I've never cared much for racing (NASCAR or otherwise) but I read this intro to a Sports Illustrated article once and it blew me away.
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The first time I drive the car it feels like rage, apocalypse in every cylinder, pistons hammering hot and remorseless as hell’s forge, the manifold ravenous, roaring for air and explosives, belts shrieking, crankshaft screaming threats, spinning off metal shavings like a lathe, the oil tortured, a black ruin of subatomic corruption boiling in the spattered bowel, rods, valves, lifters and springs flying apart, colliding and crashing back, the relentless cycling a hundred times a second, sickle on scythe, shrapnel clattering in the dark, anxious to fail, to escape, blazing, on razor wings, and the exhaust thundering fire and stench and the mourning blast of Armageddon--all of it held together by nothing more than an idea, by the faded ink on an engineer’s blueprint--and like everything else in the universe, the inevitability of its own spectacular end was sown in the first moment of its creation--a big racing V-8 is all intricacy and vanity and the outrageous noise of self-love on the way to self-destruction--everything in this engine is beating itself to pieces. Jesus, this isn’t a car, it’s entropy, a fast unraveling of thermodynamics, it’s the cosmic triumph of chaos, it’s war!
Jeff MacGregor
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