Category Archives: Sports

Super Bad

Motorcycle racing comes to Birmingham September 19 through 21 with the inaugural American Motorcycle Association’s (AMA) Chevy Trucks Superbike Championship weekend at the Barber Motorsports Park. It’s the final round of the season for the AMA Superbike series, and it’s quite impressive that Barber snagged the series’ final race for 2003. According to racing enthusiasts, the Barber track is even better suited for racing motorcycles than sports cars. The winding track promises side by side motorcycle duels that will be a first for most racing fans in the area. Popularized through an international television audience, AMA events regularly attract large crowds around the world. The thrill comes from watching riders fearlessly ripping though turns with their bikes leaning at angles impossibly close to the ground, as the racers’ knees scrape the asphalt.September 19 will also be the grand opening of the new home of track chief George Barber’s Taj Mahal, the Barber Vintage Motorcycle Museum. It’s the largest collection of motorcycles in the world, and the museum building itself is a magnificent work of architecture with a winding centerpiece walkway that allows visitors to view the entire collection from almost any spot in the gargantuan room. The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the Superbike Championship weekend. Call 800-240-2300 or visit www.barbermotorsportsmuseum.com for details. —E.R.

The Jet Set

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2003-04-24 Automobiles

The Jet Set

By Ed Reynolds

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Hurley Haywood has been racing automobiles, namely Porsches, for more than 30 years. Having won the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times and the 24 Hours of Daytona five times, Haywood is revered as one of the greatest endurance racing champions ever. “Because I’ve won Le Mans so many times, when I walk down the street [in Europe], people come up and ask me for my autograph,” says Haywood. “Whereas in the States, nobody knows me unless I’m in a racetrack environment.” The racing champion’s cool, professional demeanor doesn’t mask his excitement as he preps his Brumos Porsche Daytona Prototype for the Rolex 250 Grand American race on Sunday, May 18, the first public event at the new Barber Motorsports Park racetrack.

“It’s a fantastic facility,” gushes Haywood, who also serves as chief instructor at the track’s Porsche Driving Experience, a driving school that leases the track several days each week (after moving from the world-renowned Sebring and Road Atlanta racetracks). “We haven’t had a brand new [road racing] facility built in the United States in probably 20 years. And when I first laid my eyes on that racetrack I knew it was going to be a special place. . . . Technically, it is one of the most difficult racetracks I’ve ever been on anywhere in the world.” The 2.3-mile road course has been compared to Europe’s finest road tracks, and it has sports-car aficionados salivating.

Haywood won his first 24 Hours of Daytona race in 1973, when he teamed with Brumos Porsche racing team founder Peter Gregg. “Peter Perfect,” Haywood recalls with a laugh. “He was a real detail-oriented person. Every single bit was planned and practiced. Nothing was left to chance. He was better prepared than everybody else . . . he set the standard.” Gregg purchased Brumos Motors in 1965 and built it into the top Porsche dealership in the nation. An eye injury later eroded his driving skills and he took his own life in 1980. Before Haywood, the legendary Gregg briefly teamed up with another co-driver, a Birmingham dairy and real estate tycoon named George Barber who is, by all accounts, as much a perfectionist as Peter Gregg was. Barber co-drove a Porsche 904 with Gregg at the 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Daytona races in the late 1960s. The number 59 white Brumos Porsche is as familiar to road-racing fans as the late Dale Earnhardt’s black number 3 Chevrolet is to NASCAR devotees. Barber later met Haywood when he purchased a couple of motorcycles from the Le Mans racing legend. Barber is also the high-rolling businessman who shelled out $54 million to build the Barber Motorsports Park.

Chauffeuring a reporter around his new facility as the driving school’s silver Porsche 911 sports cars zip around the track, George Barber laughs at how he has been portrayed in the press. “For so long, I was a magnate, a mogul, a king, a baron . . . now I’m a magnate again.” Barber invited AMA Superbike champion Aaron Yates to test the track’s surface with his racing motorcycle. Yates told Barber that the track was better than 90 percent of the tracks he had driven on, and the racer pointed out a couple of minor flaws in the surface. Rather than repair the blemishes, Barber the perfectionist had the entire 2.3 miles repaved. After another test run, Yates pronounced it the best surface he had ever raced on.

