With a carload of prejudices Charles Leonard recently attended his first hotrod races at the Wembley International Raceway in Johannesburg
MY first experience with hotrods not only taught me some of life’s valuable lessons, but it also gave me my first taste of class analysis.
As a farmer’s son my father took me along to a cattle auction in Vereeniging, where, soon bored with the chattering auctioneer, I discovered these wonderful mutant car things from hell at a nearby race track.
There was no-one there so I tried my best to start several, but with no luck. With nothing standing in the way of a fertile four-year-old imagination though, I was soon “driving” around at breakneck speed and with suitable sound effects. Life’s great, I thought to myself.
But then there were parents. I had to see one of these races, but not even consistent, persistent, insistent nagging could convince them to take me.
“Hotrods are for ‘gommies’, the types who not only have grease under their fingernails, but also don’t brush their teeth or say their prayers before they go to sleep.”
My mother’s words shattered me then. But I know now that I can blame her for my perverse fascination with these dirty-nailed atheists with their bad breaths and peculiar activities. By my next experience with hotrods almost 30 years later, my feelings about them had changed.
It was shortly after my daughter’s birth 16 months ago. Sleep becomes very precious then because the new person interrupts it on average every 30 minutes and you get into bed as early as you can so that you get a kind of flying start. After winding her or changing her nappy during one of those interruptions, (the grumpy and half-asleep) you then have to rock her to sleep.
It was always during these sessions that I wished that South Africa was much closer to Haiti as I had enough work to keep an enthusiastic voodoo priest quite busy.
I had measured with my car that I lived 2,8km from the Wembley raceway, but their noisy meetings every weekend sounded as though it was taking place in my herb garden. First it’s the cars sounding like an industrial drill being switched on and off in your ear by an indecisive sadist when you have a head cold or a red wine hangover, or both. And then, when that’s over there’s the disco with Shakin’ Stevens singing This Ol’ House on your front lawn.
A few Friday nights back a friend and I went because I’m sure there is a voyeur peeping from inside each of us. In the car park it looked like the 1-2-3 crowd was there: one litre brandy, two litre coke and three-litre Cortina. We decided to take our dop along.
After parting with 15 bucks each, no-one asked a question about the booze or searched us.
“So far, so good,” we thought.
The people satisfied my fascination 10 times over. Guys with Ferdi Barnard, upside-down-pineapple haircuts looking for a dop, a pomp, maybe a barney or hopefully a dice afterwards. The ous with chicks are for some inexplicable reason all shorter than these women — who for the same reason all drink Hunter’s.
Most of them are white but I think it would be a cheap shot to brand them racists for that, although I didn’t feel that I was going to bump into them at the next Cosatu congress either. It was also difficult to determine the language group. At first I thought the ou next to me was taking the piss by talking like those comedians on Biltong and Potroast, but I soon realised that everybody was talking like that, ek s.
It is very much a family affair (the odd family looked as though they took the affair bit a tad literally) with toothless oupas and oumas down to lots of little upside down pineapple haircuts running around in little red racing driver overalls.
“There’s an SAP van parked at the entrance,” the MC called. “Would you please remove or else we’ll call the cops.”
The crowd loves him and roars their approval at all his jokes. I felt that I had to get used to his humour. Some jokes were quite funny though.
“What do you call Winnie now that she’s separated from Nelson?”
“Rebel without a Xhosa!”
The 1200cc speedway motorbikers were announced very aptly as “no brakes, no brains”. It could have been the effect of my thirst quencher, but I could swear one of the drivers was called Salami. They were all skinny shits, had long hair sticking over their collars and were not scared to fall on the oval track.
Four rounds, four bikes, lots of smoke and at least one fall a night make speedway the wild child of hotrods.
“What do you call a blonde hitchhiking? Padkos!” the MC making sure that the good taste police are not there tonight and the obligatory scatological: “Heard about the ou who had to get up cos his bum went to sleep — I heard it snoring!” However, nobody laughed at this: “A serious thing has happened — somebody has picked up a firearm licence at the hotdog stand, with a Nedbank card.”
