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The latest update as of August 30, 2003
U.S. Nationals, Shirley Muldowney & Top Alcohol - Quite a Cocktail!
So things were rolling along just great after I got out of the hospital on Thursday. The T-3s were keeping the pain in remission, the leg wasn't swelled up more than the average hindquarter of beef and the sun was shining. My financial situation was as bad as its ever been this year, but heck, the weather was great, the forest fires that are wreaking havoc and destruction in so many towns in this province were far away, and a long weekend was coming up with all the great results from the NHRA U.S. Nationals on tap.
Then it all started to slip away. First was a short rainstorm that delayed proceedings in Indy by an hour.. or two; and eventually stretched into a schedule rearranging four hours of downtime. How to get back on track with a minimum of inconvenience? Just drop the second (of four) Top Alcohol qualifying sessions. After all, there's only 53 or so of them in the pits and the spectators don't bother watching them very closely anyway, do they?
Then it rains some more, off and on in the late afternoon and NHRA pulls the plug on the day's activities without running any of first sessions for the Pro categories, or the second, and now, the third session of top alcohol. Oh well, in the case of the Pro cars, they only lose one out of five sessions and the four tries they will get is the same as at any other event on the schedule. After all, Indy is just another race on the 23-round POWERade circuit, isn't it?
Okay, so we hit the reload/refresh button a few times on the schedule page to see how they plan to make things up for the alky racers. You don't need to see/read/hear the punchline, do you? Yeah, that's right: one shot tomorrow afternoon, then the first round of eliminations on Sunday morning, well before the majority of spectators will be in the stands. If the weather continues its capricious patterns throughout the weekend, we might see some of the Top Alky cars lucky to see even one timeslip for their several thousand dollars "invested" in attending the "Big GO."
Nothing else that we can bitch about today, is there? Okay, how about one soon-to-be senior citizen, Shirley Muldowney, who's receiving the full benefit of NHRA's publicity machine in helping to promote her "farewell tour." At this point we can define a tour as attending more than one event in a season, right? And the Shirl has already appeared twice at an NHRA event in 2003, with three more to follow this weekend's installment of the "Last Pass" tour.
The story that's appearing on NHRA.com today is titled "Muldowney has left her mark on drag racing." Whatever..... Appearing slightly above the Muldowney story is a briefer article about the unfortunate passing of Lucille Lee, one of Muldowney's favourite targets for criticism in the early 1980's. Not surprisingly, Lee's death is not raised in the Muldowney story, and if it was, she would probably still be dismissed as a "poseur" by the Great Shirl.
Can you see where this whole line of thinking might be leading? It got me digging through the boxes of material that have failed to see the light of a monitor, until I unearthed a story about Ms. Roc-Muldowney-Kalitta-Tobler that was started at least two (maybe even three) years ago and for various reasons (mainly legal and political correctness), failed to get finished. There's some great bits in the article; at least from my admittedly very twisted point of view, and I'm seriously considering putting it up on this page later today.
After all, if it keeps raining at Indy, all I'll be able to do is whine and moan about the plight of the poor downtrodden Top Alcohol racers who will once again take it in the teeth (or the shorts - depending on your persuasion) while NHRA sings the praises of its latest multi-car Pro team. Or I could take Dean Murdoch up on his generous offer of an ambulance ride out to Mission this weekend and watch the Pro Mod show from the comfort of a gurney in the shade of the tower.
For now I'll sleep on things and see which way to go in the light of the morning, but we have been far too quiet and non-controversial around here for far too long, haven't we?
To see previous updates go to the What's Old page