In 1989, Barber began collecting and restoring classic sports cars. Motorcycles soon followed. “Cars are a beautiful paint job with hubcaps, but you can’t easily see the engine, the suspension,” he says, explaining his fascination with motorcycles. The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum has the largest collection of motorcycles in the world, showcasing over 850 motorcycles and race cars. It first opened in 1995 near the Lakeview district in downtown Birmingham, drawing 10,000 visitors yearly (despite being open only two days a week). The new four-story, 141,000-square-foot facility includes a 72-seat theater, a machine shop, and a restoration shop with observation areas. Any motorcycle in the museum can be run on the track with a couple of hours preparation time, and a bike can almost be built from scratch at the shop. Barber was the largest contributor of motorcycles to the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in 1998. “The main purpose of the track is to feed the museum,” which Barber expects to draw 250,000 visitors annually.

The racetrack grounds reflect the reportedly $2 million spent on landscaping. Rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwoods, and magnolia trees share the grounds with giant spider and ant sculptures that are eerily reminiscent of creatures from a sci-fi film. One gargantuan insect clutches a mannequin in a racing uniform. Perhaps it’s Barber’s dig at environmentalists who protested runoff into Cahaba River tributaries during construction. Or maybe it’s just a little dark humor from a wealthy, idiosyncratic man who enthuses over his racetrack as if he was a kid with the world’s greatest slot car set. The natural amphitheater setting offers a Sunday afternoon picnic atmosphere for race patrons, who are encouraged to bring folding chairs and blankets. Barber frowns on notions of building a permanent grandstand. “I don’t want people confined to 18 inches of concrete.” The track layout was designed by preeminent racetrack designer Alan Wilson, who notes that the Barber facility has “a British garden party sort of atmosphere.”

But Porsche is the million-dollar name here (the Porsche Driving Experience school costs $1,600 per day). The German sports car has long been a badge of wealth and adventure for automobile enthusiasts. For example, one of Porsche’s latest models is a Carrera GT (Grand Touring) car that may be purchased off the showroom floor, ready-to-race, for $350,000—$400,000. According to Porsche officials, the sports car’s aim is to “bring the driver of the Carrera GT as close as possible to a full-blown racetrack experience on the road [zero-to-62 mph in 3.9 seconds, zero-to-124 mph in 9.9 seconds].” The Barber facility is where Porsche unveiled its Cayenne sport utility vehicle ($55,000 to $88,000, depending on whether one desires a turbo engine) and every Porsche dealer in the country has visited the park.

The Barber 250 race will be the feature event at the park the weekend of May 16 through 18. The Grand Am race includes the Daytona Prototype racers sharing the track with two classes of Grand Touring cars in the weekend’s feature event. The Prototypes are futuristic, closed-cockpit, tube-framed coupes that have engines built by Porsche, Ford, Toyota, and Chevrolet. The Grand Touring sports cars include BMWs, Ferraris, and Corvettes. The Barber Park Twin 250s in the Grand Am Cup series, featuring two Grand Sport and two Sport Touring classes, will also be staged. Other races in the weekend schedule include a FranAm event, a developmental league for drivers trying to make it to the Indy Racing League, and the CART champ car series. FranAm features Formula Renault open-wheel race cars that look similar to Indy cars.

The Saturday race feature at Barber will be of particular interest to NASCAR fans. It’s the Stock Car Championship Series (SCCS), a racing league “that combines the excitement of stock car racing with the driving challenge of world class road course venues,” according to SCCS officials. The goal is to bring new fans to road racing, and the SCCS has joined the Grand American circuit as a support race during the 2003 season in order to reach a larger audience. SCCS cars include the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix, Ford Taurus, and the Dodge Intrepid, the same late model racers found on small speedways across the country on any Saturday night.

Hurley Haywood admits that the success of NASCAR is a template of sorts for making Grand Am racing more popular. “Everybody wants to duplicate what NASCAR is doing as far as making the cars very equal, and making the drivers of those cars into stars and household names . . . I think curiosity is gonna bring people out to a new facility. If you go back over the last 50 years, the core group in sports car racing has remained pretty much the same. It’s not the kind of sport that really is able to grow. There’s sort of a base group that follows sports car racing and that remains pretty much the same number from year to year. Where we’re having a problem right now is that there’s so much other stuff out there that the core group has got other things to do. So we’re trying, with the new Grand Am set of rules, to bring this group back to us with good kind of racing and interesting cars to watch. And drivers who people recognize. Unfortunately—or fortunately—I’m one of the few recognizable names in sports car racing that’s still racing. And that comes from the days when Camel cigarettes were supporting our sport and spending tons of money on the advertising side, and they really made me a star.”

