Go Fast, Turn Left Voices from Orange County Speedway (review)

time gone, long time coming. Come hook in the guls, come buUet between doe's shoulders, come long cold and die Cross, come time to lay down, come time to get awake, I'll remember you with love." The evening before his tragic death, Pancake caUed his mother and strangely repeated "I love you" three times. His mother, who knew him better than anyone, has said, "I diink he was startled, he was frightened, he was confused, he was pushed, he was sick ... I know he loved me. He wouldn't have put me through this. That's why he couldn't have done it in his right mind. . . . He was somewhere between fear and frustration and his mind just snapped." But who has ever entered die mind of another? Pancake's ultimate motives wiU ever remain an enigma. He was suigeneris, a wonderfuUy promising writer. Douglass 's book makes you want to read him. Go Fast, Turn Left Voices from Orange County Speedway Produced, directed, and edited by Kenny Dalsheimer The Groove Productions, 1997 48 min. Videotape, $24.95 Reviewed by Elizabeth A. Fenn, a doctoral candidate in early American history at Yale University. Fenn is an ASE-certified auto mechanic. Move over, basebaU. The aU-American sport has arrived, and you're not it. Auto racing—not footbaU, basketbaU, or basebaU—is the biggest spectator sport in America. For southerners, and increasingly for others as weU, that means stock cars. Stock car racing's meteoric rise to prominence is visible everywhere. Lifesize cardboard cut-outs ofnascar driverJeffGordon now clutter grocery-store aisles, and national tv networks carry flag-to-flag Uve coverage ofWinston Cup races from February to November. For those who don't understand what die todo is aU about, Go Fast, Turn Leßwiü begin to fiU the void. Despite die highly visible afternoon races at super speedways such as TaUadega, Darlington, and the new Texas Motor Speedway, the heart and soul of stock car racing remains where it began, on the short oval tracks that dot the red-clay farmscape of the South. Draw a circle with a sixty-five-mUe radius around die city of Raleigh, North Carolina, and you wUl find no fewer than eight short-track speedways witiiin its bounds. Turn up on a Friday or Saturday night, and for the price of admission (roughly $12) you wiU see racing that tingles your spine and ties knots in your stomach. In terms ofbang for the buck, it's the best deal in town. 1 00 Reviews Urüike North Carolina Racers: Backroads to Glory, a recent pubHc television program recounting the history of nascar in a predictable rags-to-riches fashion, GoFast, TurnLeftis a roots racing documentary. It focuses on Rougemont, North Carolina's, Orange County Speedway, "known nationwide" as the fastest threeeighths -mile track in the South. The director, Kenny Dalsheimer, wisely chose not to use a narrator and instead brought the track to Hfe through the voices of the people to whom it means so much. Interviews with seven individuals form the centerpiece ofthe work. We hear from Winkie WUkinsJr., the Race Day Manager ; Harold Dorsett, the Operations Manager; Dan HUl III, one of the track's owners; Kent Fogleman, a former driver whose son now races; and diree drivers: Jay Fogleman,Jason GuIHe, and Maurice HUl. The videotape is divided into four sections. For tried-and-true race fans, the first segment, focused on the history of the track, wiU hold die most interest. It includes rare film footage from the raceway's dirt-track days under the name Trico Speedway. Judging from the vintage ofthe cars, it's Hkely that footage from Orange-Occaneechi Speedway, which operated from 1948 to 1968 in nearby HiUsborough, also made it into the final cut. Viewers famUiar with the high-tech, high-doUar, media-conscious world of nascar today wiU appreciate Maurice HiU's recoUections of buüding race cars from junkyard parts and Kent Fugleman 's anecdotes of an era in which fighting and racing were of a piece. "Back in them days people fist fought," he says. "They'd fight Hke the dickens. They wouldn't shoot, wouldn't cut...