279: Auto Show

Ira Glass

What happened to Brita is that she was driving her Subaru station wagon about 100 miles from her home in Maine. There was a red SUV parked in the road, just stopped there, dead. She swerved around it, the road was wet, she went into a ditch, flipped over. Her shoulder is still hurt, but basically she's OK.

Ira Glass

Today on our radio show, I Love My Car. We have five stories about feelings between people and machines. Act One, Crunk in the Trunk. In that act, a car stereo so loud it cannot be played in any normal way. Act Two, Baby, You Can't Drive My Car, about a car that broke a man's heart. Act Three, Objects in the Rearview Mirror May be Alarmingly Familiar. In that act, on the roads of Washington, D.C., a man chasing his own car. Act Four, Not Your Father's Chevrolet Salesman, in which we reveal the secret weapon of the number one salesperson at a big Chevy dealer here in Chicago. Act Five, End of the Road, about people who don't want to stop driving no matter what. Stay with us.

David Segal

We're going to talk about obsession and subwoofers, and eventually we'll talk about girls and how to get them. But first, we're going to talk about a grudge. Specifically, we're going to talk about Vernon Sergeant and his quest for revenge against his rival, Paul Carmichael. Vernon is a middle aged black guy, Paul's a white teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania. It's a reckoning Vernon's dreamed about for a year.

David Segal

Paul beat Vernon fair and square, but here's what bugs Vernon. There was a glitch in the volume meter at that competition, and in one of the early heats, Paul posted a super high number, the sort of number that only the most monstrous car stereos produce. Someone took a photograph of that moment, Paul apparently crushing Vernon in a head-to-head match, and the photo showed up on Paul's website.

David Segal

This is Paul. As rivals go, he's pretty unintimidating. He just finished high school, he's a little gangly, wears glasses. There's something tech support about him. He's incapable of trash talk, and he's even modest about his own dB drag record.

David Segal

About a decade ago, this car stereo thing got way out of control, to the point where music isn't really part of it anymore. That's right, these systems are too powerful for music of any kind. Walk around the grounds here, a huge parking lot with dozens of guys working in teams, and you don't hear any music except what's coming from the parking lot PA. I asked this one competitor, Dave Jennings, to play me a tune on his system, and that set off a five minute hunt for a CD. He just didn't keep any near his flame-painted Chevy van rigged with a dozen 6,000 watt amplifiers, a dozen subwoofers, and 70 12 volt batteries In a vehicle that weighs more than 33,000 pounds. When he finally found a disk and blasted it through his pride and joy, it was impossible to recognize the tune. It sounded like a rock band underwater.

[MUFFLED MUSIC PLAYS]

That's actually Aerosmith. Aerosmith through a stereo that's five tons of bass and not an ounce of treble. In a normal car, it sounds like this.

[MUSIC - "LIVIN' ON THE EDGE" BY AEROSMITH]

David Segal

So when the cars line up to compete at a dB drag race and the volts start flowing, nobody reaches for Megadeth. Instead, they use this three-second, electronically-generated tone. They all call it the burp. The idea is to give everyone the same sonic raw material to work with. But the burp is practical, too. Play a whole song on one of these systems and there's a good chance the amplifiers will heat to the point where they burst into flames.

David Segal

That's Microsoft Mary, the computerized voice of this competition. A dB drag race looks a little like a regular drag race without the actual excitement of the race part. Two vehicles roll up, side by side, to one of those ready, set, go light trees. You think the cars are about to peel off down the street. Instead, a referee tapes the sound meter inside each car and shuts the door.

David Segal

The competitors stand outside their vehicles with these on/off switches attached through a wire to their stereo. And when the race starts, they've got 30 seconds to burp their machines.

[DEEP BUZZING]

David Segal

That's the burp heard from outside the car. Moments later, the volume reading for each racer is posted on a tote board overhead. The winner proceeds to the next round, tournament style.

