I have four grown children and two tiny grandchildren.

The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.

If any vestige of the American automobile industry is to survive, it must involve state-of-the-art vehicles that are not equal to but surpass the best imports in every way.

I have spent--or wasted--my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.

Regardless, I did rise to the editorship before embarking on a freelance career in the late '60's.

The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising.

Everything at a NASCAR event carries a corporate logo except the lavatory stalls.