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Robosaurus
is a four-storey high mechanical dinosaur. It picks up cars (and
sometimes planes) in its claws, breathes fire on them, trashes them
and hurls them to the ground. It's operated by a man who sits inside
its head, he pulls a lever and Robosaurus roars.
We saw Robosaurus in action at Raceway Park, near Englishtown. I remember the feeling of being knocked over the head with a sledgehammer the day that I realised that Englishtown is in New Jersey, and that we would be within a drive of this place for the start of the drag racing season. After my abortive trip to Milan Raceway near Detroit back in April, I was ready for my first trip to the American dragstrip. Oh my god, I thought, I could really go there. I love the sense-assaulting experience of visiting the drag strip in the UK. There aren't many strips in the country, we got to Santa Pod, in Northamptonshire. It's a pretty ramshackle affair, there's an old cowshed at the end of the strip, plus grassy banks where you can sit and picnic, and scream your lungs out as the jet car zooms past. Englishtown is a mythical place for me. The drag strip in the middle of New Jersey has been name-checked by my drag racing heroes Jungle Pam and Big Stick, and as far as I understand, it's where the best drag racing action takes place. Plus Americans are not shy about embracing trash culture as authentic and real, unlike my snobby English compatriots. The USA is the place where things are generally bigger and better, but how much bigger and better would the American dragstrip experience be, I wondered. The answer: very much. On 7 July we went to Raceway Park's annual Thrill Show. It kicked off at 8pm, after some woman over-sang the national anthem, in order to take advantage of the slightly cooler evening and the fact that flaming cars look better against a night sky. The pits were busy with drag racing legends posing for fan photos and signing gear. We saw Jungle Pam! Bunny Burkett! Even Big Stick were there with their Drag Racing Underground stand. I sound like a dork but it's no understatement to say that meeting them all was a dream come true. Because it was a thrill show, the racing was kept to a minimum, although some cars competed after their event had been rained off a few weeks earlier. We saw beautiful fat American cars bombing up the track. The cars were unmuffled and loud, all souped-up, super-fast and shiny. Then it was time for the entertainment. I may be wrong but a thrill show is all about the demonstration rather than the race. We saw several different classes of car, including ethanol-powered funny cars, top fuel dragsters, some junior dragsters too. We saw jet cars racing each other, a first for me. Jungle Pam led Jungle Jim's car through the burnout, just like the old days. Everything was fast, loud, beautiful. Pure pleasure. When my excitement levels couldn't get much higher, E-Town cranked it up further with the monster trucks. You know what a monster truck looks like, right? Tall. Big fat wheels that could crush a crowd of spectators. Noisy. Monster trucks have full-on paint jobs. They have names like Gravedigger, Predator or King Krunch. Monster trucks aren't particularly fast, their speciality is flying through the air right in front of your face. At Englishtown there's a strip of grass between the track and the spectators. Two blocks of trashed cars had been set up. Then, one by one, the monster trucks took it in turn to leap over them. Brrrummm! Boing! Crash! Brrrummm! Boing! Crash! Those monsters flew ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the air. There are few things that focus your mind and your heartbeat as succinctly as a massive car-shaped beast floating on nothing right in front of your eyes. It was like a fucked-up kind of ballet. Meanwhile, the trashed cars got flatter and flatter as the trucks pounded them into the ground with their tyres. We saw windscreens explode, wheels crushed like cardboard, carmageddon. The monster trucks lined up and Robosaurus was wheeled out. As its tail and head unfolded, a couple of guys drove more trashed-up cars onto the track. Robosaurus prey. The jabbering commentator urged us all to scream for Robosaurus. We didn't need much encouragement and we continued to scream for the whole of the act. At this point Robosaurus didn't look very menacing, maybe it was the disco lights studding its back, maybe it was the jerky way in which it moved, I don't know. Anyway, Robosaurus wheeled around and blew smoke and fire out of its nostrils. Then it approached one of the cars, bent over, and scooped it up in its claws. Cheers from the crowd! Over the next ten minutes Robosaurus shook the car upside down, set it alight with its fiery breath, chewed it a little with its metal jaws, and tore it into two neat pieces. We yelled: "Kill the car Robosaurus! Kill the car!" and the greasy remains of man's greatest achievement were dropped onto the ground to burn themselves out. Huge round of applause as the flames from the dead car lit up the faces of a thousand happy li'l tykes. After the last monster truck had bounced its way out of the arena, the last dragster packed away and Robosaurus put back to bed, we headed to our own car, a measly Hyundai rental unit. For the past three hours our ears had been filled with incessant redneck babbling over the public address system, our skin stank of stale funnel cake grease, our legs wobbled from the vertiginous bleacher seats and our hearts were as happy as could be. Drag Racing Underground |
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