David Segal

What's measured here is decibels, but everyone calls it SPL, short for Sound Pressure Level. At these volumes, noise is a lot like a violent gust of wind, so dB drag racers do everything possible to stiffen and seal up their vehicles to prevent sound pressure and noise from escaping. It's an engineering problem. How do you build a stereo that's as loud as a riot in a car so perfectly sound proofed that you can't hear anything inside it? Doors are clamped shut, walls are often reinforced with poured concrete, the interior is dismantled, the seats and dashboard are ripped out. There's barely room for one person to fit inside. You end up with what is basically a huge mobile speaker box juiced by dozens of car batteries. It's a rolling vault of noise, like a tank designed at Ozzfest. But there are limits.

David Segal

20 feet. This is Sam Horn. Yes, that's his real name. He's been judging dB drag races for years. He says most people trailer their cars to the event.

David Segal

Obviously, these things aren't built with passengers in mind. In fact, one of the ironclad rules at a dB drag race, you're not allowed in a car when it's show time. The sound pressure in any dB dragger at full power will make you sick.

David Segal

So how loud are these things? Reach over to the volume control of your radio right now. Got it? In a second, I'm going to play you a dB drag racing signal tone. So turn it all the way up now.

[DEEP BUZZING]

Now take this sound and, if you can possibly imagine this, multiply it by five. A typical dB drag racer is many times louder than the front row of any rock concert you've been to. Lore has it that these systems can crumple paper, that you're better off standing next to a jet engine than in a dB drag racer with the windows up. Some of this is true, but the guy who created this league, Wayne Harris, says some of it is macho myth.

David Segal

If you want to know how all this dB drag racing madness started, Harris is your man. It goes back to when he was a college kid in the '80s looking to meet babes.

David Segal

Harris should know. he began his car stereo career by building the Terminator, which was a 1960 Cadillac hearse he tricked out with a 30 inch subwoofer-- the kind you find at rock concerts-- 52 other speakers, six amplifiers, and a dashboard retooled to look like the cockpit of a jet. When he played Van Halen, he says you could hear it coming a mile away.

David Segal

He and a couple of his friends started competing to see whose system was the loudest. And pretty soon, they discovered that if you just want to make a decibel meter jump, music is not very efficient. So they invented the burp. That was 1995. The dB drag racing league Harris founded today claimed more than 10,000 competitors. And last year, it staged more than 300 races, or whatever you call these things. You build up points at each event, just like NASCAR. And if you're good enough, you're invited to the national championships in Tennessee.

David Segal

I've been to a couple of these now, and I'm always stuck with the same question. Why? Why, oh why, oh why? It's not prize money. There's hardly any in it. And it's not women, there aren't any at these things. There aren't even spectators, unless you count other competitors plus the few glum relatives who appear to have been taken here against their will. My best guess is that it's all about the quintessentially American obsession with glory, however fleeting. Everyone wants to be the king of the hill. That's international. But the number of aspiring kings always dwarfs the number of available hills. So in this country, we build more hills. We're geniuses, in fact, at building more hills.

We've got a league for everything, including underwater hockey and lawn mower racing. That's dB drag racing. It's utterly pointless. A car stereo competition with cars you can't drive and stereos you can't listen to. Until you realize that it allows a group of people to call themselves the best in the world at something.

David Segal

It's mid-afternoon on Sunday. Time for Paul and Vernon's showdown. Paul looks worried. His system is acting a little flaky.

David Segal

Paul and Vernon are each laying on top of their cars, their bodies acting as human sound baffles.

David Segal

Vernon burps first, posting a 151.6 decibels. Then he stands back looking pleased and waits. Paul does nothing for a very long 20 seconds. This might be a psych out or it might be tactics. If Paul holds out to the last moment and his score is higher than Vernon's, Vernon won't have time to burp again in the 30 second window. Paul is just standing there.

David Segal

With five seconds left, he finally moves.

