"Think back to the last [19th] century. The transatlantic packet, the stern-wheel steamboat, the express locomotive, and all such storied contrivances from the American past were aspects of a 'technology of haste' which was linked ... to 'rewards that others might grab if you were not there before them.' The question 'How fast will it go?' was one that gained currency ... . 'Getting there first' became a tangible payoff ... . The same insularity that made time valuable enough to try and save also fostered the Ingenious Yankee - isolated because of distance and thrown back on his own resources - who had to become adept at tinkering. Inevitably, he began to 'improve' the design of things, and with a vehicle that usually meant making it faster."
-Robert C. Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing 1950-1990, "A New Theater of Machines," p.22.

A citizen of the world

was in Washington, D.C. last spring to do some research on the history of rocket cars and maybe to see the flowering of the cherry blossoms. I was late for a dinner-slash-interview engagement with Robert C. Post, the Smithsonian Institute's Curator of Technology Emeritus, who - between installations at the National Museum of American History - wrote a dozen books on various technological endeavors, including High Performance, an academic tome and the book that many automotive pundits consider to be the definitive dissertation on the sport of drag racing. As I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, on the phone explaining my tardiness to Mr. Post, I came across a couple of modern-looking Asian girls who were stopped at a traffic light and were taking pictures of each other with a disposable film camera. They were trim, toothsome, and fetching.

Imagining I was beyond earshot, I muttered into the mobile that: "I have just encountered the most stunning pair of Japanese tourists. You might find it ironic that in some weird reversal of techno-post modernism, they are not taking pictures with some googol-pixel personal digital assistant thingie, but with a cheap, disposable film camera."

"I didn't even know anybody even made film anymore," Mr. Post replied rhetorically.

The ladies overheard my description of them - and they understood every word. They were pissed at my racist generalization.

"Who are you to think you know about us?" one spluttered.

"Uh-oh, Bob," I stammered into the microphone. "Those girls heard me. And they are all up on the tire. I gotta hang up, in case I have started an international incident or something." I closed the hinges.

"We are not tourists! And we do not care about technology except as a means to an end," she declared in a form of English that was far more decipherable, than say, my Japanese.

"Relax," I exhaled. "I get it. You live here. I am the tourist." They were not satisfied.

The one with the two-bit, throwaway camera held it up and shook it at me. "It is important for you not to judge us by stereotypes! I am not a tourist. Like Aristotle, I am a citizen of the world. I am ... the future!"

They both laughed. I did, too. The subtext, of course, is that the logical progression from declaring one as a citizen of the world is the inevitability of imperialism.

The future

At the steak-and-martini restaurant, Robert C. Post wasn't alone. He was with some colleagues and their wives. Gathered were some of the crème de la crème of old school hot rodders, guys who had been active participants in the sport of drag racing since it became organized professionally in the 1950s. In a phrase, movers and shakers and rainmakers. Among the motorazzi seated at our table was Dave "Big Mac" McClelland, drag racing's main television play-by-play announcer - think the Vin Scully or the Chick Hearn of the form - as well as a curator of the drag racing museum in Pomona, California.

The men sported gray sports coats and matching facial hair. Their wives were dressed as if for High Tea at the Ritz-Carlton or the Huntington Library.

Before the food arrived, the menfolk talked about a litany of bad ideas that had graced the drag strip over the years - often with grim results, if not spectacular crashes. One of the men at the table, "Diamond Jim" Annin, ran a race car that was credited with being the first machine to record a five-second elapsed time down a quarter-mile drag strip. To these guys, that was like landing on the moon. But there was some contention as to whether another dragster guy recorded a five-second time first. This created quite a hullabaloo at our table. You might as well have said the Russians got there first ... .

I broke in as devil's advocate: "Let's say you and your race car made history. So what? The world doesn't care who was first or second to break the five-second barrier on a drag strip. Let's face it. You guys have had quite a run in what was a white-male dominated sport and culture."

The graybeards set down their martinis and furrowed their brows. The women continued to talk of Michelangelo, albeit more sotto voce.

"How can you dismiss a historical watershed?" one of the graybeards asked. "The breaking of a barrier? That is a profound accomplishment!"

"I am not dismissing it. The future is. Actually, the future is ignoring it."

The table got quieter. There we were, in full springtime in our nation's capital, and a gathering of legends were celebrating the past instead of, say, another annual blooming of the cherry blossoms - summoning notions of George Washington, the horniness of the carbon cycle, and the promise of life, life, life. We stared at our own mortality and obsolescence like so much half-eaten tiramisu.

"So, what do you think the future cares about?" one of the arbiters of history asked.

"Umm, something called 'drifting,' apparently."

Robert C. Post threw down: "What exactly is drifting, Mr. Marco Polo?"

