August 12, 2007

Brandon Ashley takes his best hit
Four hundred hours of work will become a rolling target at Aug. 19’s Wasco County Fair demolition derby

By CORY ELDRIDGE
of The Chronicle

     When Brandon Ashley bought the 1968 Dodge Polara, the car looked beautiful. The big, muscular machine, its long body sleek and powerful, was mint. Perfect. Even better, Ashley, 20, bought it at a bargain. Pleased with his find, Ashley took the car to his home in Wamic and filled the driver’s door with cement.
     He took out the windows and tore off the bumper, ripped out the upholstery and removed the back seats, moved the gas tank and mounted a bracing bar in the back, rewired the ignition and welded the doors to the frame. He cut two long rectangles in the hood and attached eight pipes to the engine’s eight cylinders, and he did plenty to the engine, but those changes will stay secret.
     In the next few days, when he and a group of friends and family finish their 400-hours worth of modifications, the car will be perfect again. Perfect like a battering ram. Then Ashley will drive the stripped-down, welded-up beast to the Wasco County Fair and crash it.
     “It’s not every day you get to go out and go crazy with a bunch of people — smash a car up and not get in trouble,” Ashley says of the yearly Crash ‘n’ Bash demolition derby.
     The first year he entered the derby to pummel his and opponents’ cars, he didn’t know what to expect as he sat in the driver’s seat. Wearing a helmet that could keep his brains from being smashed but restricted his view murderously, Ashley tried to keep his nerves down. He felt the same anticipation, that same simmering adrenaline, before football games in high school.
     And like a game’s opening play, when the first car slammed into his that simmering adrenaline boiled over and he gave and received hit after hit.
     “That’s the whole point: just to nail somebody,” Ashley says. “You get out there and take your first hit and you mellow out. Everyone just has a big grin after that.”
     Sometimes the grin becomes a cringe. The motorized battering rams have no frills on their frames to keep something benign, like a windshield wiper or trim, from becoming a skewer (remember, safety first). That means no mirrors; and wearing helmets, that means the drivers can’t see what they can’t point their noses at.
     “You’re not ready for it and your body goes about 50 different directions,” Ashley says. “You have to drive around and pick your shots. You have to make sure that when you line up on someone there aren’t two guys waiting for you.”
     Making it harder, the drivers need to protect their engines, so no all-out, head-on collisions. They finesse — as well as they can in a mud bowl — around each other to aim their car’s backside on a target. They can hit any part of the car but one: the orange-painted driver’s door. (See, safety first.)
     Between the derby’s three rounds, Ashley’s pit crew patches the cracks, reattaches dislodged parts, refills the gas tank, and repairs the engine while he realigns his back.
     “Whatever I tear up they have to fix in 30 minutes,” Ashley says. “It’s hard to do good body work in 30 minutes with a sledge hammer.”
     They just hope the quick jobs last through the next hit. During the first derby, Ashley’s gas tank tipped over and his race ended. Last year, his second year, he broke a shift linkage when he hit another car. Both times he became the other competitors’ easy shot.
     This year he knows he has a good car, but that doesn’t mean much.
“You can have the best car in the world and a starter goes out,” Ashley says.
His father, who has competed in the derbies since they began at the Wasco County Fair two decades ago, once came out from the pit for the next round and couldn’t start his car. His pit crew forgot to fill the gas tank.
     With his dad involved in the derby, Ashley naturally took an interest. He worked on his dad’s cars from age 1 to 17, graduating from menial tasks to helping with body work to driving a car at 18.
     “He used to paint the tires for his dad when he was little,” says Ashley’s mom, Mary Anne Crawford. “He’s grown up with it. I always get nervous, but it’s awesome.”
     Then she says, “Sometimes I close my eyes.”
     “Yeah, I do too,” Ashley says, and they both laugh.
     The two banter about the redneckness of the demolition derby. Ashley says that the event dominates conversations in south county before and after the destruction, but maybe that’s just among the dozen or so guys in the area who drive the cars. Then again, they all enlist the help of friends and family to modify the cars and the derby draws upwards of 1,000 people to the fairgrounds. That’s standing room only.
     “I don’t know what city people think,” Crawford says.
     “That we’re a bunch of crazy rednecks,” Ashley says.
     He’s proud of that. He knows a demolition derby isn’t cool in a poppy, MTV way, and he doesn’t care. He knows he put more than $1,000 in a car he won’t use for a great need, such as impressing girls (though he jokes, “It’s all about looking hot for the chicks, mom. You don’t realize this.”) At the end of the derby, after bashing his once-mint Polara into a wreck, the most he can gain is $700, and only if he wins. That’s not the point.
     “We all like power and being loud and being obnoxious,” he says. “I go out there and have fun. If it just so happens I get some money, it just adds to the fun.”