A friend of mine is the head tech inspector at the local dirt track.  He wanted to know if I would  come help him tech the race cars last week.  I jumped at the chance.  I couldn’t wait to get a close look at all the fast cars.  I knew we would be looking under the hoods and going over suspension parts.  This seemed like a rare opportunity to spy on other race car drivers and see what they run in and on their race cars.  A proper analogy would be if I was a contestant at a large poker game and a judge.  I would  get to see their cards and I already know what I have.  Unfortunately I have a pair of deuces.  It’s still nice to know what others are holding.
The tech inspection occurs in the middle of the track.  Teching cars in the infield is fine when you have cars to tech but watching a race is difficult.  You have to decide early on if you want to turn slowly around as you follow the cars on the track, or you follow the cars as far as your neck will turn until you can’t see them anymore and then whip your head around the maximum distance to catch them on the other end.  Turning around in circles isn’t bad but soon you get to feeling kind of stupid.  After a while of turning you pretend to have a reason to turn around.  Let’s say you  had a cramp in your leg and you need to hop in the direction of the cars. It’s feasible.  Maybe you drop something on the ground and happen to turn toward the cars as you pick it up.  This will work for a couple of laps but soon you look like fumbling drunk wanting to do pirouettes.  The best method I found was to focus on one area and watch that part of the track.  This works well until you hear some crashing noises or someone says “damn, he’s gonna get him this time” then you have to whip around.  It can’t be helped.  You don’t want to miss that spectacular pass or that horrendous wreck.
When the top three cars came in for inspection after the first heat race I didn’t know what to expect.  I didn’t know if we were going to weigh them and send them to the pits or if we were going to have a close look.  Much to my happiness we looked them over good.  We crawled under them.  We looked under the hoods and checked various aspects of their motors.  We checked suspension parts.  I was loving this.  I was taking mental notes of everything I saw.  I was seeing their suspension  parts and where they had their weight placed.  I couldn’t believe my good fortune.  Then something happened to spoil my night completely.  In the last heat race a car that races in the class I’m going to race in won easily.  He beat some really fast cars with ease.  I couldn’t wait for him to pull in for inspection.  This is going to be great I think.  He rolls across the scales and parks in the tech area.  We line the top three finishers up and start removing hoods to inspect motors.  We come to the winners car and before we can remove his hood he says something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.  He says, and this is verbatim, “you boys don’t need to pull that hood off.  You don’t want to see what’s under there.  I’ll just take a DQ (disqualification) and roll back over to the pits.”  Before I could protest he fired it up and away he went.  I wanted to look under the hood.  I really did.  That may have been the only car that night that I  really wanted to look under the hood.  How dare he?  Now I’m left to wonder what mysterious thing was under there that made him so fast.  I’ve been losing sleep over it.  When I do get to sleep, I dream of prying and prying on  his hood but it won’t come off.  Just when I start to see the hood separate from it’s place the alarm clock goes off.  I awake breathing hard and sweating.  My wife doesn’t believe me when I tell her what I’ve been dreaming about.  She looks at me with disapproving eyes as she tells me some of the words she heard me say when I was dreaming.  I tell her “it’s so tight” is referring to the fit of the race car hood.  At least the guy was honest about his dishonesty.  He told us he was cheating and drove away.  That’s racing honesty.