The real death-defiers, it seemed to me, are the people whooshing past at over 170km/h on the sidecars. It has a third wheel on the left of the back wheel. The jockey has to be a crazy acrobat. When they go anticlockwise around the corners, this lunatic looks like a melodramatic dog pissing against the driver — his/her nose is 10cm from the front wheel and the same distance from the track. They hold on to a handle in front of the driver’s right foot, the right leg sharply bent and the left in that dog position over the saddle.
The winning jockey was wearing a red scarf like Molina did in Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Then the MC, in his usual manner “enlightened” me again. “That Katy Labuschagne knows how to get a leg over!”
I spoke to her afterwards. “I come from a racing family,” she said inbetween handshakes and kisses from wellwishers in the pits. “This to me is a family sport.”
Her whole family takes part, husband and both sons. Her eldest son was in a coma for three weeks after a fall and almost died. But he is riding again and so is she. Katy once fell off and broke her pelvis, but was back on the track the next week.
You must be crazy!? “It looks worse than it is,” she smiles. “But it has to be in your blood. Look, I don’t drink or smoke, so this is my kicks.”
The Labuschagnes live in Virginia where Katy is a housewife.
“I love crocheting and sewing. Many people think you have to be a lesbian, but it is not true. The men here treat me like a lady.” She is hoping that her team will become South Africa’s sidecar champions this year. She can then add it to the 60 trophies she has already won in her sport.
The MC is singing over Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.
“This oke went to the second-hand shop to sell his waterbed cos he and his wife was drifting apart!”
The sprintcars look like Boudoir biscuits with fat tyres and windmills on the roofs, apparently something to do with aerodynamics. They spray a curtain of mud over the ground when they roar past. Guys with names like Blikkies, Piering or Buks gracing this event.
There is also Bond. Bridget Bond who knocks stereotypes on the head. She started on gocarts at the age of 12. Bridget had only a slight dust stripe on her nose after the race.
“When I started I thought they would be soft on me because I was a woman — now I’m glad they weren’t. I was scared the first time I crashed. I saw the wall coming and thought I was going to die. I just broke a few ribs. What makes me do it — the anxiety, the adrenalin.”
The sprintcar winner for the night is a friendly guy called Anton Coetzee, a distribution manager for a large food manufacturer. He only started in March this year.
“It’s the speed and the adventure,” he explains. He looks embarrassed at his mechanic who volunteers: “Kak Anton, it’s like pomping a cherry, just you get a bigger hard-on here.”
Real motor racing snobs, the types interested in Formula One racing, would obviously snort at this, but the highlight of the evening for most of the crowd must be the modified saloons. It is quite democratic. It is within reach of the ordinary man — any ou can soup up a “snortina” in his backyard. It is not hi tech and the crowd can relate to this.
There is a strong element of nostalgia. The cars date back a few decades, Anglias, Escorts, a Ford Capri with front wheels looking like John Wayne’s legs, Mazda XR7s.
It is the ultimate and helluva noisy ode to the common man when the winner gets to drive a lap of honour around the oval waving the checkered flag from his window.
Errol Archer (44) has “Forever Young” painted on the side of his Anglia. “The whole week you work on the car,” Errol explains. “Two hours before the flag drops I start getting the jitters. This is my way of getting a high.”
It would be too glib to try to explain hotrods and why people drive them and come to watch, by saying it is an extension of their penis with all the accompanying waffle.
Maybe one can apply what sociologist, Michael Messner, said in The Making of Masculinities about sport in general: “The athlete’s sense of identity established through sport is therefore insecure and problematic, not simply because of the high probability of ‘failure’, but also because success in the sports world amplifies many of the most ambivalent and destructive traits of traditional masculinity. Within the hierarchical world of sports, which in many ways mirrors the capitalist economy, one learns that if he is to survive and avoid being pushed off the ever-narrowing pyramid of success, he must develop certain kinds of relationships — to himself, to his body, to other people, and to the sport itself.”
On the other hand, maybe these guys were just dealing with the new South Africa as they dealt with the old one; by tickling death’s balls and getting a kick out of that. Life’s too short not to, so do you wanna dice, my broer?
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