Five Hours on Famoso RoadWhat you are about to experience will not be enough. I know it wasn't for me. This is a work that has been many hours in the planning stages. Although it will include dozens of images, RealAudio files, and plenty of text, it will hopefully show my strange ability to make something substantial out of next to nothing. For as much as what my wife Denise and I were witness to for five hours, on October 18, 1998, my old idea of doing an event from the grandstands went down in flames...Header Flames. No, not really, but I thought that sounded kinda good...
As I sat in those rickety old stands (that may even make the S.I.R. ones look good), I quickly realized that my on-track action shots would be weak. I was buzzed from the drive (not to mention the cpl of previous nites in Vegas), had not shot a race in months, and frankly was pretty much overwhelmed from just being here after what it took to accomplish it. Actually those are just lames excuses, as I set the camera wrong a few times, hit record and in reality went to pause, panned like I had a brick tied to my butt, shot at the wrong settings...tacky, amateur mistakes I don't usually make, but when in an important deal like this made them all. And so, how the heck could I do anything decent, when I recorded but a minuscule amount of such a great event. Easy Pfister, just do what you always try to do: 'show stuff that hopefully nobody else does'. God knows everyone there, including the camouflaged Diamond P guys, got lots of race footage, so what you will see from here on out is mostly pit stuff. Thanks to a bunch of very friendly people, and a pit so full of ultra cool stuff, it wasn't hard to come up with something different. That is what I present here. A simple trip to a place on Famoso Road...from before we arrived to the start of the blast back across the desert to the brightest spot on earth.
Come with me now, on a trip I will forever treasure...and if there was some way I could send the whiff of nitro across these lines I would. My personal memory of that first hint of the stuff from 1000 feet away on this hallowed ground puts a lump in my throat even now. I recall looking out from my perch on the top row and trying to imagine what it must have been like here 30 years ago. This is the place where the Garlits legend began. This is a magic place. Anyone who's anyone in drag racing has been here, now I have too, and it feels good....REAL good! If you even get close to those kinds of feelings after going through all this I will have done what I set out to do. If it's half as good for you as it was for me, my heart can stop pounding. I started by saying it won't be enough...snorting nitro here is something you can never get enough of.
CHHR 98 Intro Page CHRR 98 Page 2 • Tom Fritz RealAudio Interview Page CHRR 98 Page 4 • Dave Wallace RealAudio Interview Page • Les Lovett Memorial Photo Contest Page |
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