Word: dragster
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...land. By day, the only tracks were made by rabbits and horned lizards seeking shade; by night, the only noise was the sound of coyotes howling. Now the dunes reverberate with the sound of engines rev ving and backfiring. These are the echoes of the desert dragster, practitioner of the West's newest, and hottest, fad - desert drag and dune racing...
From parachutes he moved on to the quintessential custom car, the dragster, whose only purpose is to accelerate over a quarter-mile straightaway to speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h. "Only an incredibly sophisticated people," he says, "would lavish expensive attention on things of such limited use." He portrayed the goggled drivers with hand-painted benday dots to make them look like newspaper photographs...
...matching polka-dot ascot. His still-accented English has taken on the authority of a Charles Boyer, his pronounced limp (an old hip injury aggravated by an automobile accident five years ago) appears less a handicap than a charming idiosyncrasy. True, he no longer tears around town like a dragster in his car, and after several unsuccessful attempts at beating Jascha Heifetz, he has given up ping-pong. But he will take the orchestra on its first tour of Latin America this spring. Then he will move his 104 musicians into their summer home...
...sense, the younger Californian artists show American art at its last frontier. They do not mind being "funky," that is, casual, deliberately corny, explorers of the American vernacular. In the ambiance of the gadget, the dragster with painted flames in its exhausts, the never-closed supermarket with motorized shopping cars, the West Coast artist has become his own deus ex machina. They are part-optimistic, part-spooky gardeners in a garish no man's land between art and reality. Like the man who built the Watts Towers, they might, when finished, just move away and never come back...
...plot, which has all the bite of the blueprint in a model car kit, tells how a car-crazy boy (Darren) and a boy-crazy girl (Tiffin) find happiness at the end of an auto endurance race through Death Valley. As the dragster's inamorata, Pamela learns that falling in love with an "intuitive genius" can be an endurance test in itself. Darren spends so much time pondering gear ratios and reassembling fuel lines that he can scarcely stay awake long enough to endanger a girl's reputation. Of course, he regains consciousness moments before the Big Race...