Soapbox cars ended my racing career

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see that insurance commercial with the little toothpick-chewing kid talking about car racing, I want to mash the little brat like a bug.

The reason is my only experience racing cars were violent crashes in the Soapbox derbies.

Soapbox cars, at least in the day, were wood-framed concoctions, with baby carriage wheels and a rope to steer the thing down some Everest-grade road.

You could always tell which kids had engineers for fathers because their cars always looked like Cadillacs and had steering devices that worked.

For those of us whose dads worked for the railroad, the highest level of instruction tended to be something like which end of the hammer to hold.

On the good side, it was one of the rare times I could scream out obscenities and not be punished. It’s allowed when the hammer head hits the wrong nail.

This flood of memories comes to me because of the neighboring story about 8-year-old drag racing champion Kevin Deel.

He’s not the only local boy to make good on the quarter-mile.

Todd Cooper of Sutter won the NHRA Jr. Drag Racing five-state Division VII regional championship, and Kenny Buzdas of Yuba City has graduated from the junior ranks and still has the need for real speed.

What I recall most about Buzdas is that he became penpals with NHRA legend Kenny Bernstein.

I don’t know if the two still correspond, but it was pure fate that Bernstein chose the then 14-year-old Buzdas to help him fold up his car’s parachute. That was in 2003.

The closest I ever came to that kind of luck in the terrifying days of Soapbox races would have been something like meeting a person who thought Kenny Bernstein was an orchestra conductor.

The worst experience I had in the Soapbox Derby actually took place in a car I had nothing to do with when it came to its construction. But it had a steering wheel, which I figured beat the old rope.

Anyway, the actual owner got cold feet, and a somewhat embarrassed, but I’m sure sympathetic father asked if I would drive in the place of his former son.

So I pulled my baseball cap down tight on my head - that’s right a baseball cap - and got ready to go down this backwoods road that made Highway 1 look like one of those strips Deel runs on.

My opponent had a car that looked like it had been wind-tunnel tested.

I won’t got into all the horrible details. Suffice it to say, about halfway down the road I was still holding the steering wheel, but was looking for some rope.

Fortunately, there were several large trees that slowed my descent down the ravine next to the road.