TBiTC #1: Gears & Tears

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Tuesday, August 17th, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized

On The Box in The Corner this week…

Gears & Tears BBC2, Monday 10:30pm

MEN! HETEROSEXUAL MEN! WITH CARS! AND OBEDIENT WIVES! YEAH!

stock car

1. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering)

a. a car, usually a production saloon, strengthened and modified for a form of racing in which the cars often collide

b. (as modifier) stock-car racing

__________

2. A railroad car for carrying livestock.

As far as I could tell, last nights episode of the frighteningly gripping Gears & Tears set out to explore the latter definition first and foremost. Snorting great MEN clambered from stock car to tour bus and back to stock car again, occasionally driving in circles on dirt tracks, but mostly moaning about how some other guy’s equipment was too long/short (I couldn’t be sure which), or reminiscing about a great big shunt from behind one time in Holland. Handily, the documentary concentrates on two drivers mainly, but when others get involved it’s just one big slab of man after another.

A rather important committee meeting took place in what looked rather like a pub. In fact, it was a pub. Apparently, discussions continued until about midnight which, coincidentally, was probably closing time. The final outcome was that everything should carry on as before, and that the guest ale was indeed quite a bargain at £2.10 a pint.

It’s easy to come across as snobbish here; as an ignorant southerner wading into a northern sport of which he knows not a jot. Well, okay, I live in London and you won’t be seeing me on Mastermind answering questions on the history of the BriSCA World Championship. But as a kid, I was regularly taken to the Coventry Speedway Stadium to watch stock car racing with my dad and sister. The lure then, and probably now for the thousands that still attend stock car racing, was the noise, the sight of funny little cars zooming around a dirt track, the ‘wacky races’ style manoeuvres, and the crazy/inspired idea of having the cars start in reverse order of speed. I can’t say I ever cared who was driving though – one randomly named driver could be swapped indiscriminately for the next and I wouldn’t notice. I cheered when they finished not so much because someone had won or come in a plucky 4th, more because they had banged into each quite sportingly without catapulting into the crowd.

The problem with Gears & Tears is that it doesn’t really add anything to the sport – knowing more about the individual drivers puts you off, if anything. There was a darts documentary a few years back which had exactly the same effect – sometimes, you just want to watch a guy throwing arrows into a wall without knowing that he’s just been through a divorce. Having said that, darts has an excuse for playing up to the ‘characters’ within its ranks – basically the same thing happens over and over again. In stock car racing, the track stays the same but the willingness of drivers to crash into each other at will means that no two races are ever the same. If darts players occasionally bumped each other off the stage when double-top would clinch the match, we wouldn’t need song-and-dance intros and comedy score announcing.

I can’t deny that, for the drivers themselves, stock car racing means a lot. Whole families go on tour together, the children presumably having a wail of a time, the wives conducting verbal warfare in defence of their husbands. A new £12,000 engine probably puts Christmas in jeopardy. But ultimately, these people must be having some fun – they all seem like pretty highly skilled engineers who could almost certainly find other means of employment – so I don’t fully buy the whole “without this, we’d have nothing” line. Without stock car racing, they would all presumably have normal jobs like the rest of us – they’re in it by choice, not necessity, and as such I couldn’t care less if Joe Bloggs beats Arthur Jones Snr. Their lives don’t depend on it – it’s all just a bit of a jolly.

I’ll be tuning in next week – it’s on after Grandma’s House, which I’m stubbornly sticking with – to see if Andy Smith can get revenge on Franky Wainman Jr. Or the other way around. I’m not sure, they all want to win really, that’s the upshot. Some wives will get angry. Part of a car will be measured, remeasured, and the average length discussed at length in the King’s Arms. The committee will make a big decision – ale or lager. Look, there’s not much else to do on a Monday evening.