Green and Purple? Not on my race car!

When I first started racing, from time to time my teammates and I would go to see some local circle track racing at Elko Speedway, just south of Minneapolis.  Sitting in the stands, we would come up with all kinds of reasons why somebody did well and why somebody else failed.  Over the course of several years, we started to notice some trends.  Green was unlucky and purple was slow.  We figured that the purple paint had to be heavy as it made the cars so much slower.  As to why green was unlucky, who knows.  But every time another green car crashed – we looked at each other with that knowing look.  Well, of course!  It had green on it.  The worst luck was day-glo green.  They tended to have expensive crashes… As we progressed through our season, one of my teammates, Wade, decided to prove that we were all being crazy.  As he rebuilt his Mazda RX-7 from an incident at Brainerd in turn two (Yikes!) he painted one bolt day-glo green just to prove us wrong.  The next race was Road America…   That was just tempting fate, right?  For most of the weekend everything was ok.  Come race day, everything was still ok.  We didn’t even think about it.  Then about midway through the race, there is this tremendous commotion in Turn one.  After the dust settles, there is Wade’s car, sitting mangled in the gravel trap.  Wade’s car looked like it was twisted by somebody trying to put a half-chewed tootsie roll back in its wrapper.    After it was hauled out, Wade told us that he lost his brakes into one and pulled the e-brake.  He had left the e-brake attached just for such a potential situation.  Pulling the e-brake slowed the car a little.  Things went well until the green bolt intervened and turned the car sideways just at entry to the gravel.  Multiple rolls later, Wade’s RX-7 was history.   As much as we tried not to, we all said “told you!” at some point.  Poor RX-7, killed by the curse of the green bolt.   That’s the way I remember it.  I’m sure I don’t have all the details right, but to this day I don’t wear green on my socks.  I don’t have green on my car or anywhere on my uniform.  I am a Spartan, though, so I do wear Spartan dark green from time to time.  British Racing Green was dark and they did ok….   And Purple? Nope, not on my car – I don’t need heavy paint weighing the Fiesta down.

Oh, and the Blue Stripe on the side of Wade’s car? I ran that on my Civic and CRX and I still run that livery on my Fiesta today. It reminds me of my favorite times racing with my friends at Mayhem Racing.