Guest Post // Sam Moses On Racing Garth Stein

As promised, here is Sam Moses' perspective on his upcoming battle against Garth Stein at the Mazda Grand Prix of Portland:

Garth is a one-point-two-million-dollar man; that’s how much Harper paid for his dog Enzo’s book. I’m a starving artist, cashing in my IRA to fix and I hope some day race (again) my 600-horsepower, 25-year-old historic stock car, the Bandit Oldsmobile, made famous by my book, “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” one of the five best books ever written about motorsports, according to the great Brock Yates who is known for his wisdom. There are no royalty checks coming in from “At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II,” an astonishing feat of journalism, according to Ken Auletta, the best journalist in the land. It’s too soon to sell my next book, “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This: The True Life Adventures of Senor Madre and the AngloArabAsian Brothers,” because I’ve only written the first five chapters, and haven’t even sent them to my agent yet.

If hunger counts for anything on the track, and of course it does, Garth is in trouble.

Without a doubt, Garth can outswag me. I pay for the few paltry tee-shirts I give away out of grocery money, and I have two growing boys to feed. It hurts me to see their forlorn hungry faces across the table. Garth’s PR team is like Penske Racing, including a dog specialist named Ami, and I’ll bet she’s just totally chipper! He’s got fawning fans. I’ve got me and my girlfriend Khia who has a day job at Pape Machinery in Portland. He’s got the giant New York publisher, Harper. My University of Nebraska Press is small, although it’s a wonderful and prestigious publisher specializing in Native American literature and classic memoirs like “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots.”  

Don’t get me wrong. Garth is my hero. Anybody gets paid $1.2 million for the quality of their creative work is my hero.   

But I’ve got to be the underdog on this bus, forget about my alleged racing experience, long ago. I think Enzo would be rooting (woofing?) for me, if he were still around.  

Well, I did rent a ride in a shreiking BMW Z3 M-Coupe, last summer. The RTG Motorsports car had “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots” on its long sleek silver hood, in bright red. I finished fifth overall in a field of 40 cars in an SCCA race, running up front with the Porsche Turbos and one rocket-fast Camaro with tons of money in it—and I was fourth until the gearbox overheated. One of the Porsche Turbo drivers came up to me afterward and said, “Man, you drive the wheels off that thing.” If I drive as well as I can, I’ll be satisfied. If Garth can beat me at my best, when I’m driving the wheels off my Team MER #2 Mazda MX-5, my goenzo.com hat that he hasn’t given me yet will be off to him.

The Mazda Grand Prix of Portland begins July 22 and runs through the weekend. To read Garth Stein's perspective on racing Sam Moses, click here // 07.15.2008