road racing   I loved to write about road racing, about the spectacle and the drama and the men who drove on the ragged edge. I never wrote about the carburetors or the tires. I quit writing about it when I discovered I was repeating myself. Here are the tops of a three-part series written in the 1960s, and an account of a particularly grim Sebring. sebring - the men     Each year in March when the oranges are ripe and the mornings crisp and dewy, the fast cars come to Sebring.    Their banshee howl shatters the sunny silence and the citrus groves reek of their burning oil and scorched rubber.     With them come the quiet, intense men who spend their lives for speed, and behind them come the thousands of pilgrims to this mecca of American road racing.     The 12 Hours of Sebring demands a special sort of driver and a special sort of spectator. It is a dazzling, deafening spectacle of sound and smell, color and speed, excitement and boredom.  **************************** sebring - the cars     Sit on a grassy slope in the shade of a tree, where the road curves into a hairpin and hear the spine-chilling howl of the car rocketing down the straight.      It shoots into sight, blatting and spitting in protest as the driver, barely visible in the bowels, gears it down. The brakes glow red, the tires scream like wounded beasts as it whips into the hairpin.      Almost before it is righted there is the flat snarl of acceleration, rising with grating gear changes to a bellow that shakes the earth, fading swiftly into the distance. The moment of deafening violence is quickly gone, leaving only the biting smell of burning oil and rubber until the roar of a pursuing cars fills the silent vacuum left by the last.     This is a road race, the ultimate form of motor sport, man clinging perilously to a machine. It is the noisiest, smelliest, the most colorful, the most international and certainly the most dangerous game man plays before an audience.       **************************** sebring - the race     The red cars glistened like blood in the blazing sun.        Their angry screams rent the stillness of the German forest and stifled the calliope at the carnival in France. In the hills of Sicily shepherds stood in awe of them and at a dusty airport in Florida men vowed to beat them.    For a decade the red cars of Ferrari were invincible.     They carried men to glory - and more to death - than any others. They were like primeval beasts from a dark lair in Italy, a fenced and guarded factory where outsiders were unwelcome. They were built by a strange, autocratic man, a man no one could understand or predict, who seemed to live only for his cars. But he never watched them race.   **************************** sebring - death      The fast cars flashed through the darkness, past the smoldering hulk at the hairpin and the wreckage by the warehouse, bellowing a savage threnody for the dead.       The cool night breeze carried away the acrid smoke and the thunder of the cars drowned the sobs of anguish. Death, which always rides with the fast cars, struck five times.      It should have been a great race, the 15th running Saturday of the 12 Hours of Sebring. But it was one of the worst.  It was a tragic drama to which fate, with exquisite bad taste, added a slapstick comedy ending.      The deaths at the hairpin and the Webster turn still haunted the minds of many as the end neared. Thus the mind could not accept the absurd sight of Dan Gurney, the certain winner, frantically pushing his 3,000-pound Ford toward the finish line in the final minute.   miscellaneous writing   baseball    civil rights    crime & punishment   funerals    ghost story   good old boy    parachute jump   rescue   riding the rails   road racing    short takes    space    survival   thus spake gates    zoo life