"Hot Cars, Cool Drivers"
By Lew Boyd

Many of us might like to talk about being from the “Old School” of racing. When it comes to racing in northeast, there is no one that has a greater grasp of its’ history than Lew Boyd. To compare his racing resume on a musical level, if we can remember a band like Grand Funk Railroad, he might have toured with Buddy Holly.

Hot Cars Cool Drivers, Celebrating Fifty Years of Auto Racing in Massachusetts provides a unique look back at racing before there ever was a school. Lew focuses his attention on three of Massachusetts’s greatest short tracks, Westboro, The Pines and Norwood Arena. These are racing facilities that are long-gone.

Well, that depends how old one might be. Westboro closed its’ doors after 1985 but The Pines and Norwood were finished in the early seventies. In hindsight that couldn’t be too long ago as Westboro outlasted Islip by a year. Regardless of that, there are a whole bunch of folks that participate as a part of the current New England racing scene that hadn’t been born when Norwood Arena was auctioned off for one thousand dollars more than the track’s outstanding bank note in 1972.

Hot Cars Cool Drivers puts the reader in the driver’s seat and takes us back to points before 1940 when The Pines, the eldest of this threesome of tracks sprung to life. When I started reading it I was amazed by stories of Reino Tulonen, Ralph ‘Hop’ Harrington, big cars and the Bay State Midget Racing Association. The racing was raw and so were the characters.

Many of us think racing is dangerous and it can be. Racing in the twenty first century is a kid’s game compared to those days. Rugged drivers with competitive passion wheeling racecars that some of this age might not feel safe enough to take for a parade lap thundered around these ovals for years.

Stories of Oscar Ridlon, perhaps one of the few people to earn a living racing in the thirties and early forties and all of his exploits behind the wheel and behind the scenes as a promoter. The dashing crowd favorite, Ollie Silva streaks to victory. “Big Starter Small” Kenny Small would flag the start of races, as spectators gasped, by leaping into the air and waving the green from the front straightaway.

Norwood Arena was perhaps one of the most polished tracks built in its’ day. They held a twenty-four hour stock car race there! It was run through a rainstorm with snow showers! One of the racers earned the name “Iron Man”. Ralph “Iron Man” Gurney completed the entire event when his relief driver took ill.

Many of the names in this book were alien to me at first. Some of them seemed vaguely familiar. Many of the passages in Hot Cars Cool Drivers read like the NEAR Hall of Fame roster.

Hey this book is about Hot Cars too! “The Whisperer”, “The Koopman Offy”, “The Little Beaver”, the “Super Cat”, “Lil Wonder”, the “Stove Pipe Car” and many other racecars are just as important to Lew’s tales as the drivers. Hot Cars Cool Drivers is a pretty easy read and filled with vintage photographs on virtually every page. It’s great for anyone who would like to glance at our racing history. Hot Cars Cool Drivers is available along with many other fantastic racing books from coastal181.com. Order it online or call Coastal 181 toll-free at 877-907-8181. You will be glad you did.