"Well, it's Japanese kids, mostly, on a slalom course. They take a hopped-up sports car or coupe and throw it into the corners like a chef from Benihana skewering a slice of Kobe steak. Then they fishtail to-and-fro to the next corner, hammering the throttle and smoking the tires like Akron, Ohio was on fire or something. It's all done with seemingly effortless panache and elan, of course. It's not about who goes the fastest or who gets there first - I don't even think the course has a real finish line."

"That's just legalized bad driving," one of the graybeards said.

"It's about who can be as out-of-control as possible without actually crashing," I corrected. "And beaucoup tire smoke. And then a panel judges the racers, not unlike figure skating or something. But the biggest difference between what we know and what these Japanese kids are doing is that it is not about crossing a finish line."

The graybeards then went off on an anecdotal tangent about a Japanese funny car driver and the moments of slapstick and carnage that happened when he suited up. I told them to laugh at their own peril.

But the guy from the Smithsonian was thinking on a more rarified, metaphysical plane.

"Okay, as a historian," Robert C. Post pondered, "I am well aware of the nature of all things being cyclical. And I can accept that the cultural and technological run of the white man is 'over,' as you put it." Then he took a beat. "But do you mean to tell me the future has no finish line?"

NASCAR: Control-Alt-Delete

Two months ago, I get an e-mail from the D1 Professional Drift Grand Prix Series, a Japanese-based professional drifting organization, who has invited journalists of all stripes to their 2005 Round 1 Season Opener (redundancy theirs, not mine) in Irwindale, California. This would be the D1's only 2005 race date not competed on Japanese soil and is quite possibly a watershed moment, and at the very least a peek into the future.

Ironically, it would transpire at Irwindale's NASCAR-sanctioned track. What were the ramifications of this? Was NASCAR unwittingly signing off on its own obsolescence? I mean, NASCAR is certainly an 800-lb. gorilla and bigger than Britney Spears, but its audience is getting older and not attracting the kids in numbers they all once took for granted. It is of the ESPN generation. Drifting and its under-a-minute blasts of screaming exhaust and tire smoke, on the other hand, is tailor-made for today's (i.e., the youngsters) attention span and sensibilities.

It is my hunch that the kids today peeling out of a community college parking lot in a modified Mazda feel very little connection with NASCAR, culturally nor technologically. NASCAR's carbureted pushrod V-8s are an antiquated technology that no kid at the local speed emporium can relate to. His or her car - a Supra, a 350Z, an RX-7 - does not have those parts. These kids don't know what a carburetor is. They know chips and modules.

NASCAR is notoriously afraid of progress, be it electronic, virtual or metallurgic. ´´ This will be their downfall.

As one Filipino kid put it to me recently at a drag race: "Anything they can do with a wrench, I can do with the up key, the down key, and the enter key."

The Mochi Ice Cream of Irwindale

The Day of the D1 arrives at a racetrack among the forgotten, bleached rock quarries that line the San Gabriel River. Irwindale. On any weekend, Irwindale Speedway is as Yankee Doodle Dandy as the vice-president's pacemaker. Every Saturday night, thousands of flag-wavin' Red State Americans motor out of the Inland Empire or Orange County in their pickup trucks, hit the 210 and/or 605 freeways, turn up the classic rock or the new country on the stereo, and rotate through the turnstiles of the Speedway, buy a beer and a tube steak, sit down and watch some big-block, pushrod, carbureted V-8 stock cars rumble around in a circle for a few hours (BLUM-BLUM-BLUM-BLUM-BLUM ... ), with their favorite local drivers swappin' paint and banging bumpers until a red-blooded hot shoe takes the checkered flag and is declared the winner - just like God intended.

But not today, Toby Keith. The D1 Professional Drift Grand Prix Series comes to California with the buzz and fury of a kamikaze squadron. It is a day which will live in infamy, as the man once said. This is the day the drifting scene coalesced; when the Indy 500 met the Monterey Pop Festival met the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

The grandstands are jammed to capacity of nearly 10,000, and the mix is a snapshot of 21st Century America: Japanese kids, Pacific Islanders, Latino low-riders, rockabilly greasers, and pasty, tongue-pierced punks and goths.

Before the competition commences, I fight my way through a bustling cauldron of a midway - with manufacturers of everything from bolt-on turbochargers to DJ sound systems that one can install in the trunk, to overamped caffeine drinks that taste like sugary brake fluid, to ersatz porn star apparel, all being hawked by micro-cadres of girls under umbrellas, luscious scoops of mochi ice cream giggling and pointing at the high-performance tchotchkes and bikini contest DVDs. Pushing past the throng of thongs, bikinis, and muscle shirts, I hastily introduce myself to an English-speaker who could tell me exactly what was going on.

