Write Your Congressman: On the Survival of the Six-Hour Race
The all-day endurance race is a load-bearing pillar of the republic. Your representative has been allowed to forget it. Put it back on the record.
Citizens are urged to take up pen and address their elected representative on a matter of grave and neglected national consequence: the endangered American institution of the long-distance endurance race.
Open with the proper salutation:
"Dear Representative, I write to you regarding the six-hour race."
State your case plainly. Today, at Watkins Glen, the Sahlen's Six Hours of The Glen will run for a full six hours, as its name solemnly promises and as a weakened age can scarcely comprehend. Remind your representative that this is a discipline of finishing, not sprinting; that it honors the relief driver, who climbs into another man's hot seat and is expected to be excellent at once; and that in last year's running the winning car led but two laps and led the only one that mattered, which is the entire moral instruction of the format compressed into a single afternoon.
Make no request that does not exist. We propose no bill. We name no committee. We ask only that your representative be made aware that a nation which will sit still for six hours to watch endurance prevail is a nation still in possession of its character, and that this is a thing worth a stamp.
Close, as every serious correspondent must, with the only words equal to the occasion:
"For the six hours, and for the republic, I remain your constituent."
The Editors, Drive Observer