by Sam Moses

Once, when I was doing a book signing for the original Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots some 20 years ago, a young woman asked me if the book was about her ex-boyfriends. (Pause for laughter.)

The title brings smiles because it reaches real far. And within the book’s core audience, it clicks in an instant. It refers to the passionate if not always practical people who pursue amateur and semi-pro sports car racing.  Every driver seems to belong in one of those three clubs.

More than ironic, this might be Karmic: Here I am, the guy who wrote the book on Idiots (last time I
checked, rare hardcover copies were going for up to $200 on Amazon), seduced blind by speed, like the rest of them.

Today, the title is displayed on the hood of my Ninja-Ford racecar truck, currently sitting in limbo on its flatbed trailer in my garage. The words are splashed in canary yellow with a red outline, filling the glossy black hood that bulges to make breathing room for four carburetors. Out on the track, the words FAST GUYS, RICH GUYS, AND IDIOTS appear, um, bold.

The Ninja-Ford has a thin aluminum skin, a 3/4-scale replica of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Under the hood lives a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle engine, 1100 cubic centimeters. The chassis is a tube frame with a racing suspension, and it’s very light. It runs in the same races with Porsches, Camaros, Corvettes, Mustangs and BMWs.

I raced it for the first time, last weekend at Portland International Raceway. It was the final and biggest race of the year, run by the Cascade Sports Car Club and called the Doernbecher Dash, a fund-raiser for the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland. There were 268 cars entered, most of which had been running all season. The Ninja-Ford had seen about 20 exploratory laps on the track in August, before suffering a disaster on the dynamometer (it’s like a treadmill for cars, to measure horsepower and torque curves), and retreating to the shop for a rebuild.

It’s easy to see the glass half full after the Doernbecher Dash, because I finished fourth in class out of nine starters and seven finishers in my race. But, predictably, the truck had teething problems that slowed it down and stressed me out. I’d had graphics made that said “Fast Guys Special,” but didn’t have the time to apply them, and I’m glad. I got passed by a lot of faster cars. I hate that. I’m a racer.

Still, the would-be Fast Guys Special ran flat-out for the full 30 minutes, looked cool and sounded fantastic—the Ninja engine shrieks to 11,000 rpm—and a lot of people came up and said so afterward.

But here’s the deal. The Ninja-Ford is going up for sale. It takes three skills to run your own racing car. You need to be a driver, mechanic, and team manager. All I want to do is drive. So that’s what I’ve learned. After all these years. I had to buy my own racecar and spend months and many dollars preparing it, to realize what I already knew. This is what it means to be an Idiot.

The cure is to go back a bit, to this release from three weeks ago:

Getting a head start on the September 26 paperback publication of his classic racing memoir, “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” Sam Moses raced to fifth overall in a field of 40 powerful sports cars at the SCCA regional event at Portland International Raceway on August 26. Driving the sleek silver RTG Motorsports BMW M Coupe, the former Sports Illustrated writer finished behind three Porsche Turbos and one Camaro, and was running fourth until an overheating gearbox hampered his pace.

It was the first race for Moses as part of his campaign to promote “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” published by Bison Books at the University of Nebraska Press, and named one of the five best books ever written about motorsports, by the Wall Street Journal Book Review.

The experiment with the Fast Guys Special Ninja-Ford ends. Book promotion moves back into the cockpit of the sleek silver BMW M Coupe on October 20, for a four-hour endurance race at Pacific Raceways near Seattle. The BMW is real fast. It can pass a lot of slower cars on the straightaways. Racers love driving a car like that.
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Sam Moses was on the motorsports beat at SI for seventeen years.  Also, he was deputy editor at AutoWeek.  His book, Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots: A Racing Odyssey on the Border of Obsession, is now available from Bison Books.