Arguecat & Motorsports 1

I can do this without being hateful or argumentative… but because you are my brother, I’m going to tell you like I see it.  If you are the common car enthusiast, you might be the greatest enemy that real hardcore motorsports enthusiasts and participants have.

This is partly because we don’t give a crap how fast you can take a highway offramp in whatever contraption you drive.  We don’t care about how much of a bitch it was to change the clutch in your buddies Impreza, or how the 3″ exhaust on your K20 makes so much more power.  Yes, we often wear a hat on our heads that says “car guy”. That hat doesn’t also say “free high fives!”.

Not that we want to be assholes, but sometimes that is pretty hard considering that you appear to be putting in your best effort to undermine all that we have worked so hard for – the freedom to actually drive and challenge our own limits in a safe and legal environment.

This is something you take for granted given that you can already take highway off-ramps faster than all your friends, and nothing (except maybe the top speed you can reach on the stretch of Highway 201 between Deerfoot and 17th AVE) could be more important than that…

I know you guys think that you are too good to drive at a legit event alongside other cars that don’t even have “illmotion” stickers on them.  It’s absolutely true that some of you actually can drive really well… but you are losers nonetheless.

And you are looking for high fives, so you show up at our local autocross… not to drive, but to show off your new GT Wing, hoping that some dude in a stock FRS will compliment you, or your style, or your car.  When that doesn’t happen, you and your friends go do pulls down the road right in front of our event site (presumably to show us all how cool you are).

My seventh-grade English teacher happens to be driving by, she calls the cops about some street racers.  The cops show up at our event.  We chill together because every cop I know is cool. We exchange many laughs at your expense.

But meanwhile, my old English teacher (Mrs. Hunt) is also calling the landowner, and the local community association, a city councilor, and her MLA… and she is talking to all of them with exactly the same tone she showed me in 1992 when I couldn’t differentiate between “their” and “there”.  She is one uncompromising and relentless broad… everybody listens to her.

By the time she is done, the landowner is changing the locks on the gate to our venue, the city mayor is calling for a new noise bylaw specific to motor vehicles, the provincial premier is stepping in to squash our local race track project, and the federal government is announcing a war on oil and gas.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

But you, as a “car enthusiast” bitch and complain about NIMBY’s, or environmental crazies. Let’s remember something though, as practical as motorsports are (certainly one of the most practical sports)… it’s still just a sport.  The pleasure we get from taking a car from point A to point B five seconds faster than your grandmother could, always loses to the pleasure your grandmother might get from smelling the flowers in silence.

Even if we doll up our events, dressing them in the clothes of taking racing off the streets, we still lose. Racing on the streets is a problem that isn’t solved by giving stupid people a place to have fun.  It’s solved instead by stupid people choosing not to be stupid.

If we want to win at motorsports, I think it’s very clear –  be ultra-conservative with our events and venues.  Noise. The volume of participants.  Emissions. Safety standards.  Some of us will complain because we don’t get from A to B as fast as we used to, or because our sport gets more expensive and somehow less enjoyable.  It seems to me that we should just be happy to have any place to run at all.