Quarter Midgets: The Clubs, the Races and the Cars

Quarter midgets are raced across the US and in one part of Canada. Thousands of kids race these crazy things each year. As a result, you have to have some way to organize the kids. It's divided into 13 regions, generally matching up with the regions in the US.

Each of those black dots represent the location of a track. Each track is called a club. Recently, there has been a split in quarter midgets and they have divided into two programs. It's annoying b/c other than politics, they are the same. I point this out because the track near LA in CA is no longer there (and two in FL I think, wow). You'll also notice CA is divided into two regions. This division becomes very important later on when I discuss my friendships (as does this missing club), so please keep it in mind.

A club is responsible for governing itself and the size often determines how it will govern. A smaller club with 5 families or so will be more lax than a club with, say, 75 families. The club we were part of was big. Biggest in CA. It got a little annoying with how political it got at times, but groups of adults are bound to find something to fight over. Both my parents have held positions of authority, so we'd go to the monthly meetings held at a pizza place. My dad was president, VP twice, and county liaison at least 3 times. My mom was secretary, head of tower, and kept track of the points. Each club takes care of itself. The money from the snack shack goes into track repairs, upgrades for the stands, etc. It's all volunteer, I can't remember anyone getting paid to do anything at the track. The families become very close. So, naturally, your friends tend to be the ones from the same club as you.

Club races were the most common races, where you just raced against people in your own club. These days were shorter, and a few, elite, families would go out to dinner after. You strengthened your bonds here because when it came to the regional races, you didn't want to be alone.

My family only ran the regional series a few times. The regional series, like the 100-lapper series, didn't offer the most competition. That's not the say winning one of those championships wasn't prestigious, it just wasn't that fun. The days were long, and it seemed to be more club v. club than car v. car. It was the theory that if the other people in your club were successful, you were always racing against the best in the state and therefore were also good, even if you didn't do as well that particular time. It's like if a basketball team has only one good player, but they highlight him so much, the rest of the team just has to get the ball to him and they score a ton. It's okay! Just so long as your team wins! Your stats don't matter! Except, no one reallllly thinks that, right?

Car v. car was reserved for the Monza series. I thought of it as the all CA series, since we raced on every pavement quarter midget track in CA once in the series. Just five races, but it offered the most competition in the state, and often drew a few from Oregon and Arizona (my biggest competition in Lt. 160 came from a guy my age from Oregon). This is where the prestige was. This is where the biggest car counts were. This is where you went if you wanted to be the best in the state. And my brother and I managed to get our paws on a few of these.

When you get older, you start remembering who crashed into you, people who made mean comments about you behind your back. So you get them back on the track. You start branching out and becoming friends with people from other tracks - a personal example is a group of boys I called the Pomona Boys. So you work with them to better yourself, sometimes against your own club. And what happens at the Grand Nationals, the week long races during the summer, when you make friends with people across the country? What happens to your loyalties there?

Just like you have an affinity for someone who has the same kind of passenger car as you, if you drove the same type of quarter midget, you stuck together. I raced GT American, and the children of my parent's closest friends did as well. Until I was 12, maybe only 11, I stuck with my own kind, drivers in my own club, drivers of my own chassis. But that too with age dissipates, as there became no clear majority in my friends. Boomerang, Fiser, Nervos, it didn't matter as much as we got older.

What mattered was if you could win, and if you were a girl? If you could look good doing it.