It was a familiar scene. The stench of secondhand smoke hung heavy in the unseasonably warm March air trackside as late model Mopars ran passes well short of their advertised capabilities. I was alone, watching the early birds make passes that can only be described as “high school fast.” Finally, my first associate would arrive in an impossibly minty Buick Regal–one of the Things That Should Not Be. We reconnoitered the area to end back up trackside to watch a turbocharged PT Cruiser outrun an Ecoboost Mustang–another pair of Things That Should Not Be. Unimpressed, we wandered back down to the pits to patiently await the arrival of our contact, a man and his father in a just-loud-enough cateye Silverado pulling a perfectly ugly S-10 pickup.

It’s no secret that racing is an expensive endeavor–to the point of cliche. But there are a few remaining pockets of truly accessible racing that exist in the United States today, of which (in the author’s humble opinion), the best is the simple, down-and-dirty local dirt oval track. Screaming V-8 motors, wheel to wheel (and sometimes open wheel) action, and sliding. So much sliding. Sliding through all four turns to the point one can’t tell where the straights actually begin or end. It’s a lot like if NASCAR and Formula D had a redneck stepchild, and then it had a teen rebellion where it got a nose ring and colored its hair green.