ETC: Day at the Races

Real race car, real fun.

A few weekends ago I took my son to the SCCA regional races at MSR Houston. It was a long drive and a long day but it was worth it for the both of us. I'd read about SCCA club racing for years and I think I would really like to try it. It seemed to make sense to at least go and visit and see if it was everything I thought it could be. It was. These are real amateur racers racing real race cars. It's not quite what you see on TV, but there are some real advantages to that. The big one is that we could walk around the paddock and just ogle the cars. I pointed out some interesting production based cars to my son as well as some normal road cars that were pretty incredible. We also got to see a few real purpose built race cars. At one point we came around the edge of a trailer and saw a gentleman working on a Formula Vee. I wanted to point out to him that it was the same kind of car that he had seen watching Mighty Machines on TV. Well, the nice guy working on the car saw us and waved us over to talk. It turns out he was the father of the driver, Charlie Hearn, and was getting the car ready for the race. He talked about the car and insisted that we stay while he buttoned things up so my son could sit in the car. It was a real treat. We cheered him on in the race and he was doing very well until transmission troubles put him out of the race.
We had a great father son day and truthfully it was probably as much entertain the daddy as it was entertain the children.