Haywood predicts that despite slower speeds, the racing at Barber will be more exciting than at other road tracks. “The actual overall speed of the racetrack, what we do in a straight line, is a little slower than most tracks. Most tracks have longer straightaways. But this has basically four straightaways that you get up to a pretty good clip on, and I would imagine that the cars that we’re gonna be driving in May will go maybe 140 miles an hour tops . . . but that bunches the cars up [for close racing]. It’s an extremely busy racetrack. And I have not been on many racetracks that require the kind of absolute total concentration that this place does. If you have a little lapse of concentration, you’re off in the bushes. That’s how precise you have to be. With a lot of other tracks that have long straightaways, you get a little bit of time to rest and relax, but not so with Birmingham. You’re working your ass off every moment.” &

Several races are scheduled at the Barber Motorsports Park for the weekend of May 16 through 18. Call 967-4745 for details or visit www.barbermotorsports.com.

The Greatest Show on Earth — Tales from Talladega Superspeedway.

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The Greatest Show on Earth

Tales from Talladega Superspeedway.

By Ed Reynolds

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	Hueytown’s Donnie and Bobby Allison in the early ’70s.

Talladega Superspeedway is a remarkable spectacle, a sprawling 2,000 acres that at one time was only soybean fields and a pair of abandoned airstrips. Completed in 1969, it was first christened Alabama International Motor Speedway, where on any given day the greatest names in auto racing history could be found turning laps at speeds of more than 200 m.p.h. Mario Andretti, Cale Yarborough, Tiny Lund, A.J. Foyt, the Unser family, the Allison brothers, and Richard Petty are among the racing champions who have charged across its asphalt. No other sport features athletic stars two decades removed from their glory days remaining competitive enough to challenge those 30 years younger. That an aging champ such as the late Dale Earnhardt could bang fenders with an upstart kid named Jeff Gordon made the speedway as much a time machine as a sporting endeavor.



	The start of the 2001 Talladega 500 at the Talladega Superspeedway.

The first Grand National race (today known as Winston Cup) at Talladega was threatened by a driver boycott. Tire manufacturers had not created a compound that would hold up for any reliable length of time at 199 m.p.h., so when tires began to crumble, Richard Petty led most of the drivers in a walkout. NASCAR ran the first Talladega 500 without its stars, filling the field with whatever drivers they could recruit from the previous day’s Bama 400, a touring car event of unknown drivers.

The first race I attended at the track in 1985 was mind-boggling. The ground quaked as the engines roared to life, and surprisingly, the cars looked brighter and smaller than on television, which could never accurately convey the surrealism of seeing 42 cars speeding along at more than 200 m.p.h. The racing pack moves so fast that it forces spectators to turn their heads rapidly to see anything more than a blur. Fenders were inches apart, and a sense of impending danger pervaded every lap. Fans don’t like to admit it, but the ever-present possibility of a wreck is part of the thrill of racing. It’s a bloodsport, invoking images of the James Caan film Rollerball, right down to the roadway carnage and corporate sponsorship of each racing team.

High-priced network television contracts and a barrage of high-pressure sponsors have boosted NASCAR racing to the upper echelon of the sporting world. As a result, rednecks are no longer racing’s main audience, and it’s kind of a shame. Gone are the days of the hedonistic Talladega infield, where I once watched a dozen men wait in line at a converted yellow school bus, from which a woman emerged to inform me she was available for a price. I declined her invitation into the bordello on wheels and continued my stroll across the infield. A sea of Confederate flags, topless women, and old men with oil-stained fingers peddling moonshine out of pickup trucks made the mile-long journey to the other side of the racetrack a jaw-dropping trek of sin and debauchery.

The new drivers are not quite the sophisticated breed that NASCAR’s public relations machine tries to portray. That’s probably just as well, because the single event that put NASCAR on front pages was a fight in the closing laps of the 1979 Daytona 500, the first stock car race televised nationally from start to finish. On the final lap, Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison spun each other out, then crawled out of their cars and staged NASCAR’s version of a middleweight championship bout for all the world to see. The nation was hooked, and NASCAR began to surge in popularity.

The current crop of drivers are apparently eager to preserve an old racing tradition that involves thinking with their fists. As a stock car veteran once reminisced of the old days on the Saturday night circuit: “We’d race awhile and then fight awhile.” More recently, fan favorite Ricky Rudd angrily criticized his team about the lack of power in his engines, prompting a crew member to punch him in the eye. Driver Tony Stewart, who knocked a tape recorder from a reporter’s hand last year, allegedly punched another reporter at Indianapolis Motor Speedway earlier this year. Most recently, Stewart was filmed slapping away the hand of an ambulance driver attempting to help him climb from a crashed racecar at a New Hampshire Speedway. Stewart is a pariah in Alabama racing circles after having called Talladega spectators the “most obnoxious fans” on the circuit.

