Time and Place: Dixie speedway

A portrait at the raceway


?Car racing, like black metal, is not something I appreciated really at all until I saw it in person. It took the chest-rumbling growls and technical precision of each that I could drown in and be in awe of. This photo is of the Dixie Speedway northwest of Atlanta. It’s an oval dirt track where, at the highest level, racers drift around corners pushing 100 mph, clomping onlookers with soft, red Georgia clay. I was able to be in the area where the racecars are unloaded by family members — dirt squeegeed off by grandmas, younger brothers pressing the gas while wheels are checked. I liked the striking color of this boy’s shirt framed in the yellow bulldozer. His expression gives me the sense that he watches from there often, calmed to be above the smoke and growling engines.