Pit Stop! Airwolf. (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Grand Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing to break into something motor sports related.

We always have a blast chatting with our guests about all sorts of different topics, but sometimes we go off the rails and dig deep into their automotive and motor sports past. So as a bonus to the main event, let’s go behind the scenes with this pit stop mini. So sit back, enjoy, and remember to like, subscribe and support us on Patreon.

Yeah, right. You wanna hear one last one? A completely off the wall, British car story. Go for it. Yeah, you got time. Sure. Brad, you right. This is absolutely true. Pieces of which I, I really do have to cut out because I can’t tell you. So I, I do a lot of work with unmanned aircraft systems, especially along edges of the country.

Yeah. Well, in this particular case, I happened to be in one of our southwestern [00:01:00] states and I was inside the ground control station. And the, we are watching the video from one of these unmanned aircraft and it’s flying up and down the edge of the country. And as we’re watching it, there are all sorts of things going on.

Um, there are various people moving mostly south to north. And then at towards the end of the day, and I’m watching this because my job was sense, an void of unmanned airplanes in the national air space, which gets very complicated. So I talked to the ground control station operator. I said, Hey, you know, can we see a little bit of this part of the world up?

We’re in southern California. And he said, sure. So he brings the aircraft around. Now this aircraft is probably 150 miles from where I’m sitting. In the ground control station and the aircraft banks around, it’s quite a big aircraft and it flies reasonably high and [00:02:00] the aircraft has got this payload ball on top on underneath it.

And he said, do you wanna have to go Mr. Wade? I said, sure. So I sit in the payload operator seat and I’m playing with a ball and being in Apache guy, I’m quite used to, you know, odd looking sensors on top of airplanes. And we start panning around and I look at a road that runs down the desert. Through a part of the country called the Analog Valley in Lancaster, California, and going down, and it’s without a word of a lie, going down this road right along the southern border or very close to it near the San Gabriel Mountains is a row of four vehicles, all of which have two tubes to three tubes sitting at this angle on the back of the vehicle.

These are not things you see commonly in the civilian world. And I’m, by this time, I’ve got these eyes looking at the screen and one [00:03:00] of the guys says, Mr. Wade, do you recognize those? And I went, I might, since I chased crap like that up and down the Iraqi border for a little while, I said, can you get me a bit of pitch?

He said, stand up. So I got outta the way. The real payload operator gets in. And he brings the airplane over the top of the road. It turns out that we were looking at this road from about 25 miles away and you could see these things going down the road, a row of them with these tubes on the back. So he banks the airplane around.

He brings it much closer. It’s taking a little while. They’re not very fast, and I’m watching and I’m watching. I said, can you bring it a bit lower? He says, yeah, it brings it down. I won’t tell you what he brought it down to, but it, it was not that high by this time. Still out a visual range of the ground.

And I’m looking at it and I said, what’s going on here this weekend? And they all sort of wounded an hard ’cause. I [00:04:00] recognize what the hell these things were. And as he zoomed in and we can go to color, I’m like, Check that out. And the entire ground control station erupted in laughter. What was going on that weekend was a race at Sonoma, and what those cars were, were mini pickup trucks with red, giant Red Bull cans on the back.

Oh.

And they were minis with Red Bull cans on the back. That’s awesome. Absolutely hilarious. We were about ready to blow those little baths off the road. Let.

Absolutely true story and I can’t really embellish much of that one ’cause I can’t tell you how it all happened. But it was absolutely fascinating. And then when we, when you zoom in on these things and it says Red Bull, you’re probably, I.

Nice. That’s your ultimate mini story. There you go.[00:05:00]

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