Car racing is a popular sport in America. High end racing like Nascar or the serious drag cars like NHRA meets are definitely at the top end of the sport, and way down there are jalopy races. This is funny stuff and will often take place as an event at a county fair or even as a preamble to dirt track races where sprint cars do their thing. The “raw meat” for these jalopy races come from junk yards. A few guys will buy one, paint it up, drag it to s grass track somewhere and bang away at other contestants until there is only one man standing and he is declared the winner. What’s left is loaded up and taken right back to the junk yard where it came from. It is a harmless sport that gets a lot of laughs.
Junk cars in Calumet City are not used as raw material for cars driven by the likes of Kyle Busch or Dale Earnhardt Jr. This sport is full on racing and although it may often be referred to as stock car racing it is anything but. The vehicles that are on the tracks around the country are every inch hand built masterpieces, the frames are constructed from strong steel tubing, the body panels are all hand formed to keep within regulations but not a millimeter more and the engines are built from a bare block up.
If you were to buy junk cars in Calumet City you would get a car that at one time actually rolled down an assembly line in Detroit or Tokyo. A Nascar racer has never seen the inside of an assembly building but it certainly has seen the inside of some of the most sophisticated automotive shops on the planet. The assembly of the race car starts with a tubular frame that has been completely fabricated from square and round high strength steel tubing. A lot of the structure is used to build a protective cocoon for the driver; this is called the roll cage. The front and rears are referred to as clips and they are light and designed to crush when the car hits the wall or another car. The front clip is designed to push the engine straight into the ground in the event a collision and not into the driver’s compartment as is the case with a normal street car.
The engine in a Nascar racer is definitely not from one of the junk cars in calumet City scrap heaps. The cars entered by Dodge still use the 340 cubic inch engine that was used in the muscle cars of the 60s but it is brand new and has never had a revolution yet.