I ask him to describe drifting.

"It is ultimate car control in the realm of no control," says Toshi Hayama, a spiky-haired hipster Japanese-American and acknowledged drifting expert. During competition, Hayama does the English-language public address play-by-play.

I cannot tell if he purposefully shaped his description in the form of a Zen riddle, but I play along and try a koan of my own: "So basically these drifters are deconstructing an accident that hasn't happened yet."

"Yes!" His enthusiasm is genuine. "Only coming out of the bank in fourth gear at over 100 miles-per-hour!"

When calling the race, Toshi is seated next to the Panel of Judges. I ask him what the judges are looking for when declaring a winner.

"The main four criteria for the judges is entry speed into a corner, the amount of counter-steer on the front tires, the angle of the car, and overall impact as well."

Translation: stomp on the throttle, and have the car pointed in the wrong direction. Try to make as much smoke as possible and make the suspension pieces scream like a coyote stuck in a bear trap. This is no mean task by itself. And to complicate matters, competition takes shape in the form of "tandem drifting" during the Main Event, which has two drivers cat-and-mousing each other, affecting each other's lines and speed.

"There is also subjectivity as well, which changes from year to year. It is up to the driver to make sure he is up to the trend."

Just like Peggy Fleming or Michelle Kwan or something.

"Yes, but this is not ice skating. This is a dogfight."

I ask him to summarize the appeal of drifting to today's eyes-bigger-than-their-bellies youth culture. He says, "It is like watching your favorite lap of the race over and over again."

I wonder aloud and rhetorically about the metaphysiological conundrum of the drifting crowd's insatiable appetite for constant hits of action and more action. How is it different from, say, laboratory mice used in experiments on chemical addiction that hit the cocaine-dispensing lever over-and-over-and-over until their little mouse hearts explode? But my musing is muffled by blasts of unfiltered exhaust from a race car guy puttering past our post.

Toshi smiles through my unintelligibility and says to e-mail him if I have any further questions.

American Idle: the driver's search

The day before, on Saturday at Irwindale, a mittenful of "unseeded" drivers (many of whom are aspiring Americans) attempt to qualify for Sunday's main feature. Exiting pit lane, the drivers stand on the gas and the engines inhale gutturally and then exhale as the drivers apply the brake before throwing the ass-end of their stock-bodied rice burner into the apex of the course's first corner like so much automotive dwarf-tossing. BWWWOOMMPPP! BBWWOOMMPP! BBWWOOOMMMPP! BBBWWAHHHH! sounds the engine as the driver gives the steering wheel full rudder and drifts toward the cement retaining wall ... BAAHHH-WWWOOMMPPP! BBWWOOMMPP! BBWWOOOMMMPP! BBBW

AHHHH! screams the engine in revolt as the driver points the car away from a cone that serves as the second "clipping point"(a mark that the drivers are supposed to air kiss as closely as possible, but not touch.)

For the American boys, this is, in essence, a cattle call, an audition to show their bravery, technique, and swagger in front of the majordomos of the drifting mass-marketing complex. It is a high-speed variation of The Apprentice cum American Idol, with the twist of the winner being voted on to the island ... of Nippon, natch. My notes are a jumble at this point, but the American driver deftly swapping pedals could be either Tanner Foust in a Nissan SX or Chris Forsberg in a 350Z or Vaughn Gittin, Jr., also in a 240SX (although rumored to strap himself into a 2005 Mustang sometime this year).

When the smoke clears, the only American driver to make Sunday's program is a Kiwi expatriate, Rhys Millen. He is the sole English-as-a-first-and-only language driver on the premises. The rest of the gaijin boys say sayonara.

At home he's a tourist

During another qualifying heat Sunday morning, Japanese drifter Manabu Orido hits the wall in his hopped-up Toyota Supra. This is the second time this weekend he has wiped out into the same exact patch of retaining wall. As Orido climbs out of his Supra, cheers explode from the judges, the drivers, and the sold-out swarm of fans. Manabu climbs on the roof of his bongoed, beat-up racer and cheers as well.

I cannot help but laugh at this. I am trying to put this spectacle into perspective. I am trying to make sense of the absurd. After watching thousands of Americans applaud an Asian driver for crashing, I wonder how the ghost of Alfred Jarry might summon the meaning of that gesture: "As karaoke is to music, drifting is to race car driving. As the Japanese did to manufacturing, they are now doing to pop culture. Anime, manga, drifting. Japan is turning the funhouse mirror on us. And everybody is laughing about it and nobody can figure who is the butt of the joke."

