For better or worse, I recently moved and picked up a subscription to digital cable when I did. This service includes Speed, a channel that I often imagined would harbor countless hours of quality race programming, and hoped for such blasphemous things as WRC coverage and maybe a little F1 to see what I’d been missing. Instead, I see largely how-to shows for rednecks with a truck fetish that are really thinly-veiled advertisements for such quality products as Lucas fuel injector cleaner. Give me a break!

Having partially redeemed themselves by airing the MotoGP of Turkey on Monday, I flipped on Speed yesterday evening to see what hardcore racing event they might dare to show. It turned out to be a wheelstand competition, which I had never seen before but was not my idea of an extreme racing event. It includes a number of amatueurish “competitors” in cobbled-together drag cars, the only common feature of which is their ability to lift the front wheels off the ground on a good launch.

So they’re interviewing one such driver, who is proceeding to explain that he plans to race on horsepower, “no nitrous here!”, he adds. Well I’ll be darned if that gentleman didn’t come up with the solution to the age-old problem of going faster — we all need horsepower! I’m in the processs of convulsively rolling my eyes and wondering how my pet hobby ever became the domain of uneducated so-and-sos when I realize that perhaps that word means something different to him. Perhaps he refers to the quality or purity of his horses and their power. Perhaps horses that are a product of “naturally occuring” oxygen molecules are more virtuous than those liberated by concentrations of unstable compounds. Perhaps this particular breeder is a fine and sporting gentleman who won’t have his horses involved with performance-enhancing steroids and decries their use as cheapening the sport.

But just then what I really wanted to know is would he be forced to race on something else if he tried his luck overseas? Though realistically, I doubt he’s ever left hicksville, could he adapt to race with pferdestarke (literally “horse strength”) in Deutschland, or kilowatts in Australia? Would it mess up his game if he had to adapt his engine to race on dyne-centimeters/second? I hear it’s a difficult conversion.