May 23, 2003 - Carlinville, IL - 9
In case you missed it on the home page, we added a button for the ministry.
Barb's off doing some grocery shopping for dinner tomorrow night. We're hosting son Doug and his family here at the Lake Williamson Christian Center. About time, too. They've fed us more than a couple of times since we've been here.
We went car shopping yesterday. Looking at Honda Accords. Found one we liked, but they liked it better than they liked our Jeep, so we went to son Doug's shop and replaced the front rotors and pads for the brakes, and decided we'd keep the 18-mpg Jeep a bit longer, even if it does have well over 76,000 miles on it now. Besides, we like the dual control heat/AC and other "goodies" it has. Managed to get Honda of America to FAX us their statement about it being OK to tow the Accord behind a motorhome though. Not that we have a motorhome yet or anything, but we've lowered the price on Moby Dick again, so who knows.
Ah, yes. Last Sunday I got to go play with my kid. That's him, the leader of the pack. Actually, he's pretty new at running the bike on the road course at Gateway International Raceway near St. Louis, so he's running with the novice class, and they have just used up their allotted 15 minutes of track time. It's "open track day", and the track has been rented by a motorcycle group and a car group for the day. Since Doug is one of the sponsors of the event, he asked me to help with the tech inspection of the cars. Gee, I dunno, lemme think a minute. OK, I'll do it (insert great big grin here!). Besides free admission and the chance to rub elbows with both the bikers and the car nuts, it was great fun to hang out with Doug for a day just messing around with fun stuff.
The Mini's were there in force. Mostly new ones, but a couple of "real" ones to boot. The green one wasn't running on the track today, it towed the yellow one here. Right-hand drive and everything. They're from the mid-'60's when I was actively involved with auto-crossing, and some club racing in a Formula V that belonged to a neighbor and brought back a flood of 40-year-old memories.
Expensive foreign cars (this is a Porsche) and restored and beefed up muscle cars (this is a GTO) were among the "run what you brung" crowd of about 75 cars. Doug's shop ( www.dougjenkinscustomhotrods.com ) built most of the GTO for the owner, Steve, who is as nice a guy as you'd want to meet.
There were a mess of these new Mini's, imported by BMW, but this "real" one from probably 1964 or so still was out-running them. Of course, this yellow one is race prepared, and the others were all stone stock. Interestingly enough, one of the things I was checking during the tech inspections was the battery to make sure it was secured, and none of the new Mini drivers knew where their battery was! I never saw a single one!
No, this isn't a real Lotus Super-7, it's a reproduction of one. Doug's shop installed the roll cage. And since I'd driven one some 40 years ago and scared myself silly because I got my foot caught between the brake and clutch pedals, I had to see if the reproduction car was accurate. It was. That's the pedal cluster you're looking at, and you can see that normal street shoes are not the shoe of choice when driving this little bomb.
The screaming yellow Mini's engine, and then a rather nice looking Ferrari.
A father-son team of Corvette drivers. The son's car was rather modified, but he turned good times in either car. It was great fun to watch so many families involved with the fun of the day. While there weren't a lot of little kids (kind of dangerous for just running around), there were more than a few being herded around by their moms while their dads acted out delayed teen-aged desires. And in all fairness, there were several women driving both cars and motorcycles, and in several cases doing an excellent job of it. There were lots of family sedans there, and a class for the novice drivers which included lots of instruction back in a vacant parking lot before going on the track. I was particularly pleased to see the new drivers (maybe 16 or 17 years old) and the mature women with the Audi station wagon and one with a Chevy Impala in the novice class learning what it's like to slide around corners and such.
A bunch of the bikes (one powered by pedals, used strictly in the pits) and Doug's Ducati.
There go the cars onto the track on the road leading from the paddock to the pits. This track is on the NASCAR circuit among many others, and the pits were fun to see from this angle, even if they were empty. And on the right is the question of the day. What is it? Well, about mid-point in the day, Doug came up to me, introduced me to Nancy, and asked me if I had a tool that would pull a sparkplug like the one Nancy was holding. Since I'd taken Moby Dick (with his "For Sale" sign) with me, I took the plug and went to the truck, and sure enough, I could find a socket that fit this unusual sized sparkplug. Doug suggested I take the truck with its toolbox over to the other side of the garage where I'd been hanging out, because I could probably be useful to Nancy and her husband Chuck.
Yup, that's Chuck, owner of CAN-AM CARS, LTD. in the red shirt, ( www.hemmings.com/dealers ) and his daughter whose name I don't remember sitting in the car, and a couple of bystanders gawking at ...... did you guess it? A 1950 Indy car with the famous Offenhauser engine. Seems Chuck is a collector and dealer of old race cars (Can-Am, Indy, Formulas 1 and 5000) and had recently acquired this one and had it restored with some modifications. It was naturally aspirated, not supercharged, and had an electric starter installed. The little cart there by Chuck is a bank of 3 batteries that get plugged in so the car has electricity for the starter. It gets its spark from a magneto, so once it's started it needs no battery. But if you stall the engine, you need to get to a battery if you're going to start it again. I got to be a hero for my 5 minutes of fame when I discovered the spark plugs were not gapped properly and made changes that helped get the engine started. I'd rather be lucky than good any day! Chuck, his daughter, and her boyfriend each got a turn at driving the car around the parking lot, and a lot of pushing was required. Why? Because there's only two gears in the car, and the low one isn't low enough to start the car from a dead stop, so it needs to be pushed a bit before the driver can let the clutch out. And there was a lot of pushing the car back to the end of the parking lot after the engine got stalled attempting to get going. Took me a couple of days to get over the pain of that kind of fun, too, I might add. But sore muscles are well worth the pleasure of working on one of the very first Indy cars I'd ever known about. It was about then that I began to develop my interest in racing, and I can remember listening to the Indy 500 on the radio in the shop while I was sanding the paint on a 1929 Chevy Coupe belonging to my folks and later my older brother. I'll never forget the sadness I felt when Billy Vukovitch (sp?) was killed driving one of these cars. What a thrill it was for me to be a part of "Open Track Day." Is this a great lifestyle or what?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.....or in this case, Lake Williamson, IL, and our SOWERS project. Wayne and Katie were celebrating their 52nd wedding anniversary and Barb had picked up a cake for our morning coffee break. And then the gang got invited out to dinner by the staff here at the camp. This picture was taken in a park at the town "square." The park is encircled by a traffic "roundabout," both of which are in the center of town. The restaurant we're going to is on the other side on this park..
There's the happy crew. Sitting next to me is Wayne, then Gary one of the staff, and then Wayne, and next to him is Kenny. Gary and Kenny were our "bosses" on this project. Their wives also are part of the staff here. It's Barb in front, Kathy next to her, Gary's wife and then Katie with Kenny's wife Stacy next to her. Then because it's Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, it's Spring Festival time for Carlinville. A flea market at the fairgrounds didn't take long to look at, and then it was off to the antique tractor show at the museum (photo); besides tractors, the event had a wonderfully large section of local craft-type booths. The ladies headed for the crafts, and Wayne and I headed for the old tractors. Cost $2 to go through the museum, but we didn't take time for that because everything else was free--free parking and free admission. Unbelievable in this day and age! And a great time was had by one and all!