At 2.66 miles, Talladega Superspeedway is the largest track on the NASCAR circuit. In 1985, Bill Elliott pulled off the most incredible feat in Talladega’s storied history when he came from two laps behind to win the Winston 500 without the benefit of a caution flag. Two years later, Elliott set a qualifying record (212.8 m.p.h.) that remains today. That same year Bobby Allison wiped out on the track’s front stretch, his car becoming airborne and repeatedly slamming into the fence that separates the track from the grandstand, as if it were actually trying to climb the barrier. Allison emerged unscathed but several fans were hospitalized after being struck by flying automobile parts. Restrictor plates were later added to racecars at Talladega and Daytona to reduce speeds and the odds of a car flying into the stands. The plates restrict the amount of air taken into the carburetor, reducing speeds some 15 to 20 m.p.h. Drivers complain that the results equalize the cars too much, bunching them together in freight-train packs of 25 or more for an entire race. The fans, of course, love the fender-to-fender racing and multi-car crashes that have increased with the use of restrictor plates.

The late Neil Bonnett’s account of his first lap around Talladega Superspeedway, as told in his biography From Last to First, describes the fear and excitement of topping 200 m.p.h. on a superspeedway:

I started down pit road and shifted through the gears. When I hit the track I was in fourth and had my foot on the floor. I was flyin’ by the time I got on the front straightaway. You know how the interstate narrows as you look down it? Well, you can imagine what that front straight at Talladega looks like at two hunnerd mile an hour. It’s four lanes wide but it doesn’t look wide enough for the car to fit through the corner . . . So I sucked in a deep breath, planted my foot firm on the floor, and dropped off into [turn] one. Damn, it was like goin’ down Third Street in Birmingham and tryin’ to drive up the side of the Twenty-Twenty Building. The track just went up and up and I couldn’t see nothin’ but asphalt. It was like bein’ in a big asphalt fish bowl . . . I could tell I was driftin’ across lanes with the rear end hung out — sorta sideways, floatin’ up toward the wall. Normal drivin’ experience would make you want to back off on a deal like that but somehow or other it felt like the thing to do was to keep my foot in it — it just felt right. Besides, I’m not sure I could have lifted [off the accelerator]anyway — everything was pressed down toward the floor [from G-forces exerted on the driver during a 33-degree banked turn at high speed] . . . It felt like somethin’ was tryin’ to pull my jaws off my face . . . The rear end was still hung out and that whole car was still driftin’ toward the wall. By then the only thing to do was hang on and keep the faith — I didn’t know what else to do. . . . Then I sort of felt the car push into the air cushion that gets pinched against the wall. The car straightened out and lined up perfect and here we went down the back straightaway like we was shot out of a cannon. &

Johnny U

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Quarterback Johnny Unitas’ death on September 11 stirred childhood memories: Sunday afternoon pickup games played on empty church lots, NFL championships on television, or the solitary make-believe of an electric football game. Unitas was considered by most to be the greatest quarterback ever, and was credited by the late sportscaster Dick Schaap as the man primarily responsible for elevating football above baseball as the national pastime. There was nothing fancy about Unitas. A blue-collar quarterback with a crew cut and a simple, workmanlike effort, Unitas shredded the NFL’s staunchest defenses to ribbons each autumn Sunday afternoon. The image of Unitas on a black-and-white television set leading another come-from-behind victory was simply spellbinding. He could make the closing minutes of a football game seemingly go on forever. Expertly milking the clock for every precious second, Unitas invented the “two-minute” offense that eventually became an integral part of modern pro football.



	Johnny Unitas prepares to pass while Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings gives chase during a 1967 NFL game.

Growing up Catholic in Pennsylvania, Unitas dreamed of playing college ball at Notre Dame but was rejected because he only weighed 138 pounds. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers out of the University of Louisville, he was released at season’s end because the Steelers had too many quarterbacks. He took a construction job in the Pittsburgh area in 1956, playing semi-pro football for the Bloomtown Rams on dirt fields “for three dollars a game and the promise of a cold shower,” according to Unitas. Baltimore’s starting quarterback broke his leg against the Chicago Bears and the back-up had chosen law school over the NFL when Unitas was picked up by the Colts for $7,000 a season. He threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown the first time he passed, and lost a fumble in each of his next two possessions. But the next year he led the Colts to their first winning season, and in 1958 he guided Baltimore to the first of back-to-back world championships over the New York Giants. Packer coaching legend Vince Lombardi said he was the greatest player to ever play the game.

