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SANTA POD

The banshee howl of a jet engine attached to a car has photographers blown over and cowerin, broken wrecks trying to capture the monsters on film . . . one blink and they're gone. Shaun Davis hits the gas
ps maybe you should print this out - it's pretty long. relax and read - don't stare at the screen . . .

It's the Doorslammers! Races for cars - with doors. There are a mix of classes at the meet: Pro Mod, Super Gas, Super Space Street and it's the final showdown of the year for the lads in the Custom Car Street Class. But to anyone not involved, the overriding focus is in the class of the people. And there, the assumption is, there is no mixing at all. Were we in America (and the California-ised name, design of the cars and occasional confederate battle flag take us close) is trailer trash territory. It is the rock end of that array of leisure pursuits that encompasses line-dancing, ten-pin bowling and cable TV: American pursuits that even America jeers. It is the background from which Clinton and Paula Jones come and the President's henchmen would deny. We are here to test whether Hot Rodding is best left on the other side of the Atlantic or if high-octane recreational slumming is worth the laugh. Can you retain your ironic stance, still enjoy yourself and avoid getting beaten up?

Off the motorway, in the photographer's car we go. In amongst the villages to Poddington. When we're nearly there, we pass Irthlingborough. Pods and Irthlings. A disconcerting proximity to 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'? The cold war era village populated by aliens hatched from pupae veined like cabbage leaves. In the heart of the English country side, paranoia takes on the tone of mid-western black and white.

But we're Hot-Rodding. And whilst the villages are stuck in the 50's, with their red telephone boxes, bicycles and biscuit tins (and reds) under the beds, we are heading for the 1970s: Not Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but 'Race With the Devil' and the photographer and myself aren't Peter Fonda or Warren Oates (or Hunter S. Thompson). And the girls in the backseat won't do the cooking. We're expecting Hell's Angels, we're looking for that glint in their eyes, and we are feeling horribly middle-class. Smugness curdles.

Left after the cricket green, winding lanes, shedding rich tea biscuits as we go, we arrive at a bleak expanse. At the gate, we arrive in the 1990s. The lack of leather is startling. The black-bomber-jacketed security look like they should be on the door at the Ministry of Sound. In the distance across the grass, a long high mound shields the action from sight.
From atop the mound Santa Pod is laid out before you. Standing amongst the picnickers we survey the scene. Like a huge grassy knoll, the mound runs the length of the track below it: a quarter of a mile of tarmac strip like Scalectrics without curves. Straddling the starting line, the control tower/commentary box. To either side, offices, the VIP lounge, the victory podium, the grandstand. Beyond, the pits. A long stretch of caravans, tents, mobile homes. The cars laid out in front. In one corner behind the grandstand, a deserted Scooby-do funfair. Set in engine oil-stained concrete, intersperse hot-dog stalls, a confederate battle-flag or two, and you haven't got it because the indescribable thing is the sound. As each race starts, the place booms. We walk the strip.

A bleached straggle-haired woman in bomber jacket and skin-tight jeans sits back into the bucket seat of a stripped down dragster rig, leans her foot into the gas. Crew gather around a laptop, checking. They wear team colours, their shirts like darts players. The insides of a jet car, Martin Hill's it says, are on display. Mr Hill's seat is squeezed in precariously close to the giant metal tube of the turbine.

Standing by his super-fuelled Ford Probe-shaped machine, a Burt-Reynolds/shell-shocked
-fighter-pilot-type, smeared in engine oil, talks about his car, candidly, punctuated by that damned noise. Not a glint, but a blankness in the eyes above the moustache - a wideness: as though permanently fixed on that not-so-distant horizon. Speeds of 250 miles an hour. 0-60 in 0.8 of a second. Pull about 4 G. Spin tyres all the way down the track. (Try to keep any blankness out of our own eyes).

Further along, the vehicles are more home-made. Some of the emblazoned names, such as 'Grounds for Divorce', tell the tale of the hobby-widows. But husband and wife teams too sit peacefully on the steps of their trailers, looking proudly over their death-machines.
And when you talk to them, they are shy and informative and proud and utterly polite. They can't explain why they do it, but their passion is palpable. All that is missing is Kris Kristoffersen strumming on his guitar. Further down the strip, Muttley trots past us sniggering.

As each race ends, they don't do a lap of honour, they return to their spot, they get out and they check their vehicles. From afar, we watch their absorbed machinations. Down at the starting line, fingers lodge in unison in ears. It's aswell to do likewise. After the car has gone and all watch for the finishing time, the photographer staggers away from the line, his face white, unable to swallow. His fingers had been focusing the lense.

After a while, you sense it. There's more to these people than meets the eye. Something which takes them beyond the confines of class stereotypes. You start to sense a seed of romance, however secret, within their speed-thrill. Of the power, of the danger, of the camaraderie before the final isolation. But they are modest. All they say is it's about getting from A to B and it's that simple. And anyway it's the people who make it. But that is the nature of their romance: it is unspoken. There is no room for pathos in the start of the car, in the sound, in the precision, in the timing. In the brute force. The races begin and they end and the repetition is mildly, pleasantly, boring. In the distance, beyond the finish line, flames. Already they line up for the next race. Wave forward and cut the engine with enthusiastic hand movements of precise finesse. An ear-splitting burst. Newly laid hot rubber tracks. They halt, reverse, prepare for the real thing. Unpin the parachute pouch.

But once they're sitting in those tubular frame cockpits, waiting for their turn to launch themselves at the horizon again, is their adrenaline ever tinged with doomed glory? Did the Light Brigade feel it? Did Don Quixote? While they wait between races, music plays on the PA. But it isn't rock. It's disco- the campest, most serene music there is, not grinding guitars and hell's angels, but manufactured pace, muted refrain, and heaven's backing singers: We're lost in music, caught in a trap. No turning back.

No romance. Only speed and cars and pride in cars. Cars, that could've brought the shopping home from Sainsbury's, tinkered with and transformed, augmented in noise and then gone. Pouncing like cats as they go, ludicrously impelled. Swerving with the tire-spin, but finally straight. As though not pushed by the force of engines, but slungshot by elastic stretched from the horizon: their trajectory simply the line of their drivers' will. The drivers propelled, heedless of our snobbery or romantic notions or ridicule, to the sublime. You know all other cars are embryonic. They wait to be unleashed. Later, when we ride home, the photographer feels it. Revs his engine as we move off. From the media balcony, the girls spot someone who we take for a Hell's Angel. We eat some bright yellow chips. We keep our fingers in our ears at each race's beginning. In genuine applause, we clap the times under seven seconds. It is a good day out.

At 4:30pm, waving, cheering as they go, the cars of the Custom Car Street Class set off in formation to parade through the villages where the other secret invasion isn't taking place. Then we decide. The outsider appeal reaches a point where you either stay on the side lines, or cross the line into the void, and say 'I am a hotrodder', learn the names, learn the classes. Get into it. Buy a rig. And never go home.

We go home. But we leave the balcony as Martin Hill's jet car is announced. We turn back and sit in the stands. The car rolls out onto the track.

The commentator-comperes in the Scalectrics control tower are laughing at the people in the enclosure directly behind the starting line. They think they're well out of it don't they. They're in for a shock. But in the control tower, they are pushing against the window panes. To stop them imploding. The jet on the back of the car starts to whine. With flourishes of the hands, the crew beckons it on. And repeatedly beneath the grey sky in short vicious bursts the car is scorched forward to it's starting line. Our seats vibrate. And in solid white smoke those people who thought they were well out of it are lost from sight.