[DEEP BUZZING]

David Segal

Paul posted 150.8, nearly a decibel less than Vernon. Paul looks pretty devastated. He says later that he held off till the last second just to entertain the crowd. Vernon, meanwhile, is doing a dB drag race equivalent of an end zone dance.

David Segal

As the competition wound down, there was a lull in the action and I couldn't resist. I drove my rented Chevy Cavalier to the competitors' lanes, and Sam hooked up the volume meter while I revved the engine a couple times and threw the official dB drag race CD into the stereo. Then I cranked the dial and played that signal tone as loud as I could. 124 dBs. Sam was giggling. It was the smallest number he'd ever seen in his entire career. And I'm not going to lie to you. That made me a little proud. I was the lowest of the low, of all time, may be in the whole country, possibly in the whole world. And nobody can take that away from me.

Ira Glass

David Segal of the Washington Post.

Ira Glass

Jamie Kitman, the New York Bureau Chief for Automobile Magazine, US editor for Car Magazine, and a writer for GQ. Coming up, car salesman smackdown, hustle versus bustle, Great News Tim and his nemesis, with opposite tactics, opposite strategies to sell you a car. That is all in one minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Curtis Sittenfield

Darren is my older sister's fiance and for a long time, he drove a white 1990 Toyota Camry. It had a vertical dent on the trunk and a tow ball on the back. One afternoon two years ago, he went to where he thought the car was parked near his apartment in Washington, D.C.

Curtis Sittenfield

Darren's insurance company paid for a rental car, which he drove around for a couple days. He started thinking about what kind of car he'd buy next. One evening, he drove the rental over to a friend's house to watch a football game.

Curtis Sittenfield

Of course, retrieving your car while it's being driven by thieves can be a little complicated. Darren realized he'd need backup.

Curtis Sittenfield

He called 911.

Curtis Sittenfield

Listening to this tape, you realize 911 people really have heard everything. The operator snaps to action so matter-of-factly that it seems like maybe she gets this all the time. At a certain point, Darren wants her to acknowledge that these circumstances are a little special, right?

Curtis Sittenfield

It goes like this for a few minutes. Darren driving through the dark, cold D.C. streets at about 30 miles per hour, both the victim and potential hero in this chase, giving the 911 woman frequent updates on their location.

Curtis Sittenfield

When Darren remembers his low speed chase, he thinks it took 20 minutes. Actually, from the time he made the call to the time he lost the trail, four minutes and ten seconds elapsed. The 911 woman gave him the address of the closest police precinct, which was one he just passed. Darren went in thinking the police had been breathlessly following his pursuit on the police band and would recognize him immediately. But they had no idea who he was. He made a second report of the same stolen car and went home.

Curtis Sittenfield

The police didn't give Darren much information about who'd stolen the car, why, or whether anyone had been arrested. But he got a few clues once the car came back to him because the thieves had left behind all sorts of stuff. In the trunk was a tool box with lots of expensive tools, including a blowtorch. There was a giant key ring with 50 or 60 keys on it, several of them master keys to different types of cars. There was a huge subwoofer and a leather case holding a vast collection of CDs, although not the kind of CDs that you usually associate with subwoofers.

Curtis Sittenfield

I'm standing with Darren in a storage area in the back of his apartment where he still keeps a lot of the stuff that was left in his car. If the key ring and the loot in the trunk tell the story of professional thieves with tools and musical contraband, the other stuff tells a different story, a more domestic one.

Curtis Sittenfield

It was hard not to imagine the car thief carting his kids around or pulling out the rattle if they started crying in the back seat. Or saying, I'm sick of jacking cars. I'd like to work in food service. One of the men left his voter ID in the car. He's a registered Democrat, 20 years old. Not that any of this made Darren feel any differently about these guys.

