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Dave's first snow race in Michigan in 2008. He didn't have competition snow tires, but took 1st anyway. So Icey.

Our friend Dave Carapetyan of Rally Ready Motorsports from Texas made the transition from hardcore punk singer to rally car racer with the grace of a pupae metamorphosing into a butterfly. Not to say that Dave is a butterfly. Let’s think of him as a man who sits inside a giant metal cheetah that guzzles high octane gasoline and exhales at ear-mincing volumes as it devours rough ground and long distances at pant-shitting speeds. Trumbull spoke with Dave just days before he took home his third consecutive Pikes Peak victory in the Open division on June 27.

Dave, we met a long ass time ago. Why were you in Massachusetts to begin with?
I was in a band from 2000-20002 called The Snobs… we were a skate punk band out of Austin, Tex., with a lineup of all 13-year-olds that played like some combination of Negative Approach and Government Issue. We were heavily influenced by early Dischord bands, old Austin bands like the Big Boys and even the modern youth crew goofballs. It was in 2002 just before our summer tour that I came to Boston to visit my friend Sweet Pete from the band In My Eyes and my friend Bill, who had played bass for us briefly but had just moved to Boston to poke some joke of a girl.

How did you become a rally car racer?
I got sick of the lack of sincerity and the bullshit associated with hardcore and music in general. After the Snobs broke up, I started recording but got sick of having people fuck me over and weasel out of $20 here or $50 there when I was already cutting outrageously good deals. I’ve always been obsessed with anything fast and especially anything with wheels, as I got a bit older it was a natural progression, I guess. It started with working at a friend’s shop who built street race cars and drag race stuff, but I wasn’t interested in having a cool car — I was interested in cool driving. Nobody gives a shit about the baseball bat, they just care about how far you hit the home run, you know? As far as motorsport, rallying is by far the most intense and difficult kind of racing on the planet. It’s you and a co-driver on a dirt road you’ve never driven, going as fast as you possibly can based only on descriptive notes about the road you’re hearing as you’re flying up on it at 100 mph. How cool is that?!

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Tonight, President Obama will speak to us from the Oval Office about the BP oil spill and about our environment. I for one am displeased with the situation. These guys aren’t too happy about it either. And then there’s the issue of firecanes — what can Prez Obama possibly say about them to put the minds of our citizens at ease? This environmental, economic, social catastrophe is awful and seems to be spreading dismay just as quickly as the crude is gushing out of a grotesque hole in the bottom of the sea…but at least I get it.

Now, what about the Guatemalan Sinkhole? Is anyone still talking about it? Is everyone OK with it now? You’re all just OK with a giant hole in the earth opening up in a perfect circle and going so deep and swallowing part of a neighborhood in Guatemala? No. I think that more questions need to be asked. I don’t like looking into that thing and hearing the hollow sound of terror. But since I doubt that the scope of tonight’s Presidential address will include this issue, we sent a correspondent to the very mouth of doom with a list of questions so bold and prying that we fully expected him to be eaten alive by the interview subject. But after all, what are interns for if not to stand between the minds at work and the dark and mysterious forces of the universe that we dutifully and tirelessly analyze?

What is your name?

Most people call me the Guatemalan Sinkhole, but I’m really a “piping feature.” I don’t associate with sinkholes. You think about sinkholes, and you think of the Great Blue Hole, or the discovery of fossils from the Pliocene. Sinkholes are like potholes in the street — think of me as a gaping sewer that leads straight down to the meat locker. I’m here for chaos, for fire, the disappearance of neighborhood pets and churches falling into my belly.

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