There were 43 cars in today’s race. Shall we do the math? It’s a 500 mile race, the cars will each use approximately 100 gallons of fuel in their trip from nowhere to nowhere - an endless circle of speed. So that’s approximately 43,000 gallons of gas used in just one race today, and there are probably lots of speedway races going on around our country.

Lots of people watch the races AT THE TRACK. Maybe 100,000 folks on a good day attend these spectacles of boredom, watching cars running in circles trying to go nowhere faster than the car behind them, while they breathe polluted air and grow deaf as the speedsters roar by. Say there are 30,000 spectator cars and trucks at the track, and they drive an average of 25 miles to get to the track - some drive lots more, some less of course but for the sake of argument: that would be about 750,000 miles driven by the spectators. Say they average 15 miles per gallon. That gives us another 50,000 gallons of gas burned up in one day on this one race track. Isn’t that rather appalling!

And we could probably add another 50,000 gallons of gas when we consider all those trucks, trailers and RVs littering the center of the oval, all those camp followers drive thousands of miles every week, burning up the roads between tracks all over the country.
I’d love to be able to factor in the amount of pollution rising into the sky from the exhaust pipes, from the burned up tires and brake pads. I wish I could factor in the amount of sewage generated in one spot by all those people, the time wasted getting there, sitting there and then getting back home, the amount of junk food that’s eaten and the pile of garbage that is generated by those 100,000 people. It boggles my mind.

While this is horrendous waste of our country’s valuable and scarce resources are being burned up this afternoon, thoughtful and worried people around our country are trying to figure out how to save a mile or two while driving to run errands, are car pooling to work, spending lots of extra time using public transportation, doing whatever they can not to use an extra drop of gas. People are switching to more fuel efficient cars, are taking their lives in their hands bicycling and riding scooters to work, while wringing their hands at the rising cost of fuel. People are asking questions like: should I turn off my car’s engine while waiting at the red light? Should I drive more slowly? Should I, gulp, buy a hybrid?

And have you noticed that the news commentators are still talking about four dollar gas, as if that’s something awful. In California it has reached five dollars in many places.

Meanwhile at the track, the tracksters and speedsters simply raise the ticket prices to pay for the added expense and give no thought at all to what this sport is doing to our country.