For all his passing skills, Unitas considered his devotion to mental discipline his most vital asset as a quarterback. A master at finding vulnerabilities in opposing defenses, he astounded coaches with his ability to call the perfect plays in unpredictable situations. He was fabled for his toughness (quarterbacks were not protected back then as they are by today’s rules), which earned respect from teammates. Former Colts lineman Bubba Smith remembered the afternoon an opposing defensive lineman shoved Unitas’ head into the ground after a tackle. “He called the same play, let the same guy come through, and broke his nose with the football. I said, ‘That’s my hero.’” Former Colt tight end John Mackey said that playing with Unitas was like “being in a huddle with God.”

Comparing Johnny Unitas to the Almighty was not lost on my Sunday School pals. Conversation at church usually centered more on football than the Lord. We couldn’t wait to get home to watch Unitas rally the Baltimore Colts one more time. With his head tilted downward as if gazing at the ground, his black high-top shoes shuffling rapidly back into the pocket, his style of dropping back to pass was like that of no other quarterback. He appeared invincible in that white helmet with the big blue horseshoe on the side. For years I didn’t realize the logo was a horseshoe. To me it had always represented a big blue “U” for Unitas.

Rev ‘Em Up

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Rev ‘Em Up

By Ed Reynolds

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	Stock car racing starts up in Phenix City.

The East Alabama Motor Speedway, near Phenix City, once again offers a roaring summer of spills, thrills, and all-around high-speed mayhem every Saturday night at 8 p.m. The 3/8-mile, high-banked clay raceway features the finest in Southern-style automobile racing with late-model, pony stock, enduro, super street, road warrior, and cruiser classifications. This year, the 6,000-seat track celebrates its 30th racing season, and will be giving away six-foot tall trophies to all Summer Sizzler Seven Series champions.

Late-model racing is the fastest, but the most fun is the cruiser class, also known as hog racing. Any car with race-worthy safety specifications (roll bars and doors welded shut) is allowed on the track to compete in a 10-lap shoot-out. There’s nothing more exciting than the sight of a massive Cadillac DeVille slamming into a 1972 Lincoln Continental as the pair slide through a dirt turn, kicking up clouds of dust. All a driver needs is a helmet, a fearless nature, and little regard for his automobile. A couple of stiff drinks probably wouldn’t hurt either. For more information, call 334-297-2594.

Vida Blue Winds Up at Rickwood

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Vida Blue Winds Up at Rickwood

By Ed Reynolds

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Snap on your bow ties and call in sick to work, because former Oakland A’s pitcher Vida Blue will toss out the first pitch for this year’s Rickwood Classic on April 25. The annual game, played at Rickwood Field, features the Birmingham Barons, decked out in vintage 1928 uniforms, battling it out with the Chattanooga Lookouts.

Vida Blue compiled a 10-3 record during a 1969 tour of Double-A baseball duty in Birmingham. Two years later, he was in Oakland, striking out 301 batters as he chalked up an ERA of 1.82 to win the Cy Young award and MVP. (His salary that year was $14,700.)

With an unforgettable moniker and a blistering pitching delivery, Blue was the perfect fit for the Oakland A’s. Sporting white shoes, sunshine-yellow uniforms, and long-haired pitchers with names like Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers, the A’s of the early 1970s were a powerhouse club years ahead of other major leaguers in terms of style. Owner Charlie Finley’s insatiable addiction to garish flamboyance established a collection of personalities never before encountered on a baseball diamond. The A’s were poster boys for irreverence, bringing to baseball what Joe Namath had brought to the American Football League a few years earlier. Blue was one of the aces on the rotating wrecking crew that debilitated hitters’ efforts during the Oakland A’s string of World Series titles from 1972 to 1974. A left-handed flame-thrower, Blue dazzled the baseball world in 1971 with his powerful wind-up as he pitched eight shut-outs en route to a 24-8 record. He threw a no-hitter against the Twins that year; a walk to Harmon Killebrew was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect game. Blue was also the first pitcher to start for each league in the All-Star Game.

Blue had an early run-in with Finley for refusing to comply with the owner’s request that he change his first name to “True.” Some of Finley’s affection for gaudy promotion must have rubbed off on Blue, however. The pitcher staged his wedding in Candlestick Park in 1989 (he spent the end of his career as a San Francisco Giant) before 50,000 spectators to celebrate Fan Appreciation Day. Former baseball great Orlando Cepeda gave away the bride and Giants’ legend Willie McCovey was best man.

