AirVenture: Lunacy Reaches Upper Limits

Who thought it would be a good idea for Ford to race Mustangs around a tent at AirVenture?

Wait. What? No. Who the ^%$# green lighted this? This being allowing Ford to set up a track half inside and half outside its big tent off Boeing square and park a couple of Mustang GTs in there. Except they aren't parked, the cars are screeching around the track giving AirVenture attendees a real-world demonstration of drifting. Yes, drifting. There appear to be no shortage of takers.

The spectacle from inside the tent is jaw dropping. The cars slide around the track in a continuous demonic din, generating billowing clouds of noxious tire smoke and hurling bits of rubber doogies at wide-eyed spectators clinging to the protective Jersey wall. The noise is not so much deafening as life threatening.

This operation generates so much smoke that I'm not so sure it didn't almost tank the airshow because as I was shooting on Boeing square, the visibility noticeably dropped, almost like a fog. Many people were heard to ask what was happening. (See the photo of the Aeroshell team shot through the smoke.)

I don't know who thought it would be a good idea for Ford to do this, but whoever it was qualifies as pure genius. It's the best, bad-assed thing ever at AirVenture and is utterly, quintessentially Oshkosh. There's nothing like a five-liter Ford V-8 in full throat to put an ear-shattering-hold-on-a-minute-Vern exclamation point on this environmentally correct but profoundly unsatisfying drift (sorry) toward electric airplanes and cars.

And anyway, who would want to do this in a Tesla?