17 February 2008

Route 210



I get a lot of mail, and this curious thing was in the in-box this morning. It is from another owner of a Hubrismobile, a real one, complete with the AMG speed-and-performance package that I could never afford. She goes by the screen-name “HotOne,” which is predictable enough.

She has been encouraging me to attend some of the informal “road rallies” that she enjoys. Reading it was preferable to starting work on Sunday morning, and I read it with growing unease. I have not altered her language, in the interest of conveying my disapproval of the whole matter.

For the sensitive, I recommend that you delete this immediately.

I have taken the precaution of eliminating the electronic envelope information in case this winds up with the Maryland Patrol:

“I was in the yellow zone last night out on Maryland Highway 210, the on-deck position, so I have a better perspective on what happened than the Asshole-ciated Press. I got the pic above from one of the gals who stuck around to answer questions. She wasn't driving, and got it on her cell camera.   It was a fucking tragedy.

We have been racing there for about a month on Saturday mornings, early. It is a hide and seek ting with the cops. There are a lot more of us than them, and we even have some sworn officers in the group who tip us off on where the raids are going to be. Sure there are a lot of kids, but there are more than a few of us bluehairs who remember there was racing before “Tokyo Drift” and all that nonsense.

We change jurisdictions frequently, and down south of DC it is easy to jump across the River and do stuff in Virginia before sliding back to Maryland. The 'burbs continue to expand, even with the recession, and there are new row-house developments that seem to pop up in the space between weekend events.

When I first got the street-racing bug here in DC, we could essentially commandeer two-line blacktop at will out in places like Haymarket, just a short drive from town. You could top off with hi-test, drive to the venue and do two or three heats and get home all on the same tank of gas.

Virginia is sprawling so rapidly that you can't get anywhere without a pit stop. Going west you nearly have to get to Winchester out in the Valley.

We have had good success down by Waldorf, in Calvert County on the Maryland side, though we let that cool off for a while.

We like the Indian Head Highway, which is the real name for Route 210 down in the southwest corner of Prince George's County. There are about fifty of us regulars, though attendance is weather and interest-driven. It was a pretty good turn-out, since the location is convenient for people in Virginia, the District and Maryland.

That is where we started going after the holidays. The road is good; the Navy has an ordnance station down there for years, and there used to be a Commissary and a Clinic before the Cold War drawdown.

It was close enough that it was easier to go to the base for routine administrative stuff that was too hard in the Capital. The Indian Head Highway was part of the national defense plan for the capital, and passes the big stone and earthworks of Fort Washington on the way.

Until the last decade, the Maryland side was the poor cousin of the   McMansions on the other side. Fort Washington is just across from Fort Hunt, which is very ritzy these days, and Mount Vernon is only a little ways south. PG County is sprouting its luxury homes these days too, and has been the way out of town for the African American middle-class that fled the misgovernment in the District.

Anyway, that is why it is possible to still stretch out and relax. There is no place to go on the weekend on Route 210, except the Ordnance Station, and that is basically closed.

Where we were set up is just ten miles south of the new Wilson Bridge, and we had it pretty well secured, with spotters and the usual rolling security. We are pretty safe. We don't race in the wee hours, when the bars are closing down and the cops are alert. We start just after four, since we all have to get up early for our day jobs and let the passion bank until the weekends.

This series of races is part of the workup to our version of the Winternationals, which we do just before the NCAA basketball tournament.

I was in the parking lot of the strip mall, number two in order for the starting zone on the main road. There was a 7-11 that had gone out of business and a beauty parlor that hadn't and plenty of space.

The race this weekend was not a tune-up; it was Pink Slips to win, though I did not know how I was going to drive the other car home when I kicked ass and won it.

I was hoping maybe I could con one of the other Chiquitas that come to watch into helping me out, but planning ahead for victory is bad luck. I most definitely did not want to see my fine German car driving away with some idiot at the wheel and me on foot.

That was not as important as checking the new software I had loaded on the chip on the V-8 Mercedes to override the governor in first gear and let me get right to the red zone.

The Stuttgart engineers are way too conservative, and I was supremely confident that my German machine would dominate the fucking rice burners.

That is the when the two on the go-line took off. I had more than a little contempt to go along with the adrenaline. Racing these days is not like the old times, when you could stand of the brake pedal of one of Dick O'Hara's Chargers and start burning the rubber on the rear-wheel drive at a stand-still, and fishtail the car at a complete stop.