For more on Vida Blue see interview, link above

Gone in Sixty Seconds

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Gone in Sixty Seconds

By Ed Reynolds

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	Who else but racing legend Mario Andretti could balance an IMAX camera on an Indy car traveling at 230 miles-per-hour? It’s all part of the filming involved in the new IMAX film, Super Speedway, at the McWane Center.

Speed demon Mario Andretti is the epitome of the handsome, charming race car driver. The most versatile champion in racing history, Andretti has won in Indy cars, stock cars, high-tech Formula I racers, sprint cars, and 24-hour endurance racing. Adding a Hollywood flourish, the Italian racer with the Tony Bennett-good looks drove for a team owned by actor and fellow driver Paul Newman.

Now, highly-acclaimed IMAX director Stephen Low gives audiences the rare opportunity to experience Andretti’s 230-mile-per-hour perspective. For Southerners open-minded enough to check out racing other than the NASCAR sort, the McWane Center’s IMAX Theatre will feature the documentary Super Speedway for a five-month run beginning Saturday, March 23. Indy cars are faster and quicker than stock cars, and their wheel-to-wheel, tension-fueled battles are breathtaking. The half-million dollar automobiles pull four G’s in the turns, and create enough suction to jerk manhole covers from streets on road course surfaces (covers are welded to the street for road races).

Andretti was lured out of semi-retirement to pilot an Indy race car fitted with an IMAX camera whose aerodynamically intrusive bulk raised concerns that the car would fail to reach top speeds. Refusing to participate unless filming was done under true racing conditions, the veteran driver put those doubts to rest when he hit 240 miles per hour. “You never really know what’s going to happen until you dive into a corner at over 200 miles per hour, because otherwise these cars don’t react,” says Andretti, describing the aerodynamic forces that drivers challenge in order to find the perfect balance between risk and opportunity. Testing a new car is a daring, unpredictable venture. “You don’t have the sense of what this animal is going to do,” Andretti comments. “These things can bite.” Initially, the camera would shut off when speeds hit 210 miles per hour because of “harmonic vibrations killing the electronics in the camera,” according to Andretti. Filming took place during practice sessions prior to each of four different races during the 1996 season, documenting Mario’s son Michael Andretti’s quest for the CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) championship. Mario Andretti was in control of switching the camera on and off, and it was up to him to find the best shots.

A second story line develops when an automobile restorer finds a 1964 Dean Van Line Special Roadster in an abandoned chicken coop in Indiana. It’s the same car that Mario Andretti drove at the 1964 Indianapolis 500. Restoration continues throughout the movie until Andretti is reunited with the reconditioned sparkling white and chrome Roadster at the film’s end. Vintage footage depicts races from earlier days, including an ample number of dramatic crashes to emphasize the risks drivers take.

The film transcends the titillating boundaries of in-car race cameras that project drivers’ perspectives during Sunday afternoon telecasts. Both Mario and Michael Andretti were amazed at the realism of IMAX racing. “With an on-board video camera, you don’t really get a true picture of what’s going on,” explains Mario. “This IMAX stuff will keep you on the edge of your seat because everything is happening the way the drivers see it.”

Super Speedway will be shown at the McWane Center March 23 through August 30. For more information, call 714-8300.

Alabama Getaway

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Alabama Getaway

By Ed Reynolds

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	The Alabama 500 will be raced at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday, October 21.

A blur of colors roars past at 200 mph with the deafening noise from 43 dueling race cars that are separated by mere inches. Suddenly, two of the cars touch, and spectators leap from their seats more in fear of flying debris than for a better vantage point. The squeal of skidding tires and odor of burnt rubber accompany an abrupt crash that leaves wreckage scattered across the asphalt.

No sport is more breathtaking than automobile racing, and with 2.6 miles of raceway action and steep 33-degree banked turn, no track is faster than the Talladega Superspeedway. The Alabama 500, held each October in Talladega is one of NASCAR’s premier events.

It’s been a sad, though no less exciting, year for Winston Cup stock car racing. The sport’s most colorful champion, Dale Earnhardt, was killed on the final lap of the Daytona 500, the first race of the year. In search of victory at any cost, Earnhardt became legendary for his controversial driving maneuvers.

