Thanks, guys. Nice crowd.

Mike, if you'd have read that first book you'd know why my editor at Automobile magazine did me a favor when she advised me to sell the last copies and forget about printing a third edition. I realized she was right and took her advice. The next book has fewer, uh, revealing stories about my driving history, that race included.

After scoring a DNF in that race one year earlier, I spent a year building a car that I felt would give us a big advantage: a two-year-old ex-Texas Highway Patrol Ford, complete with lights, siren and a 96-gallon aux. tank. I was so intent on winning that we pre-ran the course nine months prior to the event, at race speed, to shake down the car and extra equipment.

In the event, we led the race from the Mass/NY state line (we started 9th; the first 8 cars were parked there along I-90; their crews were heading for jail) and were four hours ahead of the second-place car when I we lost a cylinder, broke the starter, fried the transmission in Arizona and got a speeding ticket in California.

After three hours spent sitting in the desert, letting the car cool off. I managed to get locked it into third gear and we limped across the finish line at the Hyatt Islandia in San Diego. At the awards dinner that night, my revolving rear license plates seemed the most dazzling to the few entrants who'd finished the race. (Starting to get the gist of why a smart editor advised me to bury the book?) The second-place finisher beat us by two hours.

Craig

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Craig's Sig:

Protect yourself: Learn everything you need to know about police radar, lasers and laser jammers and radar detectors from the man Automobile magazine calls "the world's most-quoted authority on speed-measuring technology and tactics, and an underground legend among speeders"

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Member of The National Motorists Organization since 1990.