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        The Magazine

Bandimere Speedway Season Begins with A Bang! "Mile High Nationals" in July 2001.

By Bev Saidel

 
©2001 Richard F. Wise "Mile High Nationals" 2001 at Bandimere Speedway - Denver, Colorado

            If you weren’t sure before, you should certainly know now… quarter mile racing is alive and well at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison.  The official season started with the Night of Fire and Thunder.  The cars were there, the fans were there and the speed was there as the afternoon gave way to the May evening competitions.  I watched the lineup of funny cars, top fuel dragsters, and motorcycles compete, each vying one by one, to improve on their times.

            The crowd watched as their favorites pulled up to the line, spun their wheels and carefully aligned their front tires at the light tree.  Then the waiting, endless to the driver, no more than a moment for the fans.  They roared and screamed, the cars and the fans, and they watched focussing only on the end of the line -- the quarter mile achieved in less time than it takes to write about it.

            I don’t know when I became a motorhead.  Perhaps it was in my hometown of Long Beach.  I remember my high school friends talking about the “drags”.  I know I went once or twice to the “track” on Terminal Island that no longer exists.  I remember going to the Grand Prix and watching the cars and the drivers and the pit crews as they worked endlessly tweaking the engines for more speed.  I remember knowing that I liked speed and the skill that one needs to drive at more than 200 mph around, over and through the track course.  My husband was a motorhead.  Maybe I got it from him.  Or maybe I just came to appreciate the dedication of it all.

At Bandimere Speedway it equates to a one on one issue.  The dream is available to those who wish to pursue it -- like the kid who has been working on getting his car just right, the parent who has supported the endeavor, the adult who somewhere, sometime got a “whiff” of nitro fuel and knew that was just the beginning and that building the perfect vehicle was to become the endless evening and weekend project.

I don’t know why it is that some take up the gauntlet, to work endlessly on their vehicles, to ask for support of friends and family, to give up something for the sake of the challenge.  I don’t know how anyone imagines they can travel at 300+ miles per hour in a quarter mile.  I do know that those who pursue this “hobby” are said to have “nitro”and speed in their blood.  And I know that they seek the demon that holds the course record at the end of the track and they seek it through perfection and toil and hard work and love – love for the dream.

            This dream is met and reckoned with as the cars pull up to the line at Bandimere Speedway.  It is there that the test of expertise, of stamina, of speed and love for the dream can be met.   Bandimere allows the “dream” to exist and the challenge to be met by any of those who choose to take it on.

 Beverly A. Saidel is the owner of Cheap Shots Photography in Denver, Co. (303-331-9932)

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