So here’s the thing… I can’t understand a darn thing anyone in Louisiana says.I consider myself to be fairly good at interpreting accents and mumbling – I do teach elementary kids, after all. However, I feel like a foreigner here, which I suppose I am, in some regards. It makes me feel language handicapped – I have to concentrate so hard to understand anything, and I still only get about every 5th word. And I’m trying to figure out what the announcer is saying over the loudspeaker, which distorts words anyhow. The only thing I can get is “nice day” – “naaah-ss dayuh”. Lots of “we gun run dis class now…” To be a biased idiot, I kind of thought that only happened in books. And we are experiencing being a racial minority, which is also an unusual experience for us, and particularly for L. Everyone around us is either African-American or Cajun or Creole – wonderful to listen to, but a little atypical for those of us from small-town Kansas.
Anyhow, it’s Friday. We are at the track, Stuart has had two qualifying runs. That means that they use the racers’ times from those runs to rank the racers. Those rankings are used to pair the racers up for the actual racing tomorrow. Every car has an “index” – the time that the car SHOULD run, based on it’s make/model/engine size. And then racers work on their cars to try to make them go faster than the index.The racers are ranked by how much faster than their index their car goes.There were 85 racers here in Stuart’s category this morning, but more are arriving all day, so I’m not sure what to expect for actual racing (called eliminations) tomorrow. This afternoon they are running class, which is optional. It means that they line you up in your categories (classes), and you race anyone else who is in your category, to set the fastest speed for your class. Stuart is a stock car racer (as opposed to super stock or super gas or super comp). In the stock category, the racers are placed into classes based on their indexes. A is the fastest class, Z is the slowest. Stuart is in D class, so he’ll race all of the other D racers to try to set the class record. He also would have the option to try to set the national record here this weekend. There are only certain races where that is an option – the track has to provide officials to tear apart the car if you do set a record, to make sure that you aren’t cheating in any way. Stuart set the record in 2008 and 2009, but I don’t think that he’s going to try to set it again here (although I could be wrong). It’s too humid and warm, neither of which are good conditions for speed.
This morning, it was overcast and foggy – I was worried about how the day was going to turn out, weather-wise. But I’m guessing that might be a local normal weather thing, so close to the ocean . . .it all burned off after a bit, and now it is absolutely amazingly gorgeous outside. We stopped and bought sunscreen this morning, since I’d brought bug spray, but not sunscreen. And we’re stopping tonight to buy some shorts - I packed for Kansas weather, not LA weather. The announcer said it is 15 degrees warmer than normal here right now.
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