The Quiet Beauty of High-Octane Sports Cars

Ryan Young captured the drifting action in his series Home on the Grange.

As racetracks go, the Grange is narrow and short, with only one unbroken straightaway. This means that the crescendo of motors and the blare of mufflers are punctuated by the skrrtttt of tires breaking traction, with cars skating around corners in a controlled spin called a drift.

Ryan Young, a photographer who often shoots athletes, wanted to capture this type of action. His project, Home on the Grange, is full of images of cars going sideways, their rear tires billowing smoke. Yet, despite the noise generated by the vehicles in each photograph, Young's images are decidedly quiet—less a showcase of octane and more an idyll of how a motorsport can bring people together.

"The camaraderie out there was a magical thing for me to see," Young says. That sense of community is what brought him back to the Apple Valley, California, course six times in 2018, including on a frigid New Year's Eve. Out amid the San Bernardino high desert, he witnessed people who would normally be strangers promise to mail each other parts in between track weekends and perform safety inspections on each other's rides.

"It's the Wild West," says Alex Velasquez, one of the more experienced drivers who serves as unofficial track warden. "There are no set rules since it's not a racetrack. It's private property in the middle of the desert with a paved go-kart course." Although Young didn't intend to title his project after the Western folk anthem "Home on the Range," the parallels between the two are uncanny. Derived from a 1872 poem titled "My Western Home" by Brewster Higley, the song is a dedication to the bucolic America that westward settlers found. For Young, instead of homesteads on the prairie, he found tents on a racetrack nestled in the desert.

Images in the project span portraiture, reportage, and action photos, some of which were shot from the sweltering cabin of a drifting car. (A/C units are often removed for weight savings.) To accommodate the run-and-gun style of working for this project, he bought a camera holster. Strapped to it were two Canon 5D Mark IVs cycling between 24–70mm, 100–400mm, and 70–200mm lenses. "It's a good thing I usually don't shoot like that," Young says. "My back would be destroyed."

Any back strain was well worth it for the photographer, who cherishes these types of grassroots communities as the most gratifying part of shooting sports. Time will tell whether drifting can remain that way. Electric vehicles have set a horizon—far off as that may be—for their fossil-fueled counterparts. As the internal combustion engine becomes outdated in favor of electric motors, it's not inconceivable that operating and maintaining a gas-fueled race car will become prohibitively expensive. In time, then, Young's photos might join Higley's poem as dedications to bygone eras. In the meantime, the long sunset is wonderful to behold.

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