Dick's Old Man was a Chrylser exec who participated in an illicit advertising scheme back in the day. All the car companies used to do it, leaking their fastest cars out to the street to show they stuff and build street cred. Dick would get professionally-tuned MoPar cars and bring them home to be driven in the illegal race circuit around Detroit.

I know how fast they were by painful experience; my first (and one of only two speeding tickets) was in one of Dick's loaner Charger 440RT's. 120mph in a fifty zone is what the actual was, though the cop was kind enough when I smiled sweetly at him to only write the ticket for thirty over. I was still on my "learner's" permit, so I guess it was a good lesson in figuring out where the cops were likely to be at any given time.

Women racers were a little unusual then, but not now.

Some of the kids that race now think the movie of the Duke's of Hazzard is the real thing, and that Daisy didn't always drive. It is a laugh.

The racer's of today do not understand the criticality of heating the tires to top performance, particularly when it is below 50 degrees. Anyhow, I was going to do the heat-the-tire drill when I got to the green zone, and was fiddling with the new harness that goes with the Recaro seats I had Franz install when he did the software upgrade. I only heard the two cars go off the line.

They have tuned exhausts these days, which is what passes for high performance on the small blocks the kids bring to these things. When I won the semis two weeks ago- and that was a challenge with the slush on the road- I wouldn't even accept the title on the tricked-out little GTXi,

All show, and no go.

So I was just getting ready to pull out onto the four-lane and the crowd in front of the boarded up 7-11 surged on in front of me to watch the two rice-burners hurl themselves down the quarter-mile.

That is when it happened. I was still off the main road, waiting for the people to get out of the way and I saw headlights approaching, fast.

It was a big car- American sheet metal, for sure. The driver was completely oblivious of what was in front of the auto, since there was no sign that it was going to slow at all.

Stoked up as I was getting ready to go, time stopped. I contemplated the situation and it seemed like I had plenty of time to lay on my horn. Some of the people front of me looked around in the frozen moment, looking at me rather than what was going away down the highway from them or what was about to plow into them.

Like I say, it was slow motion, and right in front of me. I could see it completely, right through my windshield. It was a white Crown Victoria that slashed into the crowd, one of the last of road hogs, and I had a glimpse of an old man at the wheel as he cut into the crowd. I could see the airbag explode into his face, which is one of the first things I disable in my cars.

You cannot steer out of trouble with a gas bag in your face. Fact of life.

Bill Gaines was the one I saw best, since he had a white cast on his leg that   lit up like neon in the halogen of   my headlights. He was with his daughter and his grand-daughter, a real cuttie. The mom was able to throw the little girl out of the way, but Bill is older than I am, and the broken leg meant he couldn't move very fast.

Some went under, some went up, and some were hurled to the side.

The driver of the Crown Vic finally got a clue as to what he had just done, and slammed on the breaks, swerving wildly and heading down the embankment on the river side of the road. As he disappeared, there were still awful things coming down out of the sky. A shoe landed on my gray hood with a thunk, and there were worse things, too.

I got the cell phone out of the glove box where I stowed it and was calling 911 as I unlatched the safety belt. Some people were standing there, stunned, having missed death by inches. Others were on the ground, moaning, and some were very quiet.

I don't know how our rolling security missed the Ford. He might have come out of one of the big new houses and had a lead foot, but the accident drew the two chase cars in and that is how they missed the tractor-trailer coming up behind.

There were a few of us trying to triage the people on the road when I heard the truck. The driver was high up enough that he was over the tire smoke, but it was dark and as he shuddered to a stop I heard a sickening sound that meant someone did not get out of the way.

We did not have a lot of time. I put a couple of the walking wounded in the car and screamed out of there, north a quarter mile to Billingsley Road and a hard right to the Bennsville Pike and a hard left to parallel the Indian Head Highway. I could hear sirens going the other way out of Accokeek. I dropped my passengers at their cars in the Kiss'n Ride lot off Berry Road, and then got back on the Indian Head Highway well north of the response activity.

I saw more flashing lights headed south, but I minded my own business and saw no road blocks.

I was back in Virginia before it even made the news. I the cops had   interviewed the driver of the Crown Victoria, but no charges were pending, if you can believe that. Seven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and an eighth died later at a hospital. One of our KIA was in the Crown Vic.

He got hit so hard that the officers assumed he must have been a passenger.
They said they were looking for the drivers of the two cars involved in the race, which by extension means they are looking for all of us.

I have no idea what that means for the series, or how long it is going to take for things to cool off. Or how far we are going to have to go out in the country to find someplace as safe to race as Route 210.

Be careful out there,

HotOne”

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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