On my way to Peter Farrell Supercars, I get lost three times, backtrack twice, and call the man twice more than that for revised directions. None of which seems to help. In the end, my winning card turns out to be a 7-Eleven clerk outside his store stealing a smoke. He leads me down the right path, and I arrive 15 minutes late, a bit frazzled, and with the heavy guilt of 30 roaming minutes on my next cell bill, which dissipates when I realize it's on the company. (But if the future holds anything for me, please let it be a portable GPS.)
To pinpoint the exact location of the episode: Manassas, Virginia, a small town outside of Washington, DC, that couldn't be better described in a word other than quaint. It exudes quaintness to such a sickening degree that one wonders what, exactly, Farrell's neighbors must think is on a collision course toward their quaint houses whenever he fires up his '93 Mazda RX-7 dragster (the one you see on these pages) or one of his three-rotors for a test-run around the park.
Farrell and the rest of his team-Greg O'Connor and Jonathan Pritz-are loading his car into the trailer. The new paint scheme really swoops the car out of its old road-race element, and it's hard to fathom that this is the exact same car in pretty much the exact same setup now as it was when it was darting through the Ss during its days on the IMSA Street-Stock Endurance Championship series. The PFS body kit does nothing more than accent the Mazda's designer lines, and the stock 13B two-rotor engine bears little more than a mild street port and a custom PFS single turbo kit, neither of which is anything new.
Nineteen ninety-eight was Farrell's first year in the import drag racing scene after a long accomplished career driving road-race tracks-in Ram 50 race trucks, Peugeot 505 turbos, Saturns, and RX-7s. On the dragstrip, he felt equally at home and ended his rookie season with an impressive competition low of 10.11 at 135.6 mph in Atlanta. No major changes to the car are expected for this year-just more drag-specific tuning to get the car dialed in for the quarter-mile. At least that's what he lets on.
We regroup at a nearby park-me, Farrell, his team, the trailer, the car. They roll the car out of the trailer and Greg gives it life. The roar of the 13B is loud in bold and italics. It's the wake-up call of a bomber squad over Rotterdam. A true race car. It's something I'll never drive (unless disorder ever reigns the universe), but at the same time it looks like it would be too much for me to handle. As it idles-quakes might be a better word- it looks like it could explode off the line at any moment. It's filled with that much pent-up ferocity and power. A hungry lion in tall grass.
I can't tell you how it drives; I don't even ask to drive it, but stationary seat time behind the wheel is the sloppy seconds I do get. A task in itself-getting into the car. Just crawling through the rollcage is a trick. I bump my head twice and bruise my knee. Then there's the ordeal of squeezing all the right body parts into all the right places. The Sparco racing seat bites your backside, the rollbars attack your head, and the race wheel juts straight into your abdomen. (Once inside, it seems impossible to get out.) I have no idea how anyone can take their mind off the discomfort, let along steer the damn thing in a straight line at 140 mph.