American journalist & author
At Car and Driver, we were convinced that the automobile, as we knew and loved it, was as dead as the passenger pigeon. Ralph Nader was at full cry, ringing his tocsin of automobile doom into the brains of the public, convincing them that the lump of chrome and iron in the driveway was as lethal as a dose of Strontium 90 or a blast from a Viet Cong AK-47.
BROCK YATES
Cannonball!
I have spent--or wasted--my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.
BROCK YATES
"Hemingway Wouldn't Recognize it Today", Car and Driver, Oct. 2005
Some critics of racing witlessly claim that spectators only attend to see someone die. This is utter and complete nonsense. I have been at numerous races where death is present. When a driver dies, the crowd symbolically dies, too. They come to see action at the brink: ultimate risk taking and the display of skill and bravery embodied in the sport's immortals like Nuvolari, Foyt, and thousands of others who operate at the ragged edge.
BROCK YATES
"Hemingway Wouldn't Recognize it Today", Car and Driver, Oct. 2005
There was a day when you could identify a NASCAR Ford, Chevrolet, or Dodge and they actually looked like "stock cars." Now they are pod machines, slick on the outside but still powered by the same Neanderthal carbureted pushrod V-8s that have been under their hoods for half a century. If this is real auto racing, then the WWF ought to be part of the Olympics.
BROCK YATES
"Whatever Shall We Do, Scarlett?", Car and Driver, Jan. 2006
If any vestige of the American automobile industry is to survive, it must involve state-of-the-art vehicles that are not equal to but surpass the best imports in every way.
BROCK YATES
"Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen (and it Ain't Over)", Car and Driver, Nov. 2005
The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising.
BROCK YATES
"Even the Cops Liked the Cannonball", Car and Driver, Nov. 2002
Wherever racers go, a certain amount of madness is sure to follow. On race weekends, the area's motels vibrate with a lusty, earthy kind of activity. The cocktail lounge is usually jammed with mechanics, still in smudged white uniforms, who will joke loudly, brag endlessly, drink prodigiously, and brawl occasionally. Up and down the tiers of walkways and corridors, noisy parties swirl from room to room, while in the parking lot someone is invariably smoking the tires of a much-abused "rent-a-racer." Much of what has been written about racing implies that its protagonists are somber, brooding people, perpetually distracted with winning and the specter of death. That is nonsense. Racers for the most part are happy wanderers, with an inability to focus their intense competitiveness in brief spurts at the track. When the racing is over, the fun begins--generally centered around such conventional diversions as women, liquor, and automobiles.
BROCK YATES
Sunday Driver
Will a day come when our cars have carbon-fiber tubs, 18,000-rpm V-10 engines, and ground-effects tunnels? Perhaps, about the same time we have condos on the moon.
BROCK YATES
"Hemingway Wouldn't Recognize it Today", Car and Driver, Oct. 2005
Why the hell not run a race across the United States? A balls-out, shoot-the-moon, f***-the-establishment rumble from New York to Los Angeles to prove what we had been harping about for years, for example, that good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their Autobahns? Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality! Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly illegal act.
BROCK YATES
Cannonball!
The early 1970s was a time when illegal acts were in style. Everybody was going nuts with causes, most of them against the law.
BROCK YATES
Cannonball!
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.
BROCK YATES
"Even the Cops Liked the Cannonball", Car and Driver, Nov. 2002
There is little sentimentality associated with an automobile for a real racer. Authentic car freaks, like classic-car collectors or customizers or people who belong to organizations like the Porsche Club of America worship machines, and in so doing subordinate themselves to the automobile. Automobile journalists, for the most part, devote their efforts to fiendishly detailed documentation of the automobiles and their arcane components, at the expense of the men who build and drive them. In their frame of reference, a racing car is a source of fathomless mystery and fascination. Not so with the professional competitor, who relates to his machine primarily as a tool--perhaps even a weapon--that will permit him to beat somebody else.
BROCK YATES
Sunday Driver
As we all understand, the nodding nabobs of the elite media continue to palpitate over the prospect of hybrid automobiles saving the world from a petroleum-induced Dark Age--at least until the knotty dilemmas associated with perfecting the fuel cell can be solved. Such notions resonate in the ivied halls of academia, where the automobile resides somewhere between the H-bomb and the Ebola virus as an enemy of civilization. Meanwhile, it continues to be embraced by those of us described by that preposterous fop Graydon Carter, who edits the fatuous, celebrity-hugging monthly Vanity Fair, as the "Wal-Mart people."
BROCK YATES
"H-bombs, WMP, and Girls in Motorsports", Car and Driver, Mar. 2005
To be sure, [NASCAR] stars were initially ex-bootleggers for the most part drawn from that talent pool in the Carolinas hills: "good ol' boys" as they referred to themselves. That's exactly how they would be described in the press that slowly became enamored with their raucous life style. That has all changed, with the drivers of today polished and clean-cut athletes who are expected to behave like commercial puppets in public.
BROCK YATES
NASCAR Off the Record
Everything at a NASCAR event carries a corporate logo except the lavatory stalls.
BROCK YATES
NASCAR Off the Record
If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing.
BROCK YATES
"H-bombs, WMP, and Girls in Motorsports", Car and Driver, Mar. 2005
The bicycle is a former child's toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment. A laudable accomplishment, to be sure, and one that has been embraced by such progressives as the Chinese Communism hierarchy, who find the antlike movements of their population aboard bikes easy to control.
BROCK YATES
Car and Driver, 1994
I realize this is blasphemy, but a few weeks ago I tried to watch a NASCAR race being run at Talladega. I lasted about five minutes before terminal boredom overtook me. It appeared to be nothing more than a high-speed freeway commute--a mob of luridly painted, identical lumps of metal loping at 180 mph around the banking, fender to fender, nose to tail. Knowing the scenario would surely devolve into a multicar demolition derby that would thrill the goobers in the grandstands, I turned off the set to later learn that this time it was Jimmie Johnson who triggered the eight-car melee.
BROCK YATES
"Whatever Shall We Do, Scarlett?", Car and Driver, Jan. 2006
While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine.
BROCK YATES
"On the Road to Doom, Nobody Makes a Peep", Car and Driver, Dec. 2005
The appeal of the Riverside 500 was based on that overall spectacle of witnessing a mob of brightly colored, bellowing automobiles gamboling over the countryside like a herd of runaway steers. Stock car roadracing is in fact like a mechanical stampede, and we personally think it's maybe the neatest form of motor racing known to man. It's definitely the greatest spectacle in roadracing.
BROCK YATES
NASCAR Off the Record