********************
Title: Jet-Engine-Powered Race Car
Date Occurred: Sometime around 1974 and also on October 4, 2006
Date Written: October 4, 2006
Written by: Joseph T. Arendt
********************
When I was a boy of perhaps ten, I badly wanted to see real race cars in action. I liked watching races on television, but felt going to a real race would be much better. About eight or so miles away from our home in the Village of Biron, Wisconsin was a genuine racetrack. It was called Golden Sands Speedway.
I kept no diary or written records at that age. Therefore, this story might have been from 1973, 1974, 1975, or even later.
I guess the type of racing at Golden Sands Speedway is called "dirt track racing," but I have no idea why since the track is a large, blacktop oval. It is not dirt.
NASCAR great Dick Trickle supposedly started his career at that same Golden Sands Speedway outside Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Rapids and the Village of Biron are next to each other. Since Wisconsin Rapids is much larger, it is generally used to when a nearby location needs to be given. I believe the race track is not within the actual city limits of Wisconsin Rapids.
Various other boys in grade school had gone to the races already, so there was peer pressure to see what they had seen. I see no reason for any embarrassment in giving the real names of two of my boyhood friends in this story: Bill Nash and Steve Herman.
They had both been to Golden Sands Speedway. I wanted to go too, of course. What boy would not in those circumstances?
Both Steve and Bill at that time were fascinated by race cars and their drivers. Steve and Bill had collections of race car driver cards. I had a few myself. These looked very similar to baseball cards only were about race car drivers. The front had a photograph of the driver, often next to his car. The back of the card had text that gave biographical information.
Of course, all three of us boys had model cars of race cars of various types. It seemed all boys I knew at that age had toy race cars.
An occasional adult like one of my friend's uncles would see the race car driver trading cards. That uncle did a double take when he realized these were not baseball player cards. I recall him saying, "What's the world coming to when boys have cards like these instead of baseball cards?"
I guess these racing car driver cards were a fad of the time. I have no idea if they are still made or sold today. I suppose given the current popularity of NASCAR, racing car driver cards likely are made and sold by some company or other.
Like most boyhood possessions, the cards I had disappeared many years ago. While certain baseball cards may have become highly valuable, I am not sure there would be any market for the race car driver cards even if I still had mine.
Finally after what seemed years of begging, my parents caved in to my pleas. We went to see the stock car races at Golden Sands Speedway.
Two big impressions I had were of deafening sounds and smells like burned rubber and exhaust fumes. The impact of smells and sounds never came through from watching car races on television. The television has a volume knob to control it, after all, while the real race did not! The sound was so loud it was very unpleasant, leaving my ears ringing. It was a loud sound that could be felt in the body as well as heard in the ears.
The race cars were not the perfectly painted and pristine cars of the NASCAR races on TV. Seen close, most of these race cars had a number of obvious dents in them.
There was a special treat that evening. Not part of the actual race, but a traveling show that went from racetrack to racetrack. It was an exhibition drive of a car called the Green Mamba. When I saw the Green Mamba, I had seen nothing like it before. It looked like a vehicle out of a science fiction movie! This was because the Green Mamba was a jet engine merged into a rudimentary automobile. I had no idea this vehicle would be there that night. I had never heard of it before that night. I had merely wanted to see stock car racing, which is what all the other race cars there were doing.
The driver took the jet-engine-powered vehicle around the track a couple times. Understandably given what powered it, the vehicle sounded like a jet airplane on a runway.
Since the track was a constant curve, the jet-engine-powered Green Mamba never went fast. The normal gasoline-powered (or maybe ethanol-powered, I am not sure what stock cars like those burned for fuel) race cars seemed to go faster than it did. The Green Mamba was obviously designed for a straight-line speed run, not for cornering like the actual stock cars that would be in the actual race that night. Still, even moving relatively slowly, the Green Mamba was quite a sight!
The next day, I excitedly told Steve and Bill about my evening at the race track. I especially told them about the Green Mamba.
Steve was not as ignorant of it as I was. In fact, he said that he had a trading card for the driver of the Green Mamba! He proved it by retrieving the card. The biography in text on the back of the card claimed the driver had long experimented with jet-powered cars. One accident was so severe that his legs had to be amputated! Even that did not dissuade him from his passion of racing jet-powered cars. His current jet-powered car, the Green Mamba, was operated entirely by hand controls, according to the card.
I felt sick inside after reading that. I felt like I had just gone to the Roman Coliseum in ancient times to see gladiators gore and kill each other or something. I felt ashamed.
Today as I type this story, through the wonder of the Internet, I decided to do a web search in another window as I left this half-completed story here in another window. I did the search right now before eight in the morning of October 4, 2006. The web search result is incredible.
The Green Mamba car is still touring on the Midwestern race track circuit! On August 12, 2006, it was at the Asphalt Race Facility in Sauk Centre, Minnesota! ( http://www.tntraceways.com/i94raceway/press.php?subaction=showf ull&id=1146718237&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1& )
I believe on September 30, 2006, it was at the Raceway Park in Minnesota! ( http://www.goracewaypark.com/left.htm )
I thought these web search results must be insane! I thought it must be the same name that somebody put on a different car! The Green Mamba that I saw was from thirty or more years ago! Even if it was the same car, I felt it had to be a different driver! I finally located a photograph of the current Green Mamba. It is definitely the same car! It looks just the way I remember it! The site with the photograph is at:
http://www.tntraceways.com/i94raceway/press.php?subaction=showf ull&id=1155181319&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&
The photograph is copyrighted, so I won't copy and attach it.
Under the photograph, text explains that the driver of the Green Mamba is Doug Rose. His car before the Green Mamba was the Green Monster. He crashed that vehicle on July 4, 1966. He was injured so severely that he had to have both legs amputated! Despite being legless, he has been racing the Green Mamba since 1968.
My memory of what was on the racing driver car driver trading card that Steve Herman showed me looks accurate indeed! I easily could have and almost certainly did see Doug Rose driving the Green Mamba around 1973 or thereabouts, which is when I would have been ten years old. It seems Doug Rose is still driving the Green Mamba at exhibitions at race tracks in the Midwest in 2006!
I went though several web postings about the Green Mamba without any of them mentioning a word about the driver's leg amputations until I found the one that did. Given that, and assuming the manner of publicity has not changed all that much in the intervening decades, I guess it makes sense that I could see the car in reality over thirty years ago without knowing that about the driver's leg amputations. Not until afterward, that is, when Steve Herman showed me the trading card for what had to be the same driver: Doug Rose!
This strange experience sapped my interest in racing cars and racing car drivers. I am not sure why it bothered me so much. I knew from races on television that race cars sometimes crashed and occasionally drivers were even killed. Something about the idea of leg amputations did affect me more than those deaths, even though there was no accident the night I was at the races. The actual accident had been years earlier! That was the only visit I ever made to Golden Sands Speedway. My parents never took me there again because I never asked them to.
THE END
If you want to talk to me, I can be reached at arendtj@att.net