With engines crackling and popping with menacing intent, the piercing odor of ruptured radiators wafts through the night air like cheap perfume at the local honky-tonk.
This is demolition derby.
A place where drivers turn cars into torpedoes.
Ted Neergaard smiles, an almost demented smile, and reveals what he loves about demolition derby.
“It’s the rush you get, and you get to take out all your frustrations on all those bad drivers you have to deal with everyday,” the 51-year-old derby veteran says.
Neergaard, who is from Durango, is the defending champ of the Montezuma County Fair Demolition Derby. This year, he has a 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88 as his malicious battering ram.
His daughters, Lia, 15, and Hanna, 12, painted and named the car. A dingy yellow and black paint job was fitting for a car nicknamed the “Bumble Bee.” Red eyes are painted above the now cratered headlight area. On the hood, the prophetic sentence “This May Sting A Little”, is written.
It would be a waste to put too much effort into the cosmetic touches. This will likely be the last time the ’72 Olds will be driven.
Neergaard prefers his cars to be older than 1976, “they’re bigger and heavier,” he explains.
He picked up the ’72 Olds out of Grand Junction for free on the Internet. He even drove it back and forth to work for three months before tearing it apart and making it derby ready.
Every driver admits that there is very little strategy when they hit the arena.
“Just go out there and go crazy,” Neergaard says.
That’s the common theme. Go crazy, go nuts, have fun, smash cars — mayhem and chaos behind the wheel.
This is demolition derby.
Getting ready
For Kevin Rice of Pleasant View, he spotted a ’77 Mercury Cougar station wagon for sale and knew he had to have it for this year’s derby. He paid $50 and went to work.
Now, with its insides gutted, the doors chained shut, all the glass eliminated and a six-gallon gas tank situated behind the driver’s seat, this is not a station wagon for hauling the kids around.
And these are not the kind of drivers you should loan your car to.
Preparing the car is more than half the fun.
“We get to blow out the windows and take a crowbar to it. We basically get to tear it up,” Rice says, grinning.
Nicknamed the “General Lee,” with a Confederate flag painted on the roof, Rice, 24, admits he’s a fan of the bygone “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show.
Also with a Confederate flag painted on his car — a ’78 Cadillac — is 19-year-old John Krykendall of Cortez. He too likes to flaunt his fondness for the classic TV show, which started a year after his Cadillac rolled off the assembly line.
At the driver’s meeting, Krykendall, a.k.a. “Johnny Biceps” wears a tank top that shows off his tanned, muscular arms. His love of the “Duke” boys is punctuated as his cell phone rings. It alerts his fellow drivers to his fascination and devotion to the TV show when the “Dukes of Hazzard” theme song blares as his ring tone.
This is demolition derby.
Working the pits
In the preliminary heats, Krykendall bowed out early with engine trouble, while Neergaard and Rice went bumper-to-bumper like a pair of dueling gun fighters.
As the round came to an end, both drivers coaxed their bruised and battered cars back to the pits for repairs.
A frantic 45 minutes ensues as they scramble to get ready for the finals.
Neergaard’s pit crew swarms around the Bumble Bee wielding the tools of the trade: a car jack, sledgehammers, a torch and pry bar, to name a few.
The pounding of sledgehammers echo across the pits as every car needs to undergo mandatory modifications.
Dented and dilapidated, there’s no guarantee that the cars will be able to return to the arena for another date with destruction.
As Neergaard takes a torch to a crumpled rear quarter-panel that is rubbing a tire, other crew members swing heavy sledgehammers pounding away on the front wheel well.
Over at the Rice pits, a major overhaul ensues.
The station wagon’s rear end is dragging the dirt as he leaves the arena, and the right rear tire popped after a vicious collision.
Driving in reverse protects the engine and keeps the cars running longer. But now Rice can see that the station wagon is in real trouble.
“I thought that this would happen,” he says about the crumpled and bent rear end, “but I thought it would hold up a little better than that.”
The car is hoisted 6 feet into the air with a wrecker. Torches are used to heat the frame, then four, then five men climb atop the orange number 01 wagon.
The men, most, maybe all over 200 pounds, begin to jump and thrash up and down on top of the car. They hope to bend the frame upward.
Every pit is buzzing with activity, hoping to have their car ready for the finals.
This is demolition derby.
Crashing cars
As the finals begin, the Rice crew gets the job done. The car’s rear end is off the ground, but the top is now crumbled and Rice can’t see out the back.
He shrugs and smiles. “Oh well.”
When the day started, Rice and his orange 01 car won the audience-ovation “Prettiest Car” contest. That put 100 bucks in his coveralls.
Now, in the finals, that once pretty car doesn’t even look like a station wagon. The mutilated mobile’s top now looks like an oversized race spoiler or some sort of luggage rack.
The finals quickly turn into a two-car battle between Neergaard and Bayfield’s Kent Newkirk.
For Rice, all the work in the pits, all the jumping, pounding, cutting, bashing and fixing got him back into the arena, but the ’77 Mercury station wagon was crumpled out of the competition. He did come in fourth place.
Newkirk was the most aggressive driver, flying around the arena like a metal-seeking missile ramming every car in his crosshairs. Sometimes drilling a car head-on, other times bashing a competitor in reverse.
With radiators and engines spewing steam and tire smoke filling the arena, three cars remain running.
As Cortez’s Travis Watkin’s mutilated 1973 Mercury Marquis came to a stop after one final collision, fire flickered from under the hood.
His night was done.
The 21-year-old brought the same car he drove in last year’s derby. It was a pummeled mess to begin the competition and when it was over it looked like it came directly from the junk yard, which will now be its final destination.
After climbing out of the car, Watkins stopped and looked over his demolished car.
“I don’t think I can use it again,” he says with a smile. “I might pull the engine out and use it.”
A third-place was a satisfying result.
“It was fun. It’s fun to do things that you couldn’t do otherwise,” he says about getting the chance to bash a car into other cars.
He twists his neck and says that he will feel the results of the derby tomorrow.
“I will be hurting, I can feel it in my neck already,” he says.
Every driver wears a helmet with a neck brace but those violent collisions can have painful repercussions.
As the 2011 derby came to an end, Newkirk, 39, was declared the winner, even surviving a flat right front tire that made steering difficult.
Neergaard finished second and relieved some driving frustrations in the process.
For the victorious Newkirk, he says that being aggressive is just his nature.
“There are different strategies when you’re out there. I just like to be aggressive and see what happens.”
Then he glances over to Watkin’s car as the tow truck prepares to snatch it up.
Newkirk smiles at some of his handiwork.
“You’re here to crash cars,” he says and grins, an almost demented grin.
Indeed.
This is demolition derby.