What it's like to ride shotgun in a pickup as it flies through an exploding wall of fire
Pro tip: Use fireproof gloves to hold the "oh s---" handle.
Thank you for being a subscriber.
If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to others and becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get weekly dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes peel back modern parenting life for a look inside, and sometimes be, well, whatever this is. I’m working on ways to sweeten the pot, including appointing all y’all as my assigning editor. If you want to support my work, I would appreciate it.
My Facebook memory yesterday included a clip of me riding shotgun in a pickup truck as it drove through an exploding wall of fire at Beech Ridge Motor Speedway in eastern Maine. I’ll let you read the rest of this newsletter to learn about that. Two quick notes now and a third at the end.
1. The full story of my trip to Maine is here.
2. NBC covered my reporting of that story in a documentary about grassroots racing narrated by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Forward to the 16:40 mark.
As much as track owner Andy Cusack loves the power of a good story, he loves even more the power of a good time that makes a good story possible. On Friday nights, the track hosts an extravaganza Cusack dreamed up called Car Wars. The main event was like a Demolition Derby meets a short track race. Tires placed on the track narrowed the racing surface. Driving beater cars, the drivers ran into each other while also turning laps.
Only the best kind of nutjob enters a race like that. On restarts, only by luck did the leader make it to the start-finish line still pointed in the right direction. There were wild spins and harrowing T-bones and epic brake checks and crazy swerves and more rollovers than a month’s worth of doggy obedience school. A handful of cars were removed from the track by a forklift, one driver raced backward and the only injury was from a young man who tweaked his ankle jumping off of a Suburban that had landed on its side.
During a trick driving display between heats, Joe Pastore, a former Driver of the Year at Beech Ridge, turned three-quarters of a lap on two wheels and probably could have kept going indefinitely. He says it’s just a matter of figuring out the balance. Andy gets annoyed at him for making the two-wheel stunt look too easy. Pastore asked if I wanted to ride shotgun with him. I said no before I knew how good he was at it.
Instead, I volunteered to ride shotgun in a pickup as it jumped through a wall of fire. I climbed in beside Nick Cusack, Andy’s nephew and a driver in the Pro Series. He also shot the moose that became a delicious moose burger at a cookout for track employees. Nick gave me a helmet and fireproof gloves and made sure I buckled up, even though he had not done so.
“Shouldn’t you have a seat belt on,” I said, “seeing as how we’re about to jump through a wall of fire?”
He said the belt bruises his chest because of the hard jolt caused by the jump plus the explosion.
My first thought was maybe I shouldn’t wear my seat belt either if the jolt was that severe. My second thought was explo-WHAT-NOW?
Nobody told me there would be an explosion, and I hadn’t thought to ask. Somehow, “will there be an explosion when the pickup truck jumps through the wall of fire?” did not occur to me.
I asked Nick how he got roped into jumping a pickup through an exploding wall of fire. He said his dad (Glenn, who cooked the moose burger) and uncle (Andy) forced him to do it, and I’ve heard bigger lies in my life but not many. For every minute of Nick’s life, someone in his family has owned this track. He loved every last second of it.
Nick pulled the pickup onto the ramp, as if testing it to make sure the tires fit on it, even though he had done this dozens of times. He was like Gene Hackman measuring the hoop in Hoosiers, only he was in a pickup about to jump through an exploding wall of fire.
He backed up halfway into Turn 1 to get in position; the ramp was on the frontstretch and we would approach it running in the opposite direction of how cars run during races. Nick casually mentioned that he had only “missed” the ramp once, and that time was barely, so it wasn’t really worth mentioning. I didn’t have time to ask what barely meant, and I didn’t want to know anyway.
Someone set the wall on fire. Nick waited, waited, milking it.
He mashed the gas. I grabbed what Andy called the “oh s—” handle above my door with my right hand and pushed into the seat with my left. I braced my feet against the floorboard. We could have jumped off the top of the grandstands and I wouldn’t have budged.
We hit the ramp … flew through the air … I had enough time to think, “Why am I in a pickup truck jumping into an explo—” SMASH! We bounced and skidded to a stop.
Alas, something had malfunctioned. The fire never got very high on the wall, and the explosion didn’t happen until after we parked and got out of the truck. Even then, I could feel the heat from 60 feet away as the fireball leapt 20 feet into the air.
Though the crowd didn’t seem disappointed — they cheered the jump and the explosion, and two ovations are better than one — Andy was frustrated. “I’m not a perfectionist,” he said, “but I want everything to go right.”
Only in grassroots racing can a track owner be disappointed that an explosion didn’t happen until after his nephew was done jumping a pickup truck through a wall of fire.
3. I looked up the track to see what’s going on, and I was sad to see that it has been sold to a developer and closed.