on now (of course, that's back when 12 second cars were the "big dogs" at the track!). I ran in the finals of a Sat night all run deal once at a track without lights that was delayed at mid race by a rain shower. It was totally dark for the finals, and to their credit, the track management gave us the choice to split the pot, or run it off for first and second. My opponent had headlights--I did not. Of course we chose to race for it--all I could see at the end of the track was the infrared beams at the finish line--quite a site! When I got there, all I knew was I got there first cause I saw the beams hit my opponents tire slightly behind me--but I sure wasn't sure what lane I was in!
And there is a track in Colorado that has been operating off and on for a long time--I attended my first drag race there as a spectator when I was 8 or 10 or something. It was a pretty bigtime track at the time, and they just happened to be running as the T-bolt team was traveling through, so I got to see Gas Ronda, Bill Lawton, and Richey all run at my first race. A unique feature of the track was it was at a small airstrip, and they had struck a deal with the airport authority to use the runway, but the runway was still an active runway, and if a plane wanted to land, they shut things down for a bit, moved the tree, and let the plane taxi or land down the track (runway, whatever). Since I was at my first race, I guessed this was just standard operating procedure.
About 10 years ago, I returned to the track which had just reopened recently and was being managed by a racing friend of mine, so I took my car out there to support his efforts. Sure enough, while I was sitting in the staging lanes waiting for the semis, he came back to my car and told me "ya might as well get out, we got an incoming Cessna we need to wait for". Cool.
My apologies for the rambling trip down memory lane. I'm now on the onramp of "today" and I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. Thanks for your patience.
