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.

They still talk about the night that Augie Pabst, a fresh-faced heir to the brewing fortune, drove a rented Falcon into the swimming pool of the Mark Thomas Inn in Monterey, California. His reviews were so good that he repeated the act at a Howard Johnson's outside Denver.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

A written regulation in NASCAR is about as reliable as an Egyptian immigration law.

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.

Some guy once told me that skydiving is like cutting your throat and seeing if you can get to the doctor before you bleed to death.

I admit to wasting my life messing around with fast cars and motorcycles.