Brock Yates
Brock Yates
Brock Yates is an American journalist and author. He was longtime executive editor of Car and Driver, an American automotive magazine. He was a pit reporter for CBS' coverage of certain NASCAR Sprint Cupseries races in the 1980s, including the Daytona 500. He was also one of the main commentators on the TNN motor sports TV show American Sports Cavalcade with Steve Evans. Paul Page, Gary Gerould and Ralph Sheheen also occasionally appeared on the show. He currently serves as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEditor
CountryUnited States of America
american-editor generally home islands lawrence loafing quiet second spent time
Much of our quiet time is spent boating and generally loafing at our second home in the 1,000 Islands on the St. Lawrence River.
american-editor life nonfiction raymond reasonable seemed successful technical writer
My father, Raymond F. Yates, was a successful writer of technical nonfiction and such a life seemed a reasonable alternative to real work.
airport alone american-editor bikes busted fix leave secretary
To Secretary Pena: Fix your busted airport and leave bikes alone and the commuting to us sociopathic drivers.
car motorcycle fast-car
I admit to wasting my life messing around with fast cars and motorcycles.
truth reality fiction
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.
confused confusion landscape
The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.
nuts law style
The early 1970s was a time when illegal acts were in style. Everybody was going nuts with causes, most of them against the law.
men thinking motor-racing
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.
swimming night california
They still talk about the night that Augie Pabst, a fresh-faced heir to the brewing fortune, drove a rented Falcon into the swimming pool of the Mark Thomas Inn in Monterey, California. His reviews were so good that he repeated the act at a Howard Johnson's outside Denver.
stars athlete cutting
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.
running new-york moon
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.
depressing mean winning
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.
sports skills race
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.
real car racing
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.