Curtis Sittenfield

I found out the police had arrested the owner of the voter ID-- his last name is Martin-- while he was driving the car. But they dropped the case. Apparently, catching someone red-handed driving a stolen car isn't enough evidence to make his case go to trial. The person can just say he got the car from someone else. I made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find this Martin guy. First, I sent a letter to both the address on the arrest report and the one on the voter ID. I had some difficulty with the wording. There's just no Hallmark card that says, I think you stole my future brother-in-law's car. Let's talk.

I started calling around to Red Lobsters in the area, hoping Martin had picked up another application. I also called various phone listings for men with Martin's first and last names. One day, a guy answered. He said he was the godbrother of the Martin I was looking for. After mulling over several options in my head, I said, I think Mr. Martin might have had some involvement with a car belonging to a friend of mine. There was a long silence. Finally, the man asked, why would I want to help you?

Ira Glass

Curtis Sittenfield. She has a novel called Prep.

Sarah Koenig

Great News Tim is a salesman at Gillespie Chevrolet and Pontiac on the southside of Chicago. And the thing you should know about him is he's not their number one salesman. He's their number two salesman. Here's Tim.

Sarah Koenig

The number one salesman at Gillespie, sorry Tim, is actually a woman. Yvonne Hawk, the only woman on the sales staff of roughly 30 guys. And she's easily 20 years older than almost all of them, a grandmother. She sells 16 or so cars a month. The rest of the guys, except for Great News Tim, average around 10 or 11. But he's also got that Muhammad Ali thing going.

Sarah Koenig

Gallup came out with a poll that ranked car salespeople the least trusted professionals in America. They scored lower than lawyers and members of Congress. Nurses were the most trusted, school teachers were second. And if you think about it, both those professions-- nurses and teachers-- are associated with women. Hence, I believe Yvonne's advantage in car sales over Great News Tim. He's the hard sell, he's testosterone. Yvonne, you just don't think she can rip you off. She looks and acts like your mother.

In our very first conversation, she talked about her baby granddaughter, and I found myself confiding my fear of flying. I watched her cozy up to a middle aged lady in the showroom by complimenting her outfit, which was pretty great. Kind of runway meets lumberjack look, all in green. Then talking about dogs and kids. It's not exactly flirting she's doing, it's more like infiltrating. But in the nicest possible way.

Sarah Koenig

William's the guy who brings the swag to customers at Gillespie.

Sarah Koenig

The guy she's getting the key chain for, Rob Walker, is a jail guard and deputy sheriff. A big guy, 255 pounds. But here in the showroom with Yvonne, he's a little sheepish. He's got messed up credit, he's worried about getting financing. He knows he can't get his dream car, a Cadillac Seville. But he walked in hoping he could at least get a truck of some kind. She's willing to help him out with the credit, but she lets him know he can't afford a truck, not right now. She encourages him to buy something smaller, make payments for a year, and then come back next December and she'll sell him that truck.

They walk around the lot, but management doesn't let me go with them. Too sensitive for national broadcast. So they both tell me about it when they stroll back in.

Sarah Koenig

Finally, Yvonne convinces him to test drive a used Chevy Impala. Not the sexiest car in the world, but it's got leather seats and a sunroof and low mileage, and he fits in it.

Sarah Koenig

He's clearly not in love with this car, but that doesn't matter. It's not about the car.

Sarah Koenig

Now, if you're thinking that Yvonne is just some soft-hearted granny, it's time to talk price. She's asking $20,630 for the Impala, $2,000 more than the suggested dealer's price in the Blue Book and $7,000 more than what the dealer paid for the car if they paid Blue Book trade-in value. She's not one to flinch about that. If there's one thing she's known for at Gillespie besides selling a lot of cars, it's that she's tough. You don't want to cross her. Her coworkers tell me how she strongarms finance companies, how she yells at managers when she thinks they're slowing down a sale. Here are Will and K.C., two of the guys on the floor.

Sarah Koenig

I ask Rob if he's noticed this side of Yvonne. It turns out he has, and he's got a whole philosophy about people like this who are tough but nice.

