"Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

he'd been bending iron on his own for several years, making chassis after chassis
out of scrap and dropping flatheads in front, fat skins in back and deuce bodies on
top. Once he got his hands on my shop's equipment, he burst past all the old
barriers that had stopped him from making his dreams really come true. The
railjobs and diggers he began to turn out in his off-hours were faster and hotter
than anything else on the streets or the tracks.

Joaquin had been driving for the Road Runners and the Southern California Roadster
Club since 1948. But when 1951 rolled around, he decided he wanted to start his
own team. He recruited a bunch of childhood buddiesтАФCarlos Ramirez, Andrew
Ortega, Harold Miller, Billy Glavin, Mike Nagem, plus maybe twenty othersтАФand
they became the Bean Bandits, a name that picked up on the taunts of "Beaners!"
they heard all the time and made the slur into a badge of ethnic pride.

When Joaquin first came to work for me, I was driving a real pig, something the
legendary little old lady from Pasadena would've turned her nose up at. An
unmodified '32 Packard I had picked up cheap before the war, which had
subsequently sat on its rims in my parents' garage for five years while I was
overseas. I plain didn't care much about cars at that point. They were just
transportation, something to get me and HerminiaтАФHerminia Ramirez, a distant
cousin of Carlos'sтАФaround town on a date.

But working side by side with Joaquin, watching the fun he had putting his rods
together, was contagious. The customizing and racing bugs bit me on the ass, one
on each cheek, and never let go. Soon on weekends and nights I was elbow-deep in
the guts of a '40 Oldsmobile, patching in a Cadillac engine that was way too much
power for the streets, but was just right for the dry lakes.

The Bean Bandits, you see, raced the cars they created at a couple of places.
Paradise Mesa, the old airfield outside the city that was our home track, and the dry
lakebeds of El Mirage and Muroc. There the drivers could cut loose without worrying
about citizens or cops or traffic lights, focusing on pure speed.

When I started running my new OldsтАФpainted glossy pumpkin orange with black
flames, and its name, El Tigre, lettered beautifully across both front fendersтАФfirst in
trials with the Bean Bandits and then against drivers from other clubs, I found that
my nightmares started to go away. Not completely, but enough. That sweet deal
alone would have hooked me on racing forever, if all the other parts of itтАФthe
sound, the speed, the thrills, the gloryтАФhadn't already done the trick.

The real excitement started when we discovered nitro. That was nitromethane, a
gasoline alternative that did for engines what the sight of Wile E. Coyote did for the
Road Runner. At first we thought nitro was more volatile than it actually was, and
we carried it to meets in big carboys swaddled in rags. "Stand back! This could blow
any second!" Scared the shit out of the competition, until they got hip to nitro too.
And eventually, when we discovered the shitty things pure nitro did to our engines,
we began to cut it fifty-fifty with regular fuel. Still, plenty of extra kick remained,
and nitro let us get closer and closer to the magic number of 150 mph with every
improvement we made.