The organization behind the 2005 D1 Grand Prix Series chose lil' ol' Irwindale as the site of their "Round 1 Season Opener" for a strategic reason. They chose it for germination purposes, and these people know how to plant a garden, pal. They know the arbiters of taste and couture are on the coasts. The arbiters are fascinated with this stuff. It will dominate the magazines and sundry new media. Just as the machinations of rap music burned from a crackhouse culture Straight-Outta-Compton and sifted and seeped into the boomboxes, car stereos, and iPods of kids in the Midwest and Deep South, so will this kooky Nipponese idea of racing by bouncing off of guardrails.

Moments later, the D1 staff organizes the remaining competitors into a driver's meeting. Among the topics broached are what Hayama had earlier referred to as the judges' "subjectivity."

Listening hyper-attentively is Rhys Millen, the only non-Asian to qualify. A tall, trim, clean-cut kid, Millen seems to have half-a-foot of height on the other 15 drivers. Millen scrunches his brow and listens to Toshi, who is translating the pointers coming from the D1 officials. The pressure is palpable for Millen, who pilots a Pontiac GTO, an entry with corporate support from General Motors. He is the great white hope, of sorts.

As he listens to Toshi interpret, the lines in his perplexed countenance are loaded with subtext. And the thought balloon of his subconscious would read something like this: "Like America itself, General Motors is in an identity crisis. To connoisseurs and even half-aware consumers of the automobile, every vehicle American car manufacturers produce is a compromise of engineering and aesthetics. Like Ford, GM could barely make it without the marketing swindle and bogosity known as the Sport Utility Vehicle - basically a prefab truck frame, an ill-handling tank, shrouded in cheap alloys while guzzling gas with a complete lack of grace.

"America is defined by its hubris and its paranoia. That is one thing domestic automakers have tapped into and exploited. It has kept them afloat. But even the myopic corporate culture is starting to see the writing the wall. Demographics are changing.

"And the marketing of an American drifter in a sport dominated by the Sons of the Rising Sun is a desperate attempt to infiltrate the thinking of tomorrow."

All of your race belongs to us

High Noon for the Best 16 and the smoke begins. In the first round of tandem drifting, Millen dispenses of Masato Kawabata. Kawabata's reputation is that of a kamikaze, and the photographers are warned to back away from their retaining walls as Kawabata has been known to "plummet into corner at high velocity [sic]."

It is a seesaw battle of squealing tires and tire smoke, until Millen goes deep into a corner and outsmarts Kawabata, who spins out.

"My forceful move was to go in big into the bottom corner," Rhys recounts. "This forced my opponent from behind to go into a possible spin, which worked. I passed him through the bottom corner, but had to give him back the position." Rhys explains that if the follower interrupts the leader's line, points are deducted and the faster driver is penalized.

In the next heat, Rhys faces off against Yasuyuki Kazama, who is fast and aggressive and was the top ranked driver of 2004. With a mugging smile that defies gravity and has the corners of his lips somehow pointing at his shoes, Kazama has a playful countenance of, say, Harpo Marx, but with a Nissan Silvia (a model unavailable in the U.S.) doing the talking instead of a bulbous, skronking horn.

And, like Harpo Marx, you want to stay out of Kazama's way. Millen doesn't. In a fierce duel that defies the expectations and prejudices of the punditry, the judges declare a draw after the two drivers conclude their banzai "dogfight," to use Toshi's word. As the split-decision result is announced, the fans combust in mass hysteria and begin to chant "ONE MORE TIME! ONE MORE TIME!" in a maniacal refrain, punctuated by the stomping of feet that sounds like antiaircraft artillery.

So, following protocol, Millen and Kazama mix it up in a sudden-death drift, and Kazama, the leader, deftly showcases his expertise and hits all the "clipping points," playfully shrugging off the pressure. Millen is a quarter-step behind him and valiantly follows, but everyone knows the result before it is announced. Judges decision: Kazama.

Millen is nonplussed about the defeat and feels inroads have been paved: "Kazama is one of the top Japanese guys here," he says. "He's ranked in the Top 10. The opportunity to go up against him is fantastic. The opportunity to go 'One More Time' against him and have [the final result] that tight means that we have proved today that American drifters have what it takes to go against the best in the world. I hope they respect the fact that I have the ability to run door-to-door with them, with a gentleman's admiration for not hitting each other."

I ask Millen why he has chosen drifting as career path, instead of drag racing or NASCAR or Formula One racing.

"Traditional motorsport is stuck." Rhys ruminates. "But when you see drifting cars with rear wheel drive and this much power, what you are seeing is a fluent ballet on pavement."

Translation: It is about style. It is no longer about "getting there first," to quote Robert C. Post. And history will show that the Japanese understood this before the Americans did. And Rhys Millen is drifting into a future with no finish line.