In recent weeks, renegade driving tactics have ignited a weekly feud between veterans Ricky Rudd (who drives the late Davey Allison’s black and orange Number 28 Texaco Ford) and Rusty Wallace. Each weekend, one driver pays the other back for destruction inflicted the week before. The conflict escalated two weeks ago in Dover, Delaware, at the track known as the Monster Mile. Rudd clipped Wallace while putting him a lap down. Several laps later, Wallace blatantly smashed the rear of Rudd’s car, spinning Rudd out and costing him the race. After the race, Rudd confronted Wallace, grabbing him by the collar as the two exchanged threats in the garage. All eyes will be on the quarreling pair when the green flag drops at Talladega on Sunday, October 21.

Alabama 500 racing action begins Thursday, October 18, and Friday, October 19, with qualifying for the weekend’s races. Saturday will feature the ARCA Food World 300, and Sunday, October 21, features the big one, the Alabama 500. Call 256-362-RACE for details.

Eve of Destruction

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Eve of Destruction

By Ed Reynolds

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	The boys are back in town: The demolition derby returns to Birmingham International Raceway September 3.

Labor Day weekend will feature the glorious return of demolition derby action to Birmingham International Raceway. Grown men will transform junk automobiles into heat-seeking missiles in furious attempts to destroy one another.

Big American cars are the weapons of choice for most demolition derby warriors. Old Cadillacs, Lincoln Continentals, Chrysler Imperials, and Buick Le Sabres that were once driven by grandmothers to the corner market are converted into machines of mass destruction. Cars are frequently customized to match driver agitations: Enlarged photos of ex-wives are a favorite decorative target attached to rear bumpers. (Crashes are administered from the rear to save engines, radiators, etc.)

The front straightaway next to the grandstand at BIR will be drenched in soapy water to add to the challenge. The grand tradition of cheating is admired–just as long as you don’t get caught. To avoid a disabling flat, drivers often secretly fill rear tires with cement (for added weight and traction on the slippery surface), while front tires are injected with styrofoam. Radiators are illegally removed from the engine area, tucked away somewhere in the middle of the automobile for protection. Helmets are required, fire suits suggested, and driving barefoot is discouraged.

Races will be held in the usual Friday night categories for the special Sunday show, which begins at 7 p.m. The demolition derby will be held last. Call 781-2471 for details.

Wildflower Child

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Wildflower Child

December 07, 2000

It was an odd scene for a small town. The tiny but spiffy art-deco Ritz Theater glowed in yellow and green neon. Pulsating bulbs flashed beneath a brilliantly lit marquee announcing: An Evening With Judy Collins. Across the street, downtown Talladega’s tiny courthouse square remained quiet, the townspeople perhaps reluctant to make a big deal about the presence of a star of Judy Collins’ magnitude.The parking spaces around the town square finally filled up a scant 15 minutes before showtime. Around the corner from the Ritz, a lonesome limousine waited patiently in front of the Talladega Water and Sewer Department to whisk Collins back to Atlanta for a midnight flight to Florida. A strange twist of destiny, indeed, that President Clinton’s favorite singer was scheduled to entertain controversial Palm Beach County the following evening, the same night the Sunshine State first certified George Bush for president.

Five minutes before the 6:30 p.m. show at the Ritz, a crowd of elderly customers suddenly invaded the quaint 1936 theater. Two-thirds of the well-behaved audience were local septuagenarian “patrons-of-the-arts,” silver-haired women who supported the local concert series regardless of the performance. They had no clue who this Judy Collins person was, and their collective, overwhelmingly perfumed fragrance threatened to exterminate the audience. The remainder of the 500 in attendance (almost a full house for the first of two shows that night) was a sprinkling of middle-aged, professional couples and reluctantly aging hippies, enthusiastically embracing Collins and the memories of decades past.

Gracefully strolling onstage in a pink satin suit and pink pumps, the attractive, 61-year-old Collins looked like anything but an aging folk singer. She smiled and picked up a 12-string acoustic guitar as her pianist played the bare, tinkling introduction to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”

Collins was captivating. Her soaring soprano has aged little, and it effortlessly reached for and found all the high notes as she covered the songbook that defined her 40-year recording career. Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans” was a ragtime piano masterpiece, and her version of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On the Wire” was a bluesy, solemn ode to Cohen, a composer that she has frequently referred to as her “mentor.”

Between songs, Collins told stories of childhood, tossing off bits and pieces of traditional Irish standards she had learned from her father. Sense of humor intact, Collins frequently interjected wit into awkward onstage dilemmas with remarkable comedic timing. While continually attempting to tune her uncooperative guitar, she apologized that she was unable to make tuning “a spiritual experience, like Ravi Shankar when he tunes his sitar.” Eventually making peace with her tuning efforts, Collins concluded with a shrug, “Well, it’s good enough for folk music.” She even told a favorite sacrilegious Christmas joke, and inquired of the overpowering perfume, “Is there something blooming in here that’s causing my allergies to act up?”

