Motorsports

Motorsports is a subject that I can spend days discussing. I worked in the industry for almost 20 years. I worked as a machinist at a Lingenfelter Racing and they built engines for race cars and customers that wanted more than the standard daily driver. This was mostly drag racing or street cars but there was the occasional road racing car or stock car.

Motorsports covers a large group of racing vehicles. Most everyone knows about NASCAR and NHRA but there are other forms of racing as well. In Europe Formula 1 is the best known form of auto racing. LeMans is an endurance race on a road course lasting 24 hours. No matter where you live there is probably a motorsport event in your area.

In the midwest where I live you have area tracks that run weekly events for points and cash. Some of the tracks may be circle tracks of dirt or asphalt. Other tracks may be of straight acceleration called drag racing. One that I have recently become familiar with is the auto-cross. These are held in large parking lots and the course is created with orange cones.

The road racing aspect of motorsports is growing. NASCAR and Indy Cars are using road courses now as well as the circle tracks that they started on. The American LeMans Series is a series that runs races similar to the LeMans race in Europe. The first time I went to one of these races was at Mid-Ohio Raceway near Lexington, OH. The race was about two and a half hours long over a winding course. The background for the images was great and I have been there every year since.

Stock car racing has been a mainstay of the American people. The marketing of NASCAR has made the sport a very large and there is not a weekend that you can not catch a race on TV. Stock car racing is also very big at local tracks on weekends. You can go to the local track and see fans that cheer their favorite driver to victory.

Drag racing has been around since the mid-fifties. Two drivers try to accelerate faster than the other to get to the finish line first. NHRA is the best known sanctioning body in drag racing. For me the thunder of cars accelerating from 0 to 300 mph is a rush. I personally connect with this form of motorsports more than any, mostly because I spent a lot of my 20 years on or near a drag race. Like stock car racing local area drag stips can be found running a weekly program designed to give the next big star a start.

No matter what form of motorsports you are interested in I hope that you find something of interesting here.