How Many Hotse Race Tracks in the Us
From the November 2017 issue
I'm not one to give advice, but here's some that I came by the hard way: Don't try to race a NASCAR driver on his own private dirt track. Especially don't do that in a turbocharged Polaris RZR, which is explosively powerful but has the center of gravity of James Comey wearing a lead top hat. Because what might happen is, you charge into Turn 2 a little hot, you fail to apply enough throttle to break the rear end loose, and those knobby tires dig into the clay and send you into a half-ass Joie Chitwood Thrill Show before you tumble 90 degrees off-kilter and hang there in your harness like a skydiver dangling in ornamental shrubbery. There's a moment when everyone checks that you're okay, and then the laughter commences. It's loudest from Joey Logano, owner of this particular North Carolina off-road playground. "I'm sorry," he says. "I've just wrecked so many times that it's hilarious when someone else does it."
If you're not familiar with Logano, I'll give you a few highlights. In 2014 at Richmond, he did a victory burnout down to bare rims. To announce the gender of his first baby, he did a burnout with tires that bellowed blue smoke. And once, he took his wife's grandmother for a ride in a car called the Panther and . . . didn't do a burnout. But he did drive it into a lake—without first telling her that the Panther is amphibious. He's also won a bunch of NASCAR races.
Why am I at Logano's garage-slash-amusement park? Officially, to try out the new RZR XP Turbo EPS Dynamix, which has electronically adjustable dampers.
But really to screw around. The spread is 27 acres, and Logano invites his friends over to race on the trails. Sometimes in side-by-sides, sometimes quads. "You should buy an old Crown Vic to bomb around in out here," I say. "Or six Crown Vics!" he replies. "Then we could race them." I like how this guy thinks.
Whether I like how he drives is still an open question. I've ridden with a lot of race-car drivers—Petter Solberg, Michael Schumacher—and none of them scared me. Logano scares the crap out of me. RZRs have a grab bar for the passenger, and at first, I think I'll be cool and not hold on to it. That lasts for about 15 seconds, at which point we're heading for a banked corner at 60 mph and I'm pretty certain we're going to shoot off into the clear blue sky, so I grab the handle just so the paramedics will know where to find my arms. Then somehow Logano wrestles the machine onto the banking, gives it even more throttle, and heads back the other way before I have time to process what just happened. "You should enter the Mint 400," I tell him. "What's that?" he replies. He's like a guy who can drain shots from half-court and dunk from the foul line but trying out for the NBA hasn't really crossed his mind.
I'm always thinking about consequences, and here the consequence of too much throttle could've been an exciting trip into a metal stanchion. Logano hasn't contemplated this idea, nor the general notion of runoff, possibly ever. "I don't think it matters to me," he says. "Wall, cliff—I'd just be thinking, 'Well, better not go off that cliff!' "
We head inside for lunch and to ogle Logano's cars. Other than the Panther, the aforementioned amphibian, I'm drawn to the diesel Chevelle. It's tubbed and stuffed with a 1200-hp Duramax. I ask what it does in the quarter-mile, and Logano says he doesn't know because he can't get it to hook up. This seems like a reasonable explanation. It also has nitrous, though, just in case it ever does hook up.
Over lunch, we talk NASCAR and the challenge of translating the drivers' skills to TV. I tell him how I had to go up on the roof at Charlotte to really see what was happening in the corners—namely, that the cars are visibly sideways at 160 mph. "Oh, we're even sideways on the straights!" he says. "The cars are set up to turn, so they're kind of crabbing down the straight." So drivers are countersteering at 210 mph in heavy traffic. If only TV could make that look as cool as a Ken Block drift.
I opine that NASCAR would do well to mandate some production relevance for the on-track product, some clear link between track and showroom. "Like, what am I going to be doing, running an EcoBoost out there?" he asks. Yes! And the Chevys will have LT1s! The Toyotas will run i-Force V-8s, and we'll somehow make them about equal. If someone gets two laps ahead, we'll make him pull into the pits and pick up Ballast Barry, a 200-pound replica of one of Junior Johnson's hogs. We'll make it fair. You know, not like Logano's dirt track. "You would've been fine if you just gave it more throttle," Logano says. "The solution is always more throttle." Not bad advice.
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How Many Hotse Race Tracks in the Us
Source: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15078149/dont-try-to-race-a-nascar-driver-on-his-private-dirt-tracktrust-me-column/
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