In the Rockets’ Red Glare
December 19, 2024 at 05:13AMRachel Kushner loves speed. She’s written about it in fiction and essay; she’s driven and ridden and skied her way across more miles than most. Now, her son, Remy, seems to have inherited the gene. For Harper’s, Kushner chronicles his adolescent gearhead flowering, as well as their time spent with the National Hot Rod Association—traveling from race to race, speaking with drivers, and basking in the fumes of cameraderie and funny cars. A literal (and literary) tour de force.
Remy and I have a refrain, perhaps started by me, that among nostalgia participants, “there are no knuckleheads.” At NHRA events and in the wilder unsanctioned scene, people know what they are doing. They have to. The clutch of a nitro car, for instance, must be disassembled following each use: after only a few seconds, the clutch plates get so hot that they can fuse together. Top Fuel engines take so much wear in a single run that they must be entirely torn down and rebuilt after every pass on the quarter-mile track. Perhaps the severe consequence of error narrows the field of prospective nostalgia racers down to those with mastery. Nostalgia racing demands mastery. There is a purity to the demand: there is no money to be made. There is fun, and glory, but underneath these is a more inchoate drive, an ontological imperative, maybe, to play with fire.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/18/in-the-rockets-red-glare/
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