Subaru proves its track-worthiness

Competition cars regularly drive in excess of 180 mph on this track.

I was doing a measly 115 in the Subaru Forester, so everything should be alright, right?

So, I held it down and took a big turn with surprising ease in the high outside lane. Up there, more than 45 feet above the bottom of the track, the photographer shooting my pass looked very small. But there were no spectators and no other cars tearing around Talladega Super Speedway with me. The pits were empty. There were no national TV cameras or concession stands selling hot dogs and souvenirs either. Just me with a wedged grin in my unlikely ride, a 2003 Subaru Forester, that was handling surprisingly well.

A few weeks earlier, my wife, Lisa, and I had been asked to produce the driving portion of the North American media introduction for the redesigned 2003 Subaru Forester. Alabama was chosen as a location for a number of reasons. An early spring and neighborly people along with Alabama's relatively central continental location were attractive elements. The tough, trendy Forester could be put through its paces over a variety of roads in and around the Talladega National Forest. Foresters in the Forest? Makes perfect sense.

We had arranged for the lunch break at the Talladega Superspeedway where the attending journalists would get a chance to run the Foresters on the track for a few laps. Since the scenario also included areas for acceleration and obstacle avoidance demonstrations, participants would get a good feel for the handling characteristics of the Forester.

When pushing the Forester around the 2.6-mile track, I thought of how my own motoring activities have provided many opportunities on the open road. But in all of it, I've had very little experience in organized motorsports.

In the 1960s, I would go to the quarter-mile drag races that were held at an abandoned airstrip. Since my twin brother, Larry, and I were in our early teens, we tagged along with older brother Bruce in our father's 1963 Mercury Custom Monterey. To save the entry fee, Larry and I stuffed ourselves into the trunk a few miles before the ticket booth and stayed there until Bruce reached the parking area down a deserted taxiway.

"Hey! There's Al Melanson in the next lane!" I'd hear one of Bruce's cronies yell over the noise of the dual exhaust rumbling under the trunk floor. Then I'd hear the racket of burning rubber as Al lit up the tires. Even with a 300-horsepower 390 engine, the Merc was no match for Al's 409-V-8-powered Pontiac. It was a noisy tear down that taxiway.

The only other time I had a car on a track was during a summer high school job at a Mercury Lincoln dealership where I cleaned cars and kept the lot presentable. Lloyd, the other lot boy, and I knew the local go-cart track at a deserted gravel pit was never used during the week. Sometimes at lunch, we would take a car off the used lot and head out to the gravel pit.

Between egg sandwiches, we ran those mid-1960s Anglias, Cortinas and VW Beetles flat out around that track. It was a lot of fun screeching around in those low-key imports until Lloyd drifted a Beetle into a bunch of alder bushes and we had to go back to the dealership and sneak the tow truck to pull it out.

Those years brought me the closest I ever came to actual track racing. Larry and I bought a 1960 Ford for $25, knocked the windows out of it and entered it in a demolition derby. I figured, with a long trunk and a good reverse gear, I could destroy most of the competition by driving the big Ford backward. But the afternoon before the race, my older brother crashed his car and broke his leg in the process. As a knee-jerk reaction, my parents put the brakes on my racing debut.

Fast forward to the Talladega Superspeedway, I continued my laps for the photographer, holding the throttle flat on the floor until my leg ached. Even though I was only going 115 mph, there was still not a lot of time to look around. I couldn't imagine what it would be like doing almost twice that speed hemmed in by 40 other NASCAR competitors.

Although I'll never have that kind of experience in front of 150,000 race fans, it was a treat to drive on the world's fastest race track for a while.

And the fact that I didn't have to crawl into the trunk of a 1963 Mercury to get past the ticket booth made it even better.

Garry Sowerby, author of "Sowerby's Road: Adventures of a Driven Mind," is a four-time Guinness World Record holder for long-distance driving. His exploits, good, bad and just plain harrowing, are the subject of World Odyssey, produced in conjunction with Wheelbase Communications. Wheelbase is a worldwide provider of automotive news and features stories.