A sparse, almost sacred version of her 1975 hit “Send In the Clowns” ended the show. Accompanied only by her pianist, Collins offered up the endearing melody in hushed tones framed by the song’s climactic piano crescendos. The obligatory encore, an a capella campfire sing-along of “Amazing Grace” ended the evening.

Judy Collins’ Answering Machine Message to the World

The message on Collins’ cell phone voice mail the afternoon before her Talladega show offered a revealing glimpse of the singer’s contagious enthusiasm for life. “And we will fly beyond the sky. Beyond the stars. Beyond the heavens,” Collins sings into the telephone, her distinctive speaking voice sharing her home telephone number with the caller at message end. A second call attempt a few minutes later found her preparing for that evening’s Atlanta concert. Collins gladly agreed to take time out to reflect on her career, which started at age 10 with classical piano lessons from famed international orchestral conductor Antonia Bricoat. (Collins produced and co-directed a documentary on Bricoat, and subsequently received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in the mid-1970s.) Collins addressed a question about her ever-evolving musical endeavors: “I’m not so sure it’s about the changing of musical styles. I think it’s probably about being timeless, and integrating what I knew as a child with what I’ve learned as an adult, and sort of tying it all into one kind of music, which I can’t really define. I think it’s more like Judy Collins music than anything else. I’ve been called a lot of things-folk singer, country singer, classical pianist, and so on.”

Judy Collins’ father, Chuck Collins, was a blind singer and pianist who had a career in radio from 1937 to 1968-a fact about which the younger Collins is noticeably proud. She credited her father’s unique ability to spot good songs with her exposure to early songwriters, such as Rogers and Hart, and laughs about the subliminal presence of folk songs in her childhood home. “I grew up on folk without realizing it,” admits Collins. “My father was constantly singing traditional Irish stuff, things like ‘Kerry Dancers’ and ‘Danny Boy.’” Collins adds that “an element of timelessness” is what she looks for when choosing songs to record.

Collins believes her piano background is a primary resource for writing. She abandoned the piano in the early 1960s when her folk career blossomed, but soon returned to her first love. “I’m so grateful that I have this wonderful background in the piano,” noted Collins. “I do my writing on piano. I still practice, just like I used to. I practice and do my scales [laughs] and exercises every time I sit down to play.”

Send in the Clowns

“I was planning a new record, and was looking for material. The show, A Little Night Music, by Stephen Sondheim, had been out for a couple of years. Others have recorded the song, but my version seemed to strike a chord, and I’ve always felt it was because of that very, very sympathetic orchestration that Jonathan Tunic did,” Collins notes with pride when asked how she came to record the 1975 classic “Send In the Clowns.” She also doesn’t hesitate to briefly knock Frank Sinatra: “A lot of people, including Frank Sinatra, had recorded that song. I have a theory about Frank Sinatra’s version. He was working with Nelson Riddle at that time. And instead of taking Sondheim’s orchestration, Nelson Riddle did his own orchestration. And it doesn’t do the song justice, and I think that’s why Sinatra did not have a big hit with that song, in my estimation, because otherwise he would have. I think Sinatra got every single other song he ever sang [right], but he didn’t get that one [laughs]. So it was my good fortune that he didn’t.” She quickly adds that she saw Sinatra live a number of times, and always went to learn from the singer. “I had the privilege of seeing him work with Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald. And that’s the best.”

Songs That Go Bump in the Night

Collins has been awakened in the middle of the night by two of the greatest songs to emerge from the 1960s-a couple of soon-to-be-hits she heard while they were being created by their respective composers. Around 1966, noted musical sideman to the stars (and organist on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”) Al Kooper woke up Collins at 3 a.m. to put a young, unknown folk singer named Joni Mitchell on the telephone to sing her latest, “Both Sides Now.” Collins recorded the composition, and Mitchell was propelled from coffee house obscurity to household stardom.Collins’ slumber was also interrupted in 1963 while she was staying at a large house in Woodstock, New York, with Bob Dylan and a few other friends. “In the middle of the night I woke up, because I heard music playing. And I went hunting out through the house,” recalled Collins. “I could hear this voice singing, and hear this music playing. And I opened the door to the stairwell, and there was Dylan sitting on the staircase in this old house on the stairway to the basement, and he was just finishing [composing] “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.” &