Come with me back to 1986...or thereabouts. We have an embarrassing slide taken at the Grand Bahamas Vintage Grand Prix (it's all sort of a blur, y' know?) and, as any fool can plainly see, I'm deep into my meditative yoga training the night before the beeg race. As to the female I'm apparently dancing with, my wife enquired when I returned home (she didn't go with me that trip, having seen me over-supplied with Pusser's Painkillers and Bahama Mamas enough times to last her a lifetime already) as to whom she might be. In all honesty, I had to tell her I not only had no idea, but that she didn't look at all familiar!

Oh, well.

If those Bahamas races had gone on for a few more years, none of us would have lived to tell the stories!

Also, we have a shot of me in my very first (so-called) racing vehicle. My friend Frank embezzled $39.00 plus shipping from his college fund, and we bought the frame mail order, then hid it in my basement so his parents wouln't find out. Little by little, as money and guile allowed, we gathered more bits and pieces. First the rear wheels and tires (enormous used General racing slicks of immense width and the relative heft and coefficient of friction of pig iron.) Then came the fronts: off-road knobblies (of all things) on account of I could afford them. Finally, seeing that my desire was both genuine and unstoppable, my dad popped for a used Clinton E-60 engine, which I selected mostly because I like the olive shade of metallic green it was painted. Suffice to say that, in my very first and only race, I managed to take perhaps the slowest and most technically backward go kart at the track that evening and go even slower than anyone envisioned. I finished dead last, lapped by the entire field (some of them several times in the space of 10 laps) in spite of installing a special, high speed gear ratio I'd figured out that gave me a theoretical top speed of over 70MPH. Which it would indeed do, if pushed off a cliff. Downside was an acceleration curve that would be the envy of a Morris Minor with three plug wires removed. As you can see from the picture, I'm about to bang on the carburetor with a crescent wrench, something I believe I did very well...

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