'Dirty Driving' ... sit tight, take hold, Thundercars

It's on HBO, all right, but "Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana" isn't really as dirty a documentary as you may think. It's definitely not "Taxi Cab Confessions."

This one debuting Thursday at 10 p.m. by Emmy winner Jon Alpert deals with how the small town of Anderson, Indiana deals with fact it lost 33,000 GM jobs and the foreclosure of hundred of homes years ago.

It embraces sprint car racing.

"As much a demolition derby as a race, this cacophony of screeching tires and crashing metal gives inhabitants of Anderson a chance to lose themselves for a couple of hours, channeling their hopes and frustrations into a wild weekly contest for Thundercar supremacy," says the HBO release.

"We don't make cars no more here in Anderson, Indiana, but we can still race 'em and we can still wreck 'em," says one racer, Sammy Hawkins, who still has a job at the Firestone factory. "They can't take that away from us."

In addition to Hawkins, you get to meet Wild Willie Coffman , who straps a stuffed gorilla to his car for luck; Billy Riddle , a major trash-talker who's targeted by other drivers, and Alice Riall , the matriarch of a race-crazed family, describes herself as "probably the oldest grandmother out there racing in the Thundercar division."

Other airings on HBO: Monday at 1:05 a.m., Nov. 21 (12:30 a.m.), Nov. 24 (10:45 p.m.) and Nov. 29 (3:30 a.m.), and Dec. 4 (12:15 a.m.)

==HBO also has a DVD of the documentary for sale in its online store for $24.98 (linked here)