Sarah Koenig

Given all that stuff about the devil, I ask about the price of the Impala, if he's going to challenge Yvonne.

Sarah Koenig

Soon, Yvonne comes back. She's carrying a contract. She slides it in front of Rob and points.

Sarah Koenig

He signs. Doesn't haggle, doesn't say a word about the price. While he's waiting for his car to get cleaned up, Yvonne insists he eat some pizza that's been brought in. You've been here a long time, she says. You must be hungry. A woman comes through the dealership selling teddy bears. Rob buys one. I figure he's just being a nice dad getting his kids a present. But then he walks over to Yvonne, a person who has just sold him an Impala for $2,000 above Blue Book and gives it to her.

Sarah Koenig

This is something Yvonne has in common with Great News Tim. He says his customers love him. They bake him cakes, they bring him candy. But where Yvonne has him beat, the reason she's number one and he's number two, is that no one's ever going to call him Mom.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is a producer on our program.

Ira Glass

Which brings us to this story of an old man and his car. But to understand this story, first a little history about 1955. 1955 was a very good year for cars and a bad year for drivers. The '55 Chevy Bel Air came out and Corvette got a V8 engine. But James Dean died in his Porsche on the way to a car race in California. And the worst racing accident in history took place at Le Mans when Pierre Levegh-- Lucky Pierre-- crashed his Mercedes Benz on the front straight, killing 81 people. As the dead and maimed were carted away, Mercedes withdrew from the event and at the end of that season, quit motorsports altogether.

One side effect of this, a British driver named Stirling Moss could no longer race the Mercedes that he had become world famous for driving just a month before when he set the course record-- it was never defeated-- in a road race in Italy called the Mille Miglia, the 1,000 Miles. Moss and his navigator, Denis Jenkinson, covered the distance in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, which meant basically traveling at 100 miles an hour for 10 hours through little villages and winding country roads running the length of Italy. It's considered one of the greatest driving achievements in history.

The car that Moss drove is nearly as famous as he is, a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR, this big, silver cad of a car with red numbers 722 on the sides. Moss and the 722 still keep in touch, appearing regularly together at racing events like ambassadors at large for Mercedes Benz. And recently, Dan Neil, the automotive critic for the Los Angeles Times, got a ride with Moss-- now Sir Stirling-- in the old 722.

Dan Neil

Sir Stirling Moss and the Mercedes Benz 300 SLR number 722 have been going steady 50 years, long enough to make it a common law marriage. The car is an open-top version of the famous Mercedes Gullwing. These Mercedes postwar silver arrows were so called because of their shiny skins of electron and aeronautic metal lighter than aluminum. 2,000 pounds and over 300 horsepower, these cars were unbreakable.

Then there's Sir Sterling. People say he was the first modern race car driver. He made his living at the wheel, he wasn't just an aristocrat playing with cars. He was tight with a quid. He was the first driver to take physical fitness seriously, unlike many of his competitors for whom racing was macho part and parcel with boozing and broading the night away. His career-defining moment, his life-defining moment, was the 1955 Mille Miglia win, an almost supernatural performance that came out of nowhere. The Mille Migla record Moss set in 1955-- 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds-- are numbers every good wheelhead knows by heart.

Now it's 2004. On a rainy morning in October, Mercedes flies a few automotive journalists out to Virginia International Raceway to test a new car, a 617 horsepower carbon fiber monster that they have named the SLR. Price tag, $452,000. To sell the idea that this car is heir to the great SLRs of Moss's time-- and by the way, I'm not buying it-- Mercedes brings Sir Stirling and the original 722 to give writers rides around the track. This is a little bit like getting Lindbergh to do some sightseeing in the Spirit of St. Louis.

I meet Sir Stirling at lunch. It's him, all right. His features have thickened with age and he is, at 75, no doubt about it an old man. He's a little hard of hearing, but still quite within his wits. He's dressed in a dark red turtleneck and a houndstooth jacket, every inch an English gentleman. When it's time to go out to the track, he rises slowly. An assistant brings a wheelchair around for him. Sir Stirling has recently had back surgery. At the track the handlers are busy priming the car. The 722 is a beautiful brute in perfect condition, like a sculpture of streaming mercury. Two bolsters, like camel humps, are fixed to the rear deck behind the driver and the passenger.

Sir Stirling arrives. The camera crews go nuts. He's wearing a pale blue, one-piece cotton driving suit, a white polo helmet, goggles, and Italian, crocheted string-back gloves with leather palms. This is what racers wore back in the day before fire resistant Nomex and Kevlar full-face helmets. The car has no doors. Two people help as Sir Stirling stiffly climbs a step stool and settles into the driver's seat.

He pushes the starter button and the car comes alive with a snappish bark. Gray smoke jets from the massive exhaust pipes jutting from the car's right side. Then something wonderful happens. The hand fits the glove, the hammer hits the string, the old man disappears behind the goggles, and the racer emerges from beneath the helmet. The car seems to recognize him. Sir Stirling slips the clutch and roars off.

Moss said many times he could not have won the Mille Migla without his navigator, Denis Jenkinson, the bearded and gnomish Jenks. Their secret weapon? The pair ran a reconnaissance lap of the race with Jenks recording every detail on a roll of paper, eventually 15 feet long. This he unrolled during the race, shouting course notes to Moss over the canonade of exhaust when Jenks wasn't busy throwing up. When the race was over, the pair took off their goggles. This is a classic image of motorsports, Their faces blackened with dirt and soot except around the eyes. They look like pandas.

Moss brings the car around and it's my turn. I climb the step stool and carefully belt in. Because the engine is tipped over more than 50 degrees to the right, the transmission tunnel runs between Sir Stirling's legs, the accelerator and brake on one side and the clutch on the left. This would be damn awkward for most people, and I wonder if a man who can barely walk can mange. Oddly enough, though, Moss finds the straddling position more comfortable than a regular car. He sits astride the car as if it were a horse.

The handlers push the car to get it going. Moss flicks a bug from his goggles and tears off. We're on the course. The first thing I notice: Jenks didn't have much to hang onto. Its too loud to talk, so I sit in Jenks's seat and I watch Sir Stirling muscle the wheel. We're not going particularly fast, but the car would be a handful for civilians. It doesn't have power steering. To give drivers better leverage, the steering wheel is oversized, a big four spoke aluminum wheel with a wooden rim. Moss shuffles the wheel through his hands so that they are always in the same position, 3:00 and 9:00.

He twists his right foot to cover the brake and gas pedal, to rev the engine while braking and downshifting to save wear and tear on the gearbox. I watch him work. What is it like to be so good at something that even old and crippled you're still better than nearly everyone else?

We reach the main straight. The wind starts to whistle. He points at the big white tachometer. Every time he changes gears-- the gearshift knob has Roman numerals on it-- he indicates the gear with his gloved right hand. Third, fourth, fifth. That's about 110 miles per hour at this RPM. Now we've arrived at our real destination. This is how fast Moss and the SLR were speeding across the roads of Tuscany and the plains of a Mille Romana a half century ago. This is the speed that partnered them in history, so one of them cannot be thought of without the other.

Imagine the Italian countryside going by. It suddenly seems very fast. Tomorrow, the car will go back to the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Sir Stirling to his house in Florida. We thread through a few more turns, then he wheels the silver car back to the pits. My rendezvous with history is concluded. I thank him and give the car a pat on the dashboard. And then the two of them roar off.

Ira Glass

Dan Neil is the automotive critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder, Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Thea Chaloner and Chris Ladd.

[ACKNOLWEDGMENTS]

Ira Glass

Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our programs for absolutely free or buy CDs of them. Or you know you can download today's program in our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

Ira Glass

WBEZ management oversight for our program by Torey Malatia, who is a winner, who is number one, and who has just one question for you.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life.

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