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Conn:
I grew up going to stock car races with my Dad at Western Speedway, a small oval in Metchosin, B.C. He was in a pit crew. We'd arrive early, so I sat in the same spot each week, at the top of the grandstands above the finish line. The races were important, but it was the whole setting, it was rich with shifting colour, pattern, and graceful movement. It would start in sun and end under the lights. And the sound of the cars, a deep, male roar.
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I also watched TV. What stands out now is the memory of one race. Richard Petty was my hero, the most successful stock car racer in history, by far. Dave Pearson and Cale Yarborough had the misfortune of racing during the Petty years. They were both brilliant drivers who would have dominated any other era, and in this race they were trading the lead back and forth over 500 laps, sometimes nudging each other at top speed and skimming the track walls, veering high and low. It was a rare display of racing skill.
Petty had a problem with his car early on, he'd gradually climbed his way back to third place but there wouldn't be time to catch up. He was a half mile back in the final lap when Pearson and Yarborough rounded the last bend, still wildly moving back and forth up and down the width of the track trying desperately to either pass or block each other. Suddenly, in the main straightaway, they contacted each other too hard and lost control. They were a few hundred feet from the finish line.
As they spun off in different directions and left the track, Richard Petty rounded the last corner and drove calmly through their billowing smoke, to win.
This race made a big impression on me. There seemed to be some universal secret that Richard Petty had figured out. He always had an easy-going smile. He lived in that special place where things seem to fall into place in just the right way. For most people this happens on rare, great days. But for him it was all the time.
I mentioned this race to my father recently, which he remembers (it's famous, you can buy in on video). He disagreed with my conclusion. He said the reason that Pearson and Yarborough had crashed was because they knew that Richard Petty was behind them. It wasn't luck, Petty pressured them into making a mistake.
I think Pearson and Yarborough ended up in a fist fight after the race, as so often happened back then.
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Today, car racing seems indefensible in the face of global warming, which is one thing I brought with me to Western Speedway when I returned to make a film. But I enjoyed the racing too.
People love to watch and make patterns, we think in patterns. New thought is developed through recognizing variation in known pattern, and this gives us pleasure. The spectators at the race were as interesting as the cars, their heads turning in unison to follow the racing, their charge of reaction when a car spun out. They were part of the patterns themselves: the flawed, lovely, awful patterns.
I both love and hate cars at the same time. This is normal, I can love their shapes and sounds and smells and still want them gone. That's just part of how the mind works, in contrasting ideas, the creation of movement, and the pleasure of both pain and joy.
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Photobooklet image series + text, .pdf, 8.4 Mb
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Q: What is it about the love-hate relationship?
Our minds can easily accommodate both nostalgia and irony at once. Our relationship with technology is a common example of this paradox. Cars, especially, are wonders of invention and also a catastrophe, they embody beauty and disaster in one lovely, hateful, form.
