Thursday, September 11, 2008
September 4, Thursday – Big Change
What to do now? I wanted to see Duluth as my first experience of Minnesota. Where to stay as a base? As I drove across the Upper Peninsula (the locals call themselves “Oopers”) I noticed that RV’s were in the small fairgrounds so when I saw in one of the Wisconsin publications that the city of Superior fairground let RV’s stay there, that’s where I headed. The “Head of the Lake Fairgrounds” already had RV’s in the parking lot so I knew that I was in the right place. I went to the fairground office to check in. Jackie said that it was $17 a night for power and free if I just wanted to park. Cool; put me down for one night with power and two nights without power. A guy told me to go down the far end of power pedestals and he would come and unlock the power box. As I walked back to the parking lot I went over to the grandstands to take a peek. Instead of a ballpark or an infield, there was a banked dirt track. Hmm….
The guy said that the nationals were coming tomorrow. Tell me more. He said that the place would really change on Friday. The Northern Nationals always attracted big crowds especially this weekend because this was the last race of the season for this speedway. Speedway??? The fairgrounds was also the home of the Superior Speedway. Stocks, super stocks, sprints, classics. Now what I know about the speedway world you could hold in the bottle cap from a cold Budweiser.
After I plugged into the grid, I threw in with Ron in is golf cart. He gave me a quick course in Dirt Track Racing 101. I was looking at a large 3/8 mile banked track which made it really fast. His favor races were the sprint cars with their big air foils. He said that they have no starter so that a pickup truck has to push it until the engine catches. And since they burn alcohol, it takes a long push for the engine to fire off. Also once they start, that’s it. There is a lever that disconnects the drive shaft from engine and when pulled, you are done. There is no putting it back “in gear”. You have to shut everything down and the engage it and get another push start.
The brakes can be adjusted so that either the front or back have more grip. The airfoils can be adjusted, too. The outside back tire is big while the inside back is small to get more bank out of the track. They roar around the track at over 100 mph with their front wheels off the ground from the over power from their $65,000 engines. Ron, who has been doing the race circuit for 30 years, loves the sprints because they are so fast and they are constantly changing positions; they flip a lot.
So I decided to have a new experience.
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