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Written by:
Jade Gurss
12/02/2008 - 06:47 AM
Mooresville, North Carolina
Faster. Louder. The weekly column on SPEEDtv.com by Jade Gurss. (Harold Hinson Photo) ยป More Photos
I wouldn’t ask anyone to click his or her TV remote away from SPEED or SPEED-HD… ahem… except in this isolated case, when you need to fire-up the DVR to record the HBO documentary, Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana. Then, watch the film in between the 'Holiday Marathon' of PINKS or while gazing at the Grid Girl photos on SPEEDtv.com.
“Dirty Driving” is a look inside the weekly Friday night short-track drivers of Anderson, Indiana, a Rust Belt town which, like most of America, has fallen on hard times as its once-thriving automotive plants close down one after another. Most famous as the home of the Little 500 (2008 marked the 60th annual running of the grinding 500-lap endurance race for sprint cars which precedes the Indy 500), the quarter-mile Anderson Speedway hosts a weekly Friday night show that includes a class called Thundercars. Thundercars are a category below the entry-level street stocks, with welded bumpers on the front and back. These crude chariots produce Mad Max-level destruction and mayhem mainly because their drivers use the weekly races as a way
While the NASCAR community frets about approximately 1,000 lost jobs (important jobs indeed), Anderson has seen many thousands of jobs disappear in recent years as a victim of a faltering economy and an inept American automobile industry. (More than 1,300 jobs were lost during filming.) In more prosperous times at Anderson Speedway, General Motors employed one-third of the drivers racing at each weekly show, but that percentage is now zero. The film is riddled and strewn with vacant factories, buildings and homes.
Their necks are red (if not hidden by tattoos or mullets), and these Indiana residents put the Hoooooo into Hoosier. The faux-country theme song includes lame NASCAR lyrics and there must be a dozen varieties of Dale Jr. / #8 hats throughout as the film follows lead protagonist Sammy Hawkins, who hasn’t won “one of them six-foot trophies” in more than five years of trying, mainly because of a violent temper which boils over in self-destruction each time he